3+ SAMPLE Recruitment Business Plan

What Is a Recruitment Business Plan?

Recruitment business plans are about much more than determining which positions require immediate filling—they’re a chance to arrange company goals and skill gaps with your hiring efforts to plan for the coming year strategically. A strategic recruitment business plan should include a job list, a recruitment calendar, budget information, and tracking and assessment tools. Recruiting/staffing firms fall nicely within the category of business services. According to NYU’s Stern School of Business research, the business services industry is four times less profitable than the top twenty most profitable businesses in the United States, with a profit margin of 4.6 percent.

Benefits of Recruitment Strategy

When recruiting the ideal candidate for an open position at your company, several different recruitment strategies can be used. A targeted search is one of the most effective methods for identifying employees who will thrive in their role and contribute positively to your company culture. In essence, a targeted recruitment plan focuses advertising efforts on a specific job opening to attract individuals with specific experience levels, skill sets, personality traits, and other characteristics. We will discuss several of the primary benefits of a targeted recruitment strategy in the sections below.

Enhance the applicant quality: A significant benefit of a targeted recruitment strategy is an increase in the quality of applicants. Because only individuals who meet the specific criteria you specify will be shown your open positions, you will avoid having to sift through many unqualified applicants. Rather than that, the majority—if not all—applicants for your available job position will be a potential fit for your company.Cost savings per hire: Another significant benefit of implementing a targeted recruitment strategy is decreased cost per hire. A targeted recruitment strategy’s emphasis on quality over quantity not only saves time—it can also significantly reduce hiring costs. By narrowing the applicant pool for a position, hiring managers can maximize their budget rather than diluting it across a wide range of candidates.Fill Difficult Positions: Specific jobs are more difficult to fill than others. Fortunately, a well-targeted recruitment approach may significantly shorten the time-critical roles that remain vacant. By promoting job openings to qualified individuals, people who would be a good fit for the position are more likely to view and apply.Increase Workplace Diversity: Along with individuals with specific skill sets, a tailored recruitment approach can focus on underrepresented communities, such as ethnic youths or persons with disabilities. Businesses may promote workplace diversity by ensuring that underrepresented groups are represented in the candidate pool for an open position. Given the various benefits of a diverse workplace, including reduced attrition, increased morale, improved decision-making, and increased levels of engagement, this benefit of a focused recruitment approach should not be disregarded.Saves time and money: When you locate people who are a good fit for your needs and culture, your goals become more aligned, and you can set new targets and define your organization’s future course. It aids in the development of your road map to success. Additionally, it minimizes the time required to hire new employees. It does take time to find good people. According to studies, it might take up to 25 business days to hire a new employee, which is frequently the result of unclear recruitment objectives from the start. Alternatively, an effective recruitment strategy shortens the employment process and minimizes hiring expenditures. And costs are a significant factor in the running of every business. Poor recruitment processes can result in various challenges, ranging from failing to assess candidates’ competency to evaluating individuals to the more critical company goals.Alignment of Strategic Objectives: Recruitment marketing enables you to succeed in the long run. There is a significant strategic component; you are looking for candidates that can impact your organization “tenfold,” not just those who are instantly accessible. There is a greater emphasis on passive applicants, and success is contingent on carefully developing personas of the types of people who “fit” your organization. These applicants may be hired in the future, or they may not. In either case, they should be of sufficient quality to benefit your business from developing ties with them.Acceleration: With time to hire and time to start metrics playing a significant role in how hiring teams are assessed, it’s critical to act quickly. Once you’ve established recruitment marketing initiatives and begun building a pipeline of individuals who are a good fit for your organization, you should anticipate quicker processes across the board. For instance, your team will never have to conduct new searches from scratch because there will always be a pool of engaged people to contact about new opportunities.A More Positive Candidate Experience: The relationship between your organization and a candidate does not begin when they “click” apply; it starts when they contact your organization. Candidate experience is critical during this “pre-applicant” stage. This is the period when people evaluate your firm; this is the moment when they decide whether or not to apply. Recruitment marketing enables you to tailor the content and communication that candidates and employees get at this process. Each touchpoint can be tailored to the candidate’s “identity,” level of participation, and relationship with you. Recruitment marketing is a no-brainer for organizations concerned with the candidate experience.Strengthens Employer Branding: Individuals do not apply to corporations; they apply to brands. They’re seeking something in common with your business, some shared vision or mission. Thus, it’s unsurprising that 55% of talent leaders rank employer branding as their highest investment priority for 2017. The manner you present and market your brand is critical. To be successful, you must leverage the appropriate material on your careers page, nurturing efforts, and the proper messaging about your EVP. To achieve this on a large scale and in a quantifiable manner, you need recruitment marketing.

Elements of a Successful Recruiting Strategy

1. Stratification of the employee base.

How many people does your business require? Additionally referred to as “workforce planning,” this feature is inherent in most effective business strategies and thus easily translated into a recruitment strategy. A business’s personnel base plan should be revised annually to allow for corporate growth for long-term success. Once you understand how many people each department needs, you can prioritize roles and make more informed investments in employee development as your firm grows.

2. Recruiter stratification

Your recruiters’ staff should be diverse in terms of skill sets and knowledge, and they should have well-defined tasks within their department. Utilizing the appropriate recruiter for a specific role ensures that the best hire is made. For instance, hiring for a highly skilled position should be handled by one or two recruiters who possess deep industry expertise to understand what questions to ask and differentiate top talent from average applications. Junior recruiters may take entry-level roles with a high volume of applicants.

3. Verification of references.

This should be self-evident, but corporations frequently neglect it, resulting in significant time, money, and wasted energy. It’s a relatively minor adjustment, but it can be the difference between employing a talented, honest, and motivated employee and choosing a fraudulent or otherwise problematic candidate. While it’s natural to be enthused about a prospect with a brilliant CV and personal charm, checking their references is just as simple and may reveal some hidden truths about your “ideal” candidate.

4. Proactive sourcing

Your recruiting team should know where to seek the most acceptable candidates for every position, beginning within your organization. With expansion at the top of the corporate goal list, it’s frequently tempting to look outside for talent. Still, the most outstanding applicants for the position may already be on staff at your organization. It is pretty inexpensive and quick to begin searching for possible candidates within your existing employee base, and once employed, they require minimal onboarding to get started. Additionally, you should constantly be establishing a talent pool comprised of seasoned, warm contacts. After internal lists, this should be your second point of contact for outreach. However, recruiting teams frequently struggle to establish this pool using standard sourcing approaches rapidly.

How To Create a Recruitment Business Plan

It’s self-evident that developing a recruitment strategy is the most excellent method to rethink and improve your hiring practices—but many businesses neglect to do so. The following are six steps to a successful recruitment business strategy to assist you in the planning process.

Step 1: Analyze recruiting requirements and skill shortages.

The first stage in developing a recruiting business plan is determining your hiring goals and any skill gaps that your current workforce cannot fill. Begin by examining your company’s growth, considering critical elements such as staff attrition and planned promotions affecting your hiring needs. Determine which departments and roles will require additional support and why. Is a vital team member departing? Is a new project about to begin? By determining which talents your team will be lacking and which ones will be required to handle increased workloads in the future, you can take a proactive strategy that better matches hiring with personnel requirements.

Step 2: Establish a hiring strategy and recruitment calendar.

Following that, you can put your study into action by estimating how many workers each department will require and when they will be required. This enables you to plan and foresee future requirements with sufficient time to prepare. For instance, if you need to fill a post in Q3, you may need to begin preparations in Q2 to ensure the position is filled on time. With this information, you may create a year-long recruitment calendar. This should include the jobs you will be hiring each quarter, the total headcount for each department, and a hiring timetable outlining when each round of hiring will commence.

Step 3: Determine the tools necessary to create a scalable recruitment process.

You can determine the tools necessary to carry out your plan now that you’ve created a recruitment calendar and a hiring strategy. The most crucial components of your recruitment technology stack are an applicant tracking system, accounts on multiple online job boards, pre-employment evaluation and screening tools, and analytics or business intelligence software for data-driven decision-making. These tools will assist your team in organizing and streamlining the hiring process by automating time-consuming procedures and streamlining the candidate screening process. Additionally, you can optimize your talent pool by gathering data on your applicants’ profiles and comparing them to the profiles of your top performers. With our evaluation tool, you can quickly discover which applicants have similar ratings and gain insight into your whole recruitment funnel.

Step 4: Determine the qualifications required for each role.

With a firm grasp on the roles for which you’ll be recruiting, you can begin defining the qualifications for each job vacancy. To ensure that everyone is on the corresponding page and speed up the hiring process, you should meet with hiring managers and discuss this stage jointly. This will assist you in developing a complete understanding of each function and the requirements for efficiently filling it. For instance, if you’re recruiting for a contact center, you may wish to hire individuals with transferrable abilities if you need to transition personnel from chat agent to phone agent roles. To do this effectively and efficiently, you must go beyond current positions and consider your company culture and the general qualities that candidates should possess to be a good fit. Rather than recruiting solely qualified applicants for a specific job, you examine candidates’ abilities and attributes and give them jobs that suit their best skill set.

Step 5: Begin with an enticing job description.

Attracting the most qualified individuals begins with a compelling job description. However, many businesses take the wrong approach. They detail the job’s particular criteria and expectations but mention the company’s benefits, which may discourage job seekers from applying. Avoid this error and instead strive to design job descriptions that are interesting, inclusive, and appealing to job searchers. They should include information about your organization’s mission and beliefs, as well as job analysis. Do not be afraid to demonstrate some personality—remember, job descriptions serve as an opportunity to market the position to prospective candidates.

Step 6: Establish a procedure for applicant selection.

Following that, you should consider how you would approach the hard work of candidate selection. Define the overall process clearly by establishing the number of interview rounds and who will be responsible for interviewing and selecting candidates. You should avoid employing a one-size-fits-all selection procedure when selecting individuals. Instead of that, you should seek out unique ways to tailor the experience to each individual. This can be accomplished by anticipating and answering any questions, needs, or concerns throughout the interview and selection process. Assessments come in various forms, from testing abilities and personality to determining cognitive capacity and cultural compatibility. Using a customizable pre-hire assessment tool, you may develop gamified online exams to aid candidate selection and engagement.

FAQs

How are recruiters compensated?

Most agency recruiters earn a base salary and are compensated on a commission basis for putting prospects with the companies for whom they recruit. When an agency recruiter places a candidate on a contingency basis for direct employment, the recruiter is compensated on a percentage depending on the job seeker’s first-year compensation.

Are sales more difficult than recruiting?

Recruiting is a type of sales and one of the most demanding. There are, however, numerous distinctions between recruitment and pure sales. Someone who has spent their entire career selling automobiles cannot suddenly find success as a recruiter.

Which recruitment method is the most effective?

One of the most dominant recruiting strategies is to treat candidates similarly to how you treat your clients. Be considerate of their time. Always arrive on time, whether it’s a phone or email conversation, video conference, or in-person meeting. If you anticipate being late, notify the candidate as soon as feasible.

A recruitment business strategy should serve as the guiding light for all of your recruitment operations. It may take time and work to develop one; but, do not believe that once completed, it is definitive. You should change and optimize your plan in response to the business’s changing needs throughout time. For instance, what if your business grows quicker than anticipated and you find yourself needing to hire more personnel than anticipated? Alternatively, what if you decide to deploy a whole new technology? Please continue to work on your recruitment business plan, tracking essential metrics and iteratively improving them to reach the best results possible.