Steps in a recruitment plan
A well-designed plan helps you lay down the foundation for your hiring workflow and allows you to iterate and improve upon it. Here we outline the key components of a recruitment plan template that lets you do just that.
Perform a skills audit to identify recruitment needs
The first step in formulating a recruitment plan for hiring is to audit your existing talent to determine the skills gap you need to plug. Additionally, you need to account for dynamic factors which will affect your hiring goals. For e.g., Are you anticipating a higher load of projects? Do you have any upcoming promotions?
You need to take stock of the skills you are missing and what resources you’ll need to acquire them. Accounting for your organizational targets in the future will give you a baseline to build your recruitment plan around.
Determine the key requirements and outline your job description
Once you know what roles you need to hire for, you need to determine the requirements for each role. Here are some questions you should think about when sketching out role requirements.
-
What will candidates need to succeed in these roles?
-
What characteristics does your ideal candidate possess?
-
Do you need candidates with a specific skill set or a transferable skill set?
-
Are you looking to hire part-time/contract workers or full-time staff?
-
What are the daily responsibilities and deliverables?
-
Any goals and outcomes which need to be prioritized?
Furthermore, you’ll need to judge if candidates are a good culture fit. Once you have identified your key requirements, use your findings to design the job description.
A compelling job description is the most fundamental—yet a severely underrated—aspect of your recruitment plan. Most job descriptions are a generic checklist of requirements and expectations, but they do nothing to attract and engage the target demographic and fail to convert them into applicants.
Aim to write job descriptions that are specific about what you want but also go beyond by presenting a picture of you as an employer, i.e., your mission, values, and overall culture. An ATS can help you with job description templates that provide a solid foundation. A polished professional JD that provides comprehensive information goes a long way in establishing a context. It tells a story that will help appeal to job seekers and bring in more applicants.
Finalize a budget for your hiring needs
Now that you have a handle on your requirements, you need to figure out the available budget you can commit. It will shape key aspects of your plan by dictating the resources you can allocate to various recruitment strategies, such as:
-
Recruitment marketing costs such as advertisements, etc.
-
Employer branding
-
Technology costs, such as using a recruitment software
-
Payroll expenditure for initial salary offering and negotiations
-
Expenditure for vetting processes
-
Travel and miscellaneous expenses associated with off-site recruiting
Having a clear idea of the costs you expect to incur lets you set realistic hiring targets and helps avoid a situation where you exceed your overhead or cannot offer a competitive salary to your candidates.
Put together a recruitment calendar for your hiring plan
Once you have finalized your requirements and resources, you need to chart out a timeline. Recruitment isn’t a seasonal activity anymore. Most companies recruit on a rolling basis all year round. This means that recruiters need to juggle multiple stages for different roles on different timelines. A calendar helps you plan out windows for various activities.
Having a calendar for your recruitment plan lets you anticipate what resources and personnel you need ahead of time. Using solutions like an ATS simplifies time-sensitive tasks like scheduling interviews to make sure delays or availability issues don’t crop up.
Curate the right mix of sourcing strategies to source ideal candidates
Your recruitment plan needs to incorporate different sourcing strategies to generate a good volume of candidates. Every role will require a specific permutation of education, skillset, experience, location, etc. To cover all bases, you need to use a combination of strategies that help you target the perfect demographic you intend to source from.
Are you looking to fill a high volume of skilled entry-level roles? You should consider campus recruitment. Want a kickass coder? Host a hackathon. You can even task external vendors to directly refer candidates to your system to help out. Incorporate strategies as you see fit to maximize exposure.
Define your candidate selection process
After you have sourced candidates, the next step is to establish a clear selection process to fill available roles. This includes the number of stages and the protocols for each of them. Usual stages include screening, assessment tests, multiple interviews, etc.
You also need to make sure that your selection process is not rigid. Plan for workflows flexible enough to accommodate the different hiring needs of different roles. Additionally, you should ensure that candidates have a great experience during the selection process by running a tightly coordinated process and communicating promptly with them about outcomes.
Vet your potential employees
Your recruitment plan should specify a policy for vetting shortlisted candidates by following up on references and performing additional background checks. Such checks let you verify the candidates’ authenticity and eliminate any disqualifying red flags. While this may not always be necessary, having a protocol in place makes sure you have a consistent practice regarding these procedures.
Roll out job offers
Making a job offer is just one of the steps in an entire offer management process. This includes everything from drafting an offer letter to acquiring the necessary approvals before moving ahead with an offer. You also need to complete all the necessary documentation upon acceptance.
Your recruitment plan should have a clear-cut procedure for making an offer to selected candidates and how to further negotiate with them if necessary. By making these in advance, you have a template for common eventualities that may increase your acceptance rates.
Bring your new employees on board
A successful recruitment plan always includes a roadmap to help a candidate transition into an employee. In its absence, you will have an inconsistent experience with new hires, which might result in a loss of productivity or result in a turnover.
Onboarding is a crucial procedure, which can make or break the success of your new hires. A good onboarding facilitates employees by bringing them up to speed on all the vital aspects of their role and familiarizes them with your organization’s work culture. If you are pressed to onboard multiple employees in a short window an ATS can help you curate a high-quality onboarding experience that scales effortlessly. It provides new hires with all the tools and connections necessary to hit the ground running and generate positive outcomes from day one.
Analyze, Iterate, Improve
Your plan is incomplete if you do not have systems in place to measure its efficacy and change things up to improve your hiring outcomes. Deploy solutions that let you collect feedback from all candidates involved in your recruiting process. Keep track of key recruitment metrics like time-to-hire, cost-per-hire, turnover rates, etc. Having handy reports that give you the full picture lets you iterate your approach to recruitment to observe steady improvement.
