How to ace your 2020 recruitment strategy: King Recruit’s ultimate guide
If you are one of the many businesses planning your recruitment strategy in January for the whole of the year and beyond, you’ll know that effective planning and delivery could make a huge difference to the success of the overall business in 2020.
It’s clear that building a recruitment strategy is the best way to assess your current hiring methods: figure out what works, what doesn’t, and utilise that to make your plan going forward.
A strategic plan is not only important for filling vacancies but to ensure that you align your company goals, growth plans and skills gaps with your next hires.
Bad recruitment decisions can be costly. According to an in-depth report conducted by the REC a bad hire for a position with a salary of £42,000 can lead to a cost of £132,015 for the company to rectify-over 3 times the salary!
Your recruitment plan won’t be created overnight, and when you think it’s finished it won’t be. Your plan should always be flexible. If your company was to experience substantial growth faster than anticipated you may need to hire more staff, or what if partway throughout the year your CRM system just isn’t up to scratch?
It’s like any business plan, review and plan regularly to achieve the best recruitment delivery.
Stage One: Plan Implementation
Here King Recruit discuss steps you can take to implement your plan successfully.
Look at your current teams and employees.
To start to successfully grow your business the best place to start is to assess where you are and where you want to be. Then decide how much of this will fall into hiring requirements.
Look at each department in turn and consider: Are they short-staffed? Are there any particular roles or areas that could benefit from a different skillset? Or are they looking to take on further business or a new project?
Remember staff turnover, anticipated promotions or moves within the business will affect your hiring requirements.
When should you start?
Now you know who and how many people you need, think about when you need them and when you will need to start the process – sound simple but many businesses don’t plan effectively when it comes to timescales.
If you are thinking of hiring a candidate with a very specialist skill set, take into account that you probably need more time than you think. Sourcing and attraction through to interviewing and offer could take 6 months or more especially if it’s a very specialist position and well sought after.
By planning this month by month you can complete a recruitment calendar. For each month record the hires you will need to make, the headcount for each department and a timeline of when the hiring process will begin.
How and how much?
The big question is how you will you look to recruit these candidates. Will you be advertising internally, on job boards such as Indeed, Reed or LinkedIn, will you need the assistance of a specialist recruiter to be pro-active and ‘headhunt’ passive talent in the marketplace?
Based on your previous hiring spend you can estimate how much your recruitment plans will cost you in 2020.
When considering your recruitment budget it isn’t based solely on your adverts, it needs to incorporate the following:
- External Job adverts on job boards – if you plan to recruit large volumes of staff consider signing up to plans, they may include bulk advertising discounts.
- Internal staff’s time and resource, this may include HR and Talent Teams, Line Managers and Senior Management too.
- Social Media costs such as Facebook or LinkedIn – are their ads efficient?
- Recruitment travel expenses – for you and your candidates
- Any background checks such as CRB’s
- Salaries and benefits packages of your new hires
- Any hiring charges for external meeting spaces to conduct the interviews
Stage Two: Now is the time to start your recruitment process.
Before you start looking for the ideal candidate and start advertising for applicants there are a few steps to do beforehand.
What will the candidate be doing and what are you looking for:
This sounds obvious but we see it frequently. Hiring managers believe they want one thing and change their mind partway through the recruitment process, wasting time, interviewing the wrong candidates and throwing money at ads that are no longer relevant.
Define your vacancy, what will your new hire be doing and what do you want them to do? Have this set out in order to determine what experience, characteristics or qualifications your candidate will need to have in order to achieve this?
Writing the perfect job ad?
This could be a whole blog in itself but there are a few key points to consider when attracting the best talent to your business.
- Keep it short and sweet – most job seekers these days are looking at your ad on their phone or on their tablet, they won’t scroll through pages and pages of blurb.
- As per the above make sure your ad is optimised for job boards mobile sites
- If your company has great benefits, values and culture detail them near the top to entice candidates to read on and apply
- Detail the essential requirements of the role
- Don’t detail every single aspect of their day to day tasks, only note the key points
- Detail any career enhancement opportunities such as potential learning opportunities or promotions
- Don’t be afraid to show some personality, remember this ad is a reflection of your brand
How will you select the best candidates?
After your job advert has your inbox flooded with great applicants (hopefully!) you will need to work out your criteria for selection.
For the first round, there are many different online tests, for example, basic tests to determine their ability on Word or Excel or more advanced tests for specific skillsets*
Firstly decide who will interview the candidates, for consistency whoever is conducting the interviews will need to be present in all of them.
All candidates will need to experience the same candidate journey. They will all need to be asked the same questions and be given the same brief for any presentation. However each interview will be an individual experience; questions, requirements and concerns may be raised throughout the journey, each will need to be addressed.
Still not certain who to choose, personality tests will show who will best fit in with your culture and your current Team structure.
Conducts any checks, this could be as simple as requesting references from former employers and checking qualifications or obtaining a more detailed CRB.
Skills Tests
https://recruitment-tests.co.uk/site/html/index.php
Personality Tests
https://www.insights.com/products/insights-discovery/
Stage 3: Fantastic you have found some great talent, is your recruitment plan finished?
The short answer is no.
After you have chosen your candidate and made the offer there may be some to-ing and fro-ing as you negotiate a deal that works for you as a business and your candidate.
After your candidate has accepted and you have a start date in place the recruitment process goes on.
How did that hire go? Look for feedback from candidates that have been recently hired. Can they point out strengths and weaknesses within the selection process? Take this back to your recruitment plan and look to improve on areas where weakness has been identified.
Remember your plan is ever developing, and flexibility is always required, put the time and effort into your plan and it will see through 2020 into 2021.
Still struggling to recruit the best talent in the market and need a pro-active and targeted approach to sourcing passive talent?
King Recruit is dedicated to helping your business grow. Our goal is to allow you the freedom to run your business, whilst we invest in finding promising talent that will add lasting value. With a talent database of 2000+, we invest time and resource to rigorously test, interview and verify our candidates.
Contact Us.
If you need any assistance with recruitment or hiring strategies in 2020 get in contact with King Recruit today. Contact one of our talented team on 01392 790725 or email enquiries@kingrecruit.com. Or contact our MD Helen Plumridge directly helen@kingrecruit.com 07808 537696 for Senior and Executive hiring requirements.