How to Develop Successful Recruitment Strategies and Methods

With a tough economy defining your recruitment strategies and methods will result better hires in less time. Why? Because you are following a plan. The investment in time and effort put into defining your plan will pay off big time if you take it seriously and follow it.

Where to Begin?

Assuming you have done a proper job analysis and know exactly what type of skills and requirements are going to be demanded of the person filling the position, the next step is to decide which resources you have available to you. These may include job board, subscriptions to posting sites, databases of candidates, advertising budgets, referral programs and more. Additionally you need to assess what manpower resources are available.

Once you have a firm understanding of resources, you can decide on your strategies. If you are lacking resources or manpower you may consider outsourcing some or all of the function. It is perfectly acceptable to outsource some or all of these functions to a recruitment firm or employment service.

Implementing the Plan

Once you have decided your resources you need to implement your strategies. You do this by documentation of the process. Each step should generate a summary report of some sort and data that can be tracked. Why? So you can adjust your plan and make better decisions on allocation of resources.

Using a Recruiter

If you are using an outsourced solution, you may want to use 2-3 firms at first and measure which one provides the better candidates. This can be done by measuring the quality and speed of submission. How on target are the resumes that are submitted? How quickly can they turn around an order? To do this you need to measure and keep track of results. This does two things, you can narrow it down to 1 or 2 services or in the future if you use another firm, you have a benchmark for how a service should perform when filling a particular type of position.

In House Recruiting

If you are doing this in house, you may want to consider a recruiting management software solution to keep track of some of the data. This type of service records and tracks all kinds of data along for your recruitment methods and strategies process, from collecting candidates, to tracking interview results and hires, this software can be a powerful answer to managing your in-house recruitment effort.

If you chose to do it manually, keep track of a few important parameters like where candidates are coming from, which source provides the best candidates and how many candidate submissions it takes to develop an interview pool etc. Measuring this will show you in the future the best way to recruit for a given position.

Putting it all together.

Making your efforts pay off means starting out and taking action. By measuring results you can quickly ascertain which methods are more effective and increase the chances of finding better candidates while reducing the time to hire and the costs involved. In short, if taken as a serious endeavor, putting together and following a recruitment methods and strategiesplan has a big payoff.