Recruitment Strategy, Who Has One?

An effective recruitment strategy should provide a comprehensive blueprint for not only who your organisation should recruit, but also for when, where and how that recruitment should take place. Every company should have one. But many HR directors are no doubt reading this rather uncomfortably, the distinct lack of a well-defined organisational recruitment strategy weighing heavily on their minds.

The good news, if it can be called that, is that your competitors are most likely in an identical position and you’re certainly not alone. At Omni RMS we’ve trained over 500 UK-based organisations in using social media as a recruitment tool. While many of those organisations are forward-thinking enough to seek out the very latest in social media to help their recruitment processes, only a very small minority have ever referred to a specific social media strategy or indeed, to a wider talent acquisition strategy. Simply put, it’s the norm.

What’s more, over the past decade we’ve provided consultancy services to businesses across all sectors using our Recruitment Maturity Matrix to benchmark their activities. The very first element of our matrix is strategy, and it’s the area where businesses consistently fail. These two experiences have left us wondering why so many otherwise dynamic organisations neglect recruitment strategy to such a large degree, and what impact this could be having on future business performance and success.

What Should a Recruitment Strategy Contain?

Any recruitment strategy should be aligned very closely to your organisation’s overall business strategy, taking into account any planned changes of direction.

Since the recruitment strategy dictates how every element of recruitment is delivered, it’s also imperative that organisations communicate it to colleagues. If you design the strategy well, it becomes the cohesive back-bone that coordinates day-to-day activities towards a common goal, as all stakeholders are following a well thought-through plan that’s been properly signed off.

There are though some essential characteristics of an effective recruitment strategy that remain no matter what the company’s goals:

• Organisational factors, including the design & location of your recruitment team, their exact responsibilities, and the recruitment processes themselves.
• You should be able to take a defined, consistent employer brand to the marketplace. Rather than merely selling vacancies, you should be promoting opportunities.
• Sourcing strategies: various candidate-sourcing channels will have different pros and cons according to your organisation’s multiple talent requirements, and your recruitment strategy needs to take full account of this. Where do you have talent ‘blind-spots’? Have you got strategic attraction activities in place to meet this demand?
• Once the talent is sourced, you need to select the right candidates for your business, as opposed to merely the appropriate ones. Your assessment and selection framework needs to properly support your organisation’s talent requirements. 

A Recruitment Strategy is not Just for the Recruitment Phase

If you think that use for a recruitment strategy ends once a candidate has been offered a position, think again. Post-offer, there’s plenty more to include in your recruitment strategy; is new talent being safeguarded properly in terms of on-boarding? And are candidates then inducted into the business appropriately and effectively? Do you have effective engagement and retention strategies in place? A recruitment strategy should cover the entire employment process, right up until an employee leaves; when they depart, do you know why? What is your process for tracking lost talent with a view to potential re-engagement?

In taking an end-to-end view of the recruitment process with your strategy you can be pro-active, working to an informed plan, developing platforms to engage talent ahead of requirements, maximising employer brand messages and bringing HR and recruitment much closer to the strategic core of your business. And you’ll be part of that small percentage of organisations with a properly defined recruitment strategy, giving you a real competitive edge.

As part of our continuing efforts to assess the state of recruitment in the UK, we’re conducting a survey – get involved, complete this short questionnaire and help to shape the discussion on this important subject: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/RecruitmentStrategyUK