How to Create a Strategic Recruitment Plan For Your Hiring Needs

In a brightly lit factory, four workers wearing grey shirts and blue pants stand to the left a man and a woman wearing business attire. The man, wearing a dark blue suit and white shirt, shakes hands with a male worker as both smile.

Effective talent acquisition is essential for the growth and success of every company, states the Harvard Business Review. Recruiting top-quality employees not only facilitates business expansion but also helps to ensure the execution of strategic plans. As organizations have unique hiring requirements, they must adopt tailored approaches to their recruitment processes. We’ll delve into the most successful and valuable recruiting strategies, with a particular focus on strategic recruiting, to help you achieve your specific talent acquisition goals.

What are the most successful recruiting strategies?

Employee Referral Programs

Word-of-mouth is possibly the most effective advertising method, as people are more likely to listen to and heed the advice of people they know and trust. Satisfied employees are some of the best messengers, and you can tap into this by enacting an employee referral program, offering incentives and rewards to employees who bring in referrals.

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Social Media

Job seekers often learn about jobs and companies and make connections on social media. Establishing your company’s presence on social media is a great way to capture their attention, show off your company’s mission and culture, and potentially translate to job applications.

Utilize Job Boards and Freelance Platforms

This is especially helpful if you’re after a niche talent or a temporary hire. There are all sorts of specialty professional job boards and freelance platforms on the Internet. Make sure to advertise your jobs there to maximize their exposure.

Recruiting Videos

This can be done in tandem with using social media. Recruitment videos — posted on social media and/or your company website — can give potential candidates a quick preview of your company’s culture, workplace environment, mission and job expectations. It’ll help ensure applicants are aligned with your company’s mission.

Strategic Recruitment

Strategic recruitment is a strategy involving recruitment-focused marketing efforts, savvy company branding, and then selling it to potential candidates.

What Is Strategic Recruitment?

Strategic recruitment uses a set of techniques to help a company adapt to changing market conditions while continuing to attract ideal candidates.

Strategic recruitment places emphasis on creating a strong company brand. A good brand can make a company stand out and attract a would-be candidate’s attention when shared through marketing and social media. It also emphasizes targeting candidates from quality sources (employee referrals, talent networks), and candidates who haven’t yet applied to competitors. During the recruitment and hiring process, speed and focusing on the candidates’ needs and values are priority. This can be done by utilizing software to expedite sifting through applications, virtual interview platforms, remote options, and so on.

Strategic recruitment can be used at any time, and not every element must be used. It’s commonly employed when the labor market gets competitive and quality talent is in short supply. This way, companies in need of employees can stay competitive and continue to bring in talent for their business goals and growth.

Why Is a Strategic Recruitment Plan Important?

Ideally, companies are bringing in the best talent they can. Having the best employees will contribute to your company’s growth and development. Additionally, because strategic recruitment optimizes your approach to focus on quality candidates, you’ll save on costs of wrong or low-quality hires, which not only slows growth but can also cost your company significant amounts of money.

How Does a Strategic Recruitment Plan Make the Recruitment Process Easier?

Even though it sounds ambitious by only targeting niche and top talent, strategic recruitment aims to expedite the whole process. As we mentioned before, speed is important. This is because when the labor market becomes competitive, candidates may only have smaller windows of availability between jobs. Making the process quicker and returning decisions to candidates faster helps. This can be done by employing technological solutions: electronic applications, keyword filters, virtual interviews and automated scheduling. Additionally, recruiting videos and engaging interviews can also go a long way to integrating company culture, as well as expediting the hiring process.

How to Create a Strategic Recruitment Plan

Review Previous Recruitment Strategies

If it’s not broken, don’t fix it. Data is very important, and any previous data and information you have from past recruitment strategies can be very valuable for informing future ones. Review previous goals and plans. Evaluate how you executed them and how they performed. If you’re planning to launch a similar recruitment strategy, think of ways you can improve.
What Are Your Goals?
Remember, companies don’t put ample time and effort into strategic recruitment plans for no good reason. There needs to be goals and an endgame in mind. These goals —and the type of talent they’ll require — can be very influential to the company’s future, so make sure to give this step very considerable thought.

The goals also influence your recruitment plan. If you need a particular type of talent, you’ll have to tailor the strategy to attract them. This can make for a significantly different campaign than if you’re looking for general employees, or even multiple different types. Essentially, you’ll start your recruitment strategy with the goal in mind and work your way down.

Consider Timelines and Number of Positions

Next to your goals, the timeframe and number of positions you’ll be filling for your recruitment plan can really influence the strategy. If you have an urgent timeline for a project that requires a lot of new hires, you might need to streamline your current recruitment methods, increase the number of your recruitment personnel, or even reach out to a recruitment agency for outside help. Also, you’ll need to take the type of talent into consideration. Extra associates to help on the assembly or production floor will likely be easier to find than an experienced pipefitter or maintenance mechanic.

Marketing Plan

With your goals, numbers, and previous data in mind, you can now put together a marketing plan to target your ideal candidate. For instance, you can target specific job boards or networks that cater to the type of talent you’re looking to attract. You can analyze salaries, benefits, and perks from other companies and try to make your offers competitive. Utilize advertising channels that best target those demographics or personnel. Essentially, you’re trying to find where your ideal candidate would be and focus on their needs. This can better your chances at drawing them to your company to make the hire.

Selecting Process

A good strategic recruitment plan will keep your recruitment pipeline running smoothly. That means inevitably you’ll need to filter out some applicants. Having a robust selection process can help save your company crucial time (and significant money) by weeding out candidates. The best way to do this is by having a clear vision of your would-be candidates’ skill set, abilities, and temperament. Again, we recommend also using technology and software to highlight keywords and screen applications.

The Advantages of Working With a Strategic Recruiting Agency

If the example strategic recruiting plan seems a bit daunting, don’t fret. It can be a big undertaking, but you don’t have to execute it alone. Strategic recruiting agencies can be an asset to helping you create, execute, or revise a plan. They can consult with you every step of the way, and here are a few reasons why you might consider enlisting their help.

Experience

A good strategic recruiting agency has many seasoned marketers, recruiters, and managers aboard. Chances are they’ve worked on several different recruitment strategies before and can apply their experiences to meet your goals and objectives. That experience can save you a lot of time and headaches figuring it out yourself, especially if this is your first campaign.

They Know The Market

Besides having experience on previous recruitment strategies, a good strategic recruiting agency will also have a finger on the pulse of the market. They’ll have an idea of what candidates are looking for and which direction the overall market is going. Like their experience on previous campaigns, a recruitment agency in tune with the market can help you navigate it better than on your own.

Talent Networks

This is particularly useful if you require a certain type of niche talent, and in a hurry. Some recruitment agencies are highly specialized and have built up a portfolio of connections or roster of talent of their own. If consulted, they can leverage this network to quickly connect you with quality and vetted talent. They may often help with the onboarding process too, so your new employees can hit the ground running.

Eliminates the Burden on Recruitment Personnel

Large corporations often have an in-house recruiting department to handle strategic plans. However, this isn’t always an option for smaller or even medium-sized companies. Availing yourself of a recruiting agency can save your company substantial amounts of money compared to creating a dedicated recruitment department. It can also help fill in if your in-house recruiters are overwhelmed with volume or aren’t able to bring in new hires with their current campaign.

Learn More About Strategic Recruiting

Strategic recruiting is very important to a company’s success in a competitive labor market. Well-executed strategic recruitment plans can ensure a company has the best talent available. However, launching a strategic recruiting campaign can be a very involved process. If at any step of the way — whether it’s planning, executing, or revising your strategic recruiting plan — please feel free to visit our website and contact Aerotek. We’re more than happy to consult with you to create a strategic recruiting plan with your company’s interests and goals in mind.