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Recruiting appears to be a simple task: It’s the job of bringing candidates into an organization. In reality, however, recruiting is a process with many stages and many forms. There’s internal recruiting and external recruiting. There’s entry-level recruiting and executive recruiting. There’s local recruiting and global recruiting.
With so many forms and facets to consider, it’s essential that employers get strategic about the kinds of recruiting they need to perform. Recruiting may be a complex business function, but its goal is clear: to find, attract and win the best talent the marketplace has to offer.
Below, we’ll define the essential elements of recruiting, explain the best practices associated with them, and dig into the trends surrounding the profession.
The hiring process features several distinct stages, from sourcing candidates to onboarding new hires. Recruiting encompasses them all. When recruiters understand the best practices recommended for each stage, they’ll have an easier time nabbing top talent.
Sourcing candidates is the first step of recruiting, and it may just be the most important. When recruiters tap into qualified talent who offer pertinent skills and experience, the candidates who make it to the final stage will be well-equipped for the job. Recruiters don’t always have to start from scratch; they can source talent among former applicants who are already familiar with their organization.
Once recruiters have gathered a pool of leads, they need to identify the talent with the most potential. Strategic recruiters use talent assessments to quickly determine candidates’ knowledge and skills, work style and behavior. Likewise, reference calls can expose resume lies and exaggerations in addition to highlighting a candidate’s best and worst traits.
A good interview features behavioral questions that reveal not what candidates have done but what they would do. By asking questions that go beyond job history and past experience, interviewees get a glimpse into candidates’ temperament and work ethic, increasing their chances of choosing a high-quality hire.
Once recruiters have pinpointed the best candidates, it’s time to begin the offer and negotiation process. The first step of this process is to create a job offer. A good letter will:
Recruiters must be ready to follow up on candidates’ questions and counteroffers. Build your employer brand by showing candidates you’re willing to fight for them.
Finally, it’s time to acclimate new hires to your organization. A successful onboarding process positions employees to be engaged from the get-go. Meet-and-greets and goal setting are important hallmarks of early onboarding. But providing ongoing support throughout an employee’s first year is key.
Now that you’re familiar with each stage of recruiting, let’s dig into the details. Below, you’ll find the best practices associated with every step of recruitment.
Your job description will determine what kinds of applicants you receive. A quality job description will include:
Recruiters can’t rely on one source of candidates alone. It’s not enough, for instance, to post a role on a single job board. Recruiters need to cultivate multiple pipelines of talent to ensure their organization receives a broad range of candidates who are diverse in their experience, skills and background.
Talent acquisition teams can get creative with sourcing methods, finding candidates through channels such as referrals, job boards, recruiters, social media, and career fairs, for example.
Recruiters can screen candidates in a number of ways. The two most common? Talent assessments and reference checking.
Talent assessments typically consist of multiple choice questions, open ended prompts and audio or video responses. The assessments evaluate candidates in three areas: knowledge and skills; work style; and personality. This information helps hiring teams pinpoint the best candidates for open positions.
Recruiters can glean similar information by checking candidates’ references. Automated reference checks help recruiters choose hires who prove to be assets to their new teams and avoid selecting those who may bring toxic behaviors.
Insightful interviews showcase candidates’ strengths and weaknesses. To put both of these elements on display, however, recruiters need to be intentional about the questions they ask. Behavioral questions are best at revealing candidates’ true selves. These questions include prompts such as:
When it’s time to send an offer letter, it’s important to remember that the game of recruiting isn’t quite over. The offer letter needs to impress candidates and convince them to come on board. Offer letters with this kind of sway include:
The act of recruiting culminates in onboarding — the process of officially integrating a new employee into a company. Onboarding is the opportunity to equip new hires with the tools and information they need to succeed in their new position. A successful onboarding program involves:
H2: Emerging trends and technologies in recruitment
Now that we’ve covered the best practices in recruiting, let’s dig into the trends surrounding the field.
Considering the buzz AI has created everywhere else, it’s no surprise that it’s a popular topic in recruiting, too. It’s important to remember, however, that AI is not a new phenomenon in the world of recruiting. While recent developments have pushed AI into the spotlight, recruiters have been taking advantage of algorithmic technologies, language processing tools, and advanced search mechanics for quite some time.
These and other AI technologies have allowed recruiters to improve their role considerably. They have relieved recruiters of some of the administrative workload that used to accompany the profession. AI is also helping recruiters make better candidate matches, placing incoming talent more accurately within their organizations.
You may not realize it, but your hiring platform stores incredibly useful data. These numbers are only useful, however, if they’re accessible — and if users have the skills to interpret them.
Thankfully, AI can analyze large amounts of data quickly and recommend recruiters’ next steps. AI-powered tools equipped with candidate engagement scoring are particularly useful to recruiters. These tools can evaluate candidate profiles based on how well their skills and experience match open roles.
These tools also recommend candidates not only based on their skills but also on how much they’ve engaged with an organization’s brand. By evaluating a candidate on engagement, AI tools help recruiters select candidates who are more likely to successfully integrate into an organization.
Recruiters are quickly discovering that AI tools can heighten their productivity and elevate their efficiency. For example, recruiters are using AI to:
These productivity gains do not mean employees will be replaced by technology. Recruiters may see certain aspects of existing roles automated, but people are still necessary to run AI tools and provide human oversight. And with more time on their hands, recruiters can focus on building relationships with candidates, increasing AI responsibility, and position their team to be more strategic.
How can recruiters know they’re doing a good job? Recruitment metrics and analytics help answer that question. Below, we define the most important metrics and analytics a recruiter can consider.
Most recruiters understand the importance of the time-to-hire metric. When a role stays vacant, existing employees may suffer, new opportunities may be missed, and goals may go unfulfilled.
By tracking time to hire, organizations can determine how quickly they move candidates through the hiring process. Organizations who don’t track this KPI will find it challenging to forecast against their hiring goals and set timing expectations for candidates in the pipeline.
This metric determines the total spend required to attract a single applicant. In effect, the cost per hire metric measures the cost effectiveness of the recruiting process.
This information can be invaluable in helping recruiters to set their budget: cost-per-hire allows recruiters to focus their resources on the candidate channels that attract the most quality talent at the lowest average cost. To calculate cost per hire, divide the sum of all internal and external recruiting costs by the number of hires in a specific time period.
This metric measures the performance of a new hire throughout their first year. Quality of hire is an important metric for a number of reasons. It’s not just a widely used metric — it’s also an input for another measurement called the success ratio.
To calculate this ratio, recruiters divide the numbers of well-performing hires by the total number of candidates hired. When recruiters find that they have a low success ratio, it may be a sign that they need to make some changes to their hiring process in order to boost the number of high-quality hires they’re bringing into their organization.
The source of hire metric shows how many of your total hires came from various recruiting channels, also known as sources. Data from your ATS can provide the percentage hired through various channels such as referrals, job boards, recruiters, social media, and career fairs.
Recruiters can also measure these channels by total volume. Next, recruiters can break these down by talent pools or filter them by hired candidates. This more detailed approach tells a richer story of this metric using talent data.
Now let’s discuss two incredibly important elements of modern recruiting: employer branding and employee value proposition (EVP).
These two concepts are closely related. An employee value proposition encompasses all an organization offers to employees, from compensation to career development. Employer branding includes how organizations communicate their EVP to job seekers, applicants and employees alike.
A job is like a product. Employers must communicate to candidates why they would want to work for their organization. This “why” includes all the benefits that employers offer employees. Ultimately, these elements define an organization’s EVP.
Every employer must pinpoint the defining factors of their unique EVP. Of course, an EVP includes concrete items like salary and benefits. But it also incorporates intangible elements like company culture.
Recruiters who assume they can’t showcase their company culture to outside applicants would be mistaken. Today, there are many ways to show candidates what it’s like to work at their potential employer.
Social media is particularly adept at this task. Employers can select certain employees to do employee “take overs” on company platforms that show followers:
Today’s job seekers are just like the rest of us: they’re obsessed with short-form videos. Strategic recruiters are capitalizing on the short-form video trend by creating EVP-centered content that shows up in job seekers’ social media feeds.
These short videos can feature employee testimonials in which current employees talk about why they enjoy their jobs. Prompts for featured employees include:
It’s essential that recruiters develop an optimized careers page that captures candidates’ attention and informs potential applicants. To create a careers page that performs well, it’s essential recruiters track key analytics and make adjustments as necessary. Consider tracking these metrics:
Recruiters are often hyper-focused on external talent. The best recruiters know, however, that one of the most important candidate sources is their own organization. Here, we go through the top tips to ace internal mobility.
Recruiters need an internal career page where they can post opportunities in a transparent, accessible way. Then, talent teams can use applicant tracking tools to account for employees’ skills and interests to spot potential matches.
An employee referral program allows employers to encourage current employees to refer qualified candidates for jobs within the company. It’s a common practice for referring employees to receive a financial incentive for successful placements.
Like any recruiting initiative, it’s essential to measure success with metrics. Use common recruiting KPIs to assess internal mobility programs. These KPIs include time to fill, number of candidates, interview success and more.
When recruiters develop a comprehensive recruitment strategy, they improve the quality of candidates who enter their organization.
To achieve this, however, it’s essential to continually track, measure, and improve the recruiting experience. TA leaders, to keep up with candidate expectations, be sure to assess and enhance your recruitment processes thoroughly and regularly.