All About Recruitment Strategies

What is a recruitment strategy?

A recruitment strategy sets out the plan for finding, hiring and onboarding new recruits to a company and establishes a long term vision for recruitment and talent acquisition. Your recruitment strategy should align with the specific needs, goals and values of your business and may change over time. 

The recruitment process encompasses the whole timeline from identifying a skills gap or vacancy that needs filling, to starting the onboarding process for a new recruit. A good recruitment strategy will maximise your chances of finding talented new recruits and can save you time and money during the recruitment process and beyond.

Finding new employees can be time consuming and stressful. Sometimes, when you place an advertisement for a job vacancy, you receive hundreds or even thousands of applications. Sifting through all of these applicants to decide who should advance onto the next stage of the process takes up a significant amount of time and energy, as does the rest of the hiring process. 

Data from the popular recruitment site Indeed found that around 85% of jobseekers had failed to show up for a job interview without letting the company know, a process known as ghosting. A solid recruitment strategy should aim to attract the right type of candidate and weed out the ones who have no legitimate interest in the job. 

To maximise efficiency, you want to either deter unsuitable candidates from applying at all or use methods to identify them early on in the process.  

Common issues that face businesses who need to recruit include:

• Unsuitable candidates applying 
• Too many or not enough applications received
• People not showing up for interviews 
• Lack of engagement from jobseekers or new hires 
• Low staff retention 
• Unrealistic expectations 

If the recruitment process has you feeling stressed and frazzled or you find that you are constantly having to advertise for the same positions, the chances are that you have not taken the time to build a recruitment strategy and this is likely having a negative effect on the business overall. 

Having a strong recruitment strategy should:

• Increase the chances of finding the most suitable candidates to fill roles 
• Streamline the recruitment process and make it run more efficiently 
• Reduce costs associated with hiring as you should have to hire less often 
• Help recruits to feel valued 
• Reduce rates of staff turnover and allow you to retain talented workers for longer 
• Help to build a workforce that is tailored to the company’s needs 

In business, it can be tempting to try to get job adverts drafted quickly in order to fill vacancies as soon as possible, however, failing to plan ahead can result in mismanagement of the recruitment process. 

Failing to manage the recruitment process may mean:

• You make job offers based on desperation rather than suitability 
• You waste time and energy interviewing applicants who have no relevant experience or qualifications 
• Incompatible candidates end up being chosen who are not engaged or unable to perform the job properly 
• New recruits accept jobs but do not show up for their first day
• You have to start to recruit again, sooner than you would like to 

Your recruitment strategy can include both short term goals (for example filling immediate vacancies) as well as long term plans for your business and recruitment, such as building relationships with potential candidates over time, even if there are no immediate vacancies. 

What should be in a recruitment strategy?

Companies with a confusing organisational structure, unclear expectations of their workers or poorly defined roles and responsibilities within the business, tend to have higher staff turnover and lower levels of satisfaction amongst workers. The same can be said of companies with a poor approach to recruitment which is why it is imperative to plan out an appropriate strategy for recruiting new workers. 

A well planned and organised recruitment strategy will make the hiring process less stressful and lead to better outcomes for everyone within the business. Your recruitment strategy will depend on the specific needs and scope of your business, however, in general it may include:

• What your business targets and goals are
• A clear understanding of your hiring requirements 
• Details about budgeting and resources 
• A plan for assessing skills and qualifications 

You should also think about the practical points of the hiring process as this will help you to develop a framework that you can use in future and simply tweak it slightly to fit the specific role you are advertising for, such as:

• What is the role and what are the main responsibilities 
• How many people are you looking to recruit
• Who is your ideal candidate
• Where do you want to advertise (via job sites or your company website, on social media, at local job fairs, through a recruiter)
• Who will conduct the interviews and how many rounds will you need 
• Do you require any screening questions or assessments to be completed during the application stage

Remember that a recruitment strategy is a process and it can be adapted as you try out ideas and learn from them. You may find, for example, that you get more suitable candidates from certain channels whereas others attract timewasters and you can use this information to help you decide where to advertise next time. 

Common recruitment strategy mistakes include:

• Failing to plan ahead 
• Unclear or misleading job advertisements or descriptions 
• Trying to rush the recruitment process
• Being disorganised 
• Failing to provide a positive candidate experience 
• Making promises during the hiring process that you cannot keep 

Defining your recruitment goals

Before drafting a recruitment strategy, you should take some time to consider exactly what your recruitment goals are. Initially, you should assess the needs of your business, where your business currently stands (both within your industry and amongst competitors) and what your future targets are. Next, consider how your current recruitment process is helping to achieve those goals and how you could adapt it to better meet your targets and get your business where you want it to be.

Your goals will depend on your business needs, examples may include:

• Improving the quality of candidates that you attract
• Diversifying your talent pool 
• Lowering recruitment costs 
• Reducing the time it takes to hire (from placing the initial advertisement to commencing the onboarding process)
• Making recruitment easier and more efficient 

When defining your recruitment goals try to be as specific as possible; think SMART goals. SMART is an acronym that stands for:

• Specific
• Measurable 
• Achievable 
• Realistic 
• Timely 

You may set a goal of reducing hiring costs within your business. To make this goal SMART you could adapt it to reducing hiring costs by 15% by the end of the fiscal year. 

Once you have defined some SMART goals, you should consider how to proactively address them. 

Once you have defined your SMART goals and thought about how to meet them, you should start to build these ideas into your recruitment strategy. 

Building your recruitment strategy

When it comes to building a recruitment strategy, you will find the process easier if you have:

• Good knowledge about your industry of field 
• Solid branding 
• Clear, realistic targets for the future 
• Some understanding of global markets and trends 

To build your recruitment strategy you also require a clear understanding of:

• Your business and workforce requirements 
• Your future business goals
• Any issues or problems with your current recruitment process 
• How you will improve your recruitment process
• How to tailor your recruitment process so it aligns with your business needs and goals

Organisation is key within recruitment. If you want to pique the interest of talented candidates, you need to present a professional, well-polished view of the business. This means arriving on time to interviews, being organised and reading through their CV is advance. 

If your goal is to attract and retain top talent, is also important that your business seems like an attractive place to work. Take the time to read through reviews of your company online and take note of poor reviews or criticism and decide how to address these issues within the hiring process. For example, if being routinely expected to do the work of others regularly crops up, you can build this into the process by explaining to candidates how the business is going through a recruitment drive and redefining roles within the company.  

You should also consider ways to easily tailor your recruitment methods to make them suitable for individual vacancies. For example, it is reasonable to expect the process for applying for an entry level position to be simpler than for a management position. If you use pre screening questions as part of your recruitment process ensure they are relevant to the role advertised and change them accordingly. 

It is important to assess the way in which you have been recruiting and how you can improve on this. You should think about:

• What skills gaps or productivity gaps there are within the business
• Which roles will need advertising 
• How to design clear advertisements that align with the roles and responsibilities of the vacancy 
• Whether you have a successful employee-referral scheme with adequate incentives 
• Identifying suitable places to advertise (for example job sites, social media) 
• How candidates will make their applications (such as via a recruitment site, directly on your website or by emailing their resume over) 
• The criteria used to select candidates for interview (and any tools or technology that can assist with this) 
• Will pre-screening questions be required and what will they be
• Details about interviewing (scheduling, content and who is responsible for conducting them)
• Any assessments needed as part of the hiring process 
• Follow ups (second stage interviews etc)
• Onboarding (contract signing, paperwork etc)

Reviewing your recruitment strategy

It is important to regularly review your recruitment strategy to ensure it remains relevant and is fit for purpose. Outdated or unsuitable recruitment practices will waste time and may affect the reputation of your business. 

To help you measure the efficacy of your recruitment strategy, you should consider key metrics, for example:

• The costs associated with hiring (per hire)
• The length of the process
• The number of applicants who complete the whole recruitment process 
• Offer acceptance rates 
• The quality of hires 
• How hires are finding you (for example via referrals, recruitment websites, social media pages)

By monitoring and analysing these metrics, you will be able to identify the strengths and weaknesses within your recruitment strategy and define areas for improvement. 

To monitor the success of your recruitment strategy you could:

• Collect feedback from candidates on their experience of the recruitment process 
• Speak to current employees as they may have valuable insight 
• Involve stakeholders in the conversation about your recruitment strategy
• Stay up to date with current global and market trends 
• Don’t be afraid to adapt and change your recruitment strategy 

When planning and reviewing your recruitment strategy, it is important to ensure that you are compliant with any laws and legislation for example around diversity, equity and inclusion, as well as upholding best practice. 

A solid recruitment strategy can help to place the best candidates in the right roles at the right time, improving efficiency, output and the reputation of your business. It also frees up HR time, allowing HR professionals to focus instead on the success and wellbeing of their existing employees.