Your recruitment strategic plan helps guide your business and foster success. To create a robust company culture and attract relevant, talented candidates, you should assess your current strategy and see where to implement new policies.
Why Is Strategic HR Management Important?
Strategic HR management is vital because it determines how your workplace functions. After all, employees are the backbone of your business, so their behavior, perception and motivation affect it. You ensure greater success when you select candidates who share your goals.
In recruitment, a strategic plan involves aligning candidates with the company’s goals and culture rather than just hiring to fill an empty role. While many startups try their hardest to hire anyone qualified, actual growth comes from having staff who feel aligned with the business.
Finding quality employees is essential, considering the hiring process can be incredibly expensive and time-consuming. Since you invest your resources into each new hire during onboarding, you must ensure they’re a good fit. After all, you won’t recoup your recruitment costs until after a minimum of six months on average.
Even if you’re okay with taking the loss and hiring someone else, you should know it costs double a worker’s salary to fill their role with a new candidate. You’ll have a much easier time if you have policies to help you source the best people initially.
Can Recruitment Policies Drive Strategic HR Management?
Recruitment policies can guide the development of strategic HR management (SHRM) to help your business grow in the right direction. The employees you choose are foundational to your success because they dictate your workplace culture and operations. You can find people who align most with your goals if you have the right policies.
How Can Recruitment Policies Improve SHRM?
Recruitment policies can improve SHRM at every stage, including sourcing, job posting, applying and interviewing. Establishing them in multiple places throughout your process ensures you receive high-quality candidates who align themselves with your business’s goals.
1. Candidate Sourcing
Where you source your candidates can impact your entire recruitment process, so you should ensure you look in the right places. For example, people at a college job fair have little experience but are more likely to apply, while those on networking sites fit the role but have many other options.
If you have a quality staff already, consider using referrals to build your workforce since they reduce recruiting costs by $7,500 on average and increase employee retention rates. It’s best to consider what you’re looking for in a new hire to create the best candidate-sourcing policies.
2. Job Description
A description is essential to all job listings, no matter the industry. At this stage of the recruitment process, having the right policies can help you get more people interested in applying. You must determine what information and requirements you’ll list to optimize them.
Consider how you currently describe the job when you post it — do you include the compensation range, necessary qualifiers and a snippet about your business? Considering around 63% of people only want to apply to places that disclose compensation ranges, you should consider including it.
3. Application Process
Quality policies around the application process are essential because they determine who meets the hiring team. Only the people who feel they align with your company and fit the role well will reach this stage, so you should streamline the process to make it as easy as possible for them.
Even if you initially pique their interest, you must do more to get them invested enough to apply. In fact, around 92% of applicants begin applying for a job but don’t finish. Many walk away because the process is time-consuming or complex, so you should simplify it. For instance, you should determine if you require them to create an account or write a cover letter.
4. Skill Assessments
Will you make your candidates take tests or fill out forms to prove their capabilities? Your recruitment policies should include the specifics of assessments if you use them in your process. For example, you must decide which ones to use and when you’ll use them.
Over 75% of medium-sized businesses use assessments when hiring externally, with most using them for senior-level vacancies. While they can be beneficial, candidates don’t typically enjoy them. If your current policy requires them and you don’t get much engagement, you may want to reconsider using them.
Will people filling senior-level vacancies have to prove their skills with a test or will you only use them for entry-level candidates? This is the kind of question you should ask yourself when creating a recruitment strategic plan.
5. Interviews
You should clearly define your interview policies before progressing in the recruitment process. Will you require multiple face-to-face sessions, waive the requirement for internal hires or only conduct meetings remotely? You should also determine what questions to ask.
Standardization makes things more clear to candidates, incentivizing them to apply. It’s also an excellent strategic move considering a quality interview process helps you quickly identify the prospective hires that align with your business’s goals.
What Are the Benefits of a Recruitment Strategic Plan?
A recruitment strategic plan benefits a business by standardizing the process, improving applicant quality and potentially increasing employee retention rates. Qualified candidates who feel connected to your business’s mission are more likely to stay in their role and excel.
Employees feel more comfortable providing feedback and ideas when they align with their company’s culture, increasing staff collaboration, innovation and business success. It makes the workplace a nicer place to work, which could even improve client or customer interactions.
Over time, recruitment policies will become a significant driving force for SHRM. You will likely notice improvements to company culture and possibly even faster growth since you only hire people who feel motivated to achieve the business’s goals.
Drive SHRM With Policies
Your recruitment policies determine how the HR department selects candidates and how applicants interact with your brand. Additionally, they determine the future of your business since quality hires will work much harder than people with no stake in your success. Assess your current process to find improvement areas, then monitor your progress.
