What Is Strategic Recruiting

Recruiting is a necessary part of almost every organization from local bowling teams to Fortune 500 companies. For small business owners, recruiting and staffing often feels like a necessary evil. It consumes time and money, sometimes with little to show for it. Moreover, the process is often managed by the c-suite because small businesses do not need or cannot afford a full-time recruitment manager. In the end, the business struggles to find the right talent, or the talent comes at too high of a cost. This recurring problem leaves small business owners frustrated and can hamper growth. So what is strategic recruiting and how can it benefit small businesses?

What Is Strategic Recruiting?

Strategic recruiting for small business is a holistic approach to acquiring talent and building a strong talent pipeline. The main aim of a strategic recruiting process is to select qualified candidates tailored for your company by aligning your hiring strategy with overall business goals. A successful recruitment strategy requires collaboration between hiring managers, consistent employer branding, and the use of job boards, employee referral programs, and other tools to streamline the recruiting efforts. Strategic recruitment marries the positional needs of your company with brand marketing and a clearly defined strategic recruitment plan. This process ensures the company can both attract and select the right people, even in a competitive job market with multiple job openings. All in all, strategic recruiting is effective recruiting that strengthens the recruitment process at every stage.

What is the importance of strategic recruiting? 

Strategic recruiting is the most important for small business owners. Strategic recruiting is a process that combines a sound recruiting process with a brand allowing you to attract the right people. In a small business, new talent has a great impact on culture and  business function. It is essential your recruiting strategy pushes  your business forward. 

3 Stages of the Strategic Recruitment Process

1. Attraction- Attraction is driving interest and traffic to a job posting. The attraction stage begins with understanding your company and the role it needs to be filled. To take a strategic approach to recruit, time should be spent detailing the desired skills, salary, competencies, and cultural fit in your organization. Then, companies should simplify their job descriptions with keywords. This makes posting more easily searchable. Finally, it is also important to market your brand. Recruiting is employer marketing. 
2. Engagement– Engagement is connecting with the talent once they have found your website or job posting. Engagement includes watching videos, reading the website, reacting to social media posts, and more. Videos are a newer wave of engaging with potential candidates. They can be used in job postings or external media to give a candidate an inside glimpse of what it’s like working for your company.
3. Conversion- Conversion incorporates the whole process from application to interviews to selection and beyond. Small businesses need to strategically build their recruitment process so that conversion is repeatable and scalable. Strategic recruiting brings a critical eye to the conversion process so that small businesses are set up to scale. This will allow their recruitment practices to grow with the business.

The strategic recruiting framework effects each stage of the recruitment process.. Your recruiting process should be intentional. Repeatable. Scalable. Strategic recruitment that embodies these values will attract the right talent into the company help the business grow. 

What Are The 10 Steps Of An Effective Strategic Recruitment Plan?

These 10 steps are ways to break down the 3 stages of recruiting. These steps can be your company’s outline for how to write a recruitment strategy.

Clarify the Role With Stakeholders

Discuss the needs of this role with all relevant stakeholders. This discussion should develop necessary skills, core competencies, experience, cultural fit, and salary. Balance both realistic and idealistic needs to attract the right talent pool. 

Develop Your Employer Brand

Effective recruiting means effective brand marketing. Establish how you want to communicate your culture, people, values, and work. Then, decide how this person would fit into the company brand. Providing this clarity helps potential recruits envision themselves in the company.  

Clear Posting with Keywords

For talent to find your job posting, they need to be able to search for it. In the job description, concise posts with industry-relevant keywords attract talent. 

Establish Consistency

The brand, job posting, people, and external media need to represent a consistent message. The brand shouldn’t promote a tech-forward workplace while the website is not intuitive. Take a holistic approach to evaluate your company’s brand and ensure consistency. When potential candidates do their research, they are confirming that your values are more than just words on the about page.

Produce Engaging Content

Surveys, employee reviews, and videos are essential to the engagement stage of recruiting. Candidates are looking to get an understanding of what it is like to work for you, and engaging content can be a valuable part of this process. The about us page on the website is a good start, but we recommend engaging content in addition to the standard text. 

Offer to Connect

Potential candidates should be able to connect with someone in the business to learn more about the job and company. This connection can be as informal as a chatbot or as personalized as giving the hiring manager’s contact information. This practice helps your company stand out by being personalized and attracting a better-fitting talent pool.

Create Scalable and Standard Decision-Making Processes

As your business grows, so will the needs of your recruiting function. Items such as scorecards, phone screenings, and transparent salary ranges will help make the process repeatable. Developing this process with stakeholders so they understand the goals of a strategic recruiting strategy leads to more effective recruitment. 

Communicate Through All Stages of an Application

According to this study, only 1% of Fortune 500 businesses communicate application status after the initial email confirming submission. Small businesses can strategically recruit by showing personalization and value to their applicants. Communication can set your recruiting process apart from the rest. 

Select Your Candidate

After doing steps 1-8, step 9 should be easier to decide based on the process and brand work you did ahead of time. Many companies skip the initial steps of recruiting and screening candidates that aren’t great fits or paying a recruiting firm to do the work of attracting candidates and explaining company values to them. 

Build a Development Plan

Perfect fits are rare. Most candidates will not have every skill or the perfect experience. However, building a development plan is an effective way to bridge the gap. Development plans are an effective strategy to turn a good candidate into a great hire and start as soon as the decision is made to hire a candidate. 

Making Strategic Recruitment Decisions

The first recruiting decision a small business needs to make is who will be leading the recruiting function. Small businesses can handle it internally, either through employees or a recruiting manager. The other option is to outsource it to an agency or 3rd party HR company. Recruiting agencies can help attract candidates to apply and typically have a database to pull potential candidates from. Recruiting agencies charge a percentage of the base salary or can operate off of retainer. Outsourced HR companies typically won’t attract candidates for you, but can help to build the strategic recruiting process outlined above. Outsource HR usually charges an hourly rate or a consulting project fee. Outsourcing is a popular choice as it allows small businesses can access expertise without paying full-time salaries and benefits. 

In the attraction phase, companies must make decisions about their needs, where to post job postings and budget. In the conversion phase, companies need to make sure their brand is consistent across the board. Whether your company brand is about fun and collaboration or innovative and hardworking, these qualities should be reflected in anything externally facing. Building a values-first corporate brand in recruiting helps you attract talent that in turn represents your brand. Finally, small businesses need to be process driven about who and how to interview and hire. It is important to note that no hire is perfect. We recommend building a development plan post-interview to fill in the gaps between candidate and company needs. 

Do You Need Help With Strategic Recruiting?

Contact our team at Milestone today for an example of how an outsourced HR company can build a strategic recruiting plan. We take the time to understand your business, stakeholder needs, and position requirements. We then build a strategic recruiting process to attract and retain the right talent for your business. Milestone is a small business built for small businesses.