HAVING worked in a variety of roles throughout my recruitment career, I have worked with both companies who have a recruitment strategy and ones who don’t.
As a stereotype, larger companies are more likely to have a recruitment strategy than SMEs.
Recruitment Strategy - what are the benefits?
Having a defined recruitment strategy can provide many benefits for large and small businesses.
To begin with, having a recruitment strategy shows your colleagues throughout the business that you take your function seriously and you are ready to be a strategic partner to the business.
It gives you a game plan for the future and helps you measure the success so you know if you strategy is fit for purpose or if you need to rethink.
Recruitment Strategy – how can it help you succeed?
To be honest, I don’t believe having a recruitment strategy is the most valuable part, although it will help you stay focused day to day.
The value is in creating the strategy.
By creating a strategy you can learn a lot about your business, what works and what doesn’t.
Three of the most common factors that have a huge impact for SMEs are knowing your metrics, understanding your recruitment channels and building a talent brand.
Metrics – I like to start my recruitment strategies with a set of high level SMART goals.
Something like “reducing time to fill” might be a suitable goal for your first recruitment strategy.
By making the commitment to reduce time to fill means you first need to know how long it takes you to fill a vacancy.
This can be the first step on the road to understanding your talent data.
By doing so you will highlight where you can provide significant benefits to your business.
Recruitment channels – If you want to gain a strong ROI from your recruitment budget, you need to understand where your potential candidates are.
You can start this by asking your current employees:
“If you were job hunting, where would you look for work?”
If you work in an industry where there is a large skills gap, the answer might just be:
“I don’t need to look for work as I am always being offered work.”
By knowing this simple piece of information, you might need to accept that advertising jobs just won’t cut the mustard.
Your strategy will need to include other attraction methods like proactive recruitment techniques.
Talent brand – Often SMEs compete for the same talent as larger organisations.
As an SME, it can seem like you are at a disadvantage when competing for talent.
In fact, SME companies can have the advantage!
SME employees can feel more valued, have more diversity in their roles and progress their career quicker.
The biggest challenge for a SME is making sure potential candidates know about their brand, values and job opportunities.
By promoting your talent brand and value proposition to potential employees, you can attract high quality talent quicker.
Thankfully, it no longer costs the world to do this.
By choosing channels like social media to promote your talent brand, you can even do it without any cost.
- These are just some of the benefits of a recruitment strategy, and you might just find significant cost savings by creating and implementing a recruitment strategy.
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