Recruitment Strategy Plan: How To Make Best One

New year is the right moment to make a hiring plan, set KPIs, and revise the hiring process. How to start looking for an employee and speed up the process? What steps must a recruitment team go through to achieve the best results?

What Is a Recruitment Strategy Plan?

What is a recruitment plan? This is a guideline summarizing all hiring rules and procedures within your organization. Recruitment plan for hiring serves as a real recruitment business plan! To ensure a company has an effective and efficient recruitment process to source suitable candidates, you should first develop an effective recruitment strategy.

The recruiting strategy is your plan to fill vacancies with qualified employees. It answers four basic questions:

1. Which positions do we want or need to fill?
2. How do we want to achieve this?
3. Who is involved in the recruiting process?
4. When should the positions be filled?

This strategy can help your organization meet key recruiting goals and the needs of everyone involved. Once the strategy is defined, break it down into actionable tactics.

Advantages of a Recruitment Plan

A clear and organized recruiting plan allows managers and other employees involved in recruitment to have visibility on the recruitment process and its progress.

The main benefits of the detailed recruitment plan are:

• Defined strategy for hiring;
• Understanding of hiring goals and mechanisms by all the parties involved;
• Clear recruitment budget planning;
• Easier onboarding for new recruiters and hiring managers;
• Preventing lapses in recruitment.

Why Are Recruiting Plans Important?

Recruiting plans are indispensable in the realm of talent acquisition, serving as strategic roadmaps that outline the systematic approach an organization will undertake to attract, assess, and hire top-tier talent. These plans play a pivotal role in aligning recruitment efforts with the broader organizational goals, ensuring that the workforce meets current and future needs.

Creating a recruitment plan involves a meticulous process, considering factors such as job roles, skills required, target candidate demographics, and the most effective channels for sourcing. A well-crafted recruitment plan for hiring not only provides a structured framework for the entire hiring process but also aids in resource optimization, cost-effectiveness, and time efficiency. It allows recruiters and hiring managers to proactively address potential challenges, set realistic timelines, and implement strategies for attracting diverse and qualified candidates.

Recruitment Strategic Planning

How to create a recruitment plan? First of all, define the most relevant steps necessary to generalize the process within your organization. Follow the steps indicated below to develop your own workflow.

1. Evaluate the existing strategies

Before developing a recruiting strategy, you should review current strategies for effectiveness. It is necessary to obtain feedback and ideas from HR managers.

Recruitment planning is also an excellent time to review your company's recruiting budget, including departmental budgets and the platforms you can use to find your ideal candidates, such as LinkedIn, Glassdoor, etc.

By regularly re-evaluating and reviewing your internal recruitment process, you can ensure that your processes are continuously optimized. It's also important to look at the process in terms of the candidate’s journey and candidate experience - the experience from the applicant's perspective.

Collect feedback from applicants and recruiters to continuously improve the recruiting plan and boost the process.

2. Initiate collaboration

It is important to seek and consider stakeholder feedback when developing the recruitment strategy plan.

Stakeholders in a recruiting strategy include hiring managers, executives, employees, candidates, and HR teams. Also, make sure that you take into account the needs of the applicants in the strategy to ensure a good candidate experience.

Think about the useful tools that can boost collaboration between hiring stakeholders.

3. Define the hiring budget

Another essential step in recruitment planning is clearly defining the budget for recruitment processes. This budget must, of course, include the remuneration envisaged for the position, but also the cost of the recruitment itself.

Try to be as comprehensive as possible in personnel planning and recruiting. For example, include every possible expense to your recruitment planning process: cost of using certain job boards, time spent recruiting, possible external resources used, sponsored ads on social media, etc.

4. Review internal channels, policies, and practices

Your company's current recruiting channels, policies, and practices can give you an advantage in the competition for top talent. This may be reflected in employee benefits, vacation policies, corporate social responsibility, flexible work options, or career development.

Another important aspect to consider when developing your recruitment strategy plan is how you interview or question applicants. For example, is there a telephone interview right in the first step? Are interview teams used, and if so, are they used for all jobs or only for jobs of a certain level?

In addition, you should consider when and how to conduct background checks, what types of checks you want to conduct, and whether you want to use a third party. Hiring planning is also an opportunity to identify policies that may be outdated and prompt applicants to choose another job opportunity.

Also, consider the automated tools that can fill the bottlenecks of your hiring channels and processes. Modern recruiting requires a well-designed recruiting strategic plan that includes important factors influencing recruiting success. To maintain a strong market position, rethink an existing recruitment approach and adapt it to new circumstances.

Take a look at our material about recruitment policy building!

5. Consider outsourcing certain processes

There are many ways to outsource your recruiting needs. For example, if you have a one-time need for many people with the same skills, hiring a partner who specializes in talent with those skills may be more cost-effective.

You can also build long-term partnerships or do in-house recruitment by recruiting your own people. Define a suitable model for your organization and take it into account when building your recruitment plan for hiring.

We recommend organizing feedback sessions regarding the hiring process and conducting further deep analytics. This will help to build future recruitment strategies more successfully.

6. Use innovative technologies

When hiring volumes are low, manual processes can still work, but software solutions are necessary when recruitment volumes increase.

Include some expenses on technology when developing a recruiting strategic plan. There are many choices when it comes to recruiting applications. For example, anonymous marketplaces that poach passive candidates can be used to recruit unlimited candidates without high commissions for recruiters and headhunters.

Video interviewing software has become another important part of the hiring process, mostly because of the COVID-19 pandemic. It eliminates the need for in-person interviews, facilitates team interviews, and allows you to interview qualified applicants wherever they are.

Recruitment platforms like Axterior offer automated job pipelines to customize the hiring steps to the peculiarities of your company. Also, Axterior provides comprehensive analytics to assess your hiring efforts in a data-driven manner. Such a practice will save time for your recruitment team and bring long-term benefits to your recruitment efforts.

7. Optimize your approach to candidates

There are various ways to target both active and passive applicants. Devising a communications strategy to identify the ideal forums for each job is just as important as creating an engaging social media campaign that will help attract candidates and verify the success of your strategy against relevant metrics.

For example, get inspired by recruiting video of CSIS Intelligence Officer:

Posting open positions on your company's careers website is the first step, as you want applicants to get a feel for your company's culture and mission.

Active sourcing, mobile recruiting, searching for former candidates, and building a strong employer brand are now effective methods that companies can use to attract highly qualified specialists and young talents. In addition, many employers use in-house recruitment and employee referral programs to keep up with the fierce competition within the industry.

8. Define the core of your employer brand

The employer's brand has a powerful impact on the number and quality of qualified applicants a company receives.

So if you have a strong brand, you should focus on that. If your company's brand isn't well-defined or well-known, refining it so you can make the most of it in the hiring process should be a part of your overall marketing strategy.

Find more useful tips in our blog post about employer branding rules!

It's also important to consider how employees and external individuals perceive your company using platforms like Glassdoor. Ideally, the perception of your business will align with your plan. If this is not the case, you should devise strategies to close the gap.

Recruitment Plan: Example

Let's consider a Recruitment Plan example for a mid-sized technology company aiming to fill several software engineering positions:

Objective:The primary objective of this recruitment plan is to hire skilled and diverse software engineers to strengthen our development team, meeting the company's growing project demands and innovation goals.

Steps to Create the Recruitment Plan:

1. Needs Assessment: Identify the specific skills and experience required for the software engineering roles. Consult with department heads and project managers to understand current and future project requirements.
2. Job Description Development: Craft detailed and compelling job descriptions that clearly outline responsibilities, qualifications, and opportunities for growth within the organization.
3. Sourcing Strategies: Utilize a multi-faceted approach for candidate sourcing, including online job boards, professional networking sites, industry events, and employee referrals. Collaborate with HR and marketing to enhance the company's employer brand.
4. Application and Screening Process: Implement an efficient applicant tracking system (ATS) to streamline the application process. Develop a screening process that includes resume reviews, skills assessments, and initial interviews to identify top candidates.
5. Interview Panel Selection: Formulate interview panels comprising technical experts, team leads, and HR representatives to ensure comprehensive assessments from different perspectives.
6. Diversity and Inclusion Initiatives: Integrate diversity and inclusion initiatives into the recruitment plan to attract a diverse pool of candidates. Implement blind resume reviews and diverse interview panels to mitigate biases.
7. Candidate Experience Enhancement: Prioritize a positive candidate experience by providing timely and constructive feedback, clear communication about the hiring process, and a transparent view of the company culture.
8. Offer and Onboarding Strategy: Develop competitive and attractive compensation packages. Collaborate with the HR department to ensure a smooth onboarding process for successful candidates.
9. Performance Metrics and Analytics: Define key performance indicators (KPIs) such as time-to-fill, source effectiveness, and diversity metrics. Regularly analyze and adjust the recruitment plan based on these metrics.
10. Continuous Improvement: Conduct post-hire evaluations to gather feedback from new hires and hiring teams. Use this information to continuously refine and improve the recruitment plan for future hiring cycles.

This example illustrates the comprehensive nature of a recruitment plan, showcasing the importance of strategic thinking and a well-structured approach to attract and hire the right talent for organizational success.

Who Should Use a Recruiting Plan?

A recruiting plan is a valuable tool for any organization, regardless of size or industry, that seeks to strategically acquire top talent to meet its business objectives. It is essential for HR professionals, hiring managers, and recruiters who are responsible for navigating the complexities of the hiring process. Small businesses can benefit from a recruiting plan to ensure efficiency in their talent acquisition efforts, while larger corporations may utilize it to manage the recruitment process across various departments and locations.

Whether in the private or public sector, a well-structured recruiting plan provides a roadmap for attracting, assessing, and hiring candidates in a systematic and goal-oriented manner. Ultimately, any entity aiming to build a skilled and diverse workforce aligned with its organizational goals stands to gain significant advantages from the thoughtful implementation of a recruiting plan.

Conclusion

When you have a position to fill, you want to find the best person whose skills and knowledge will help your business grow. A detailed recruitment policy is a necessary element for this success. Also, such a strategy plan will help you simplify the whale process and find new opportunities. Use the tips mentioned above to strengthen your hiring efforts and Axterior recruitment platform - to streamline your efforts! Try for free now.