Strategic Recruiting Services

What Are Strategic Recruiting Services?

The average U.S. employer spends $4,000 and 24 days to hire a new employee, according to a recent Glassdoor study. Even without this statistic, we think most employers would agree that recruiting new talent is challenging and time-consuming. Fortunately, it doesn’t have to be this way, with services like outsourced HR and recruitment agencies offering plenty of solutions. 

Before anyone can make strategic recruiting decisions, they must understand the procedure of recruitment. So, what are the steps in strategic recruiting, and how can businesses find the best talent? Our HR team at Milestone has put together this guide on the process and strategies of successful recruitment to assist with this challenging undertaking. 

​​What Is Recruitment?

In general, recruitment is the act of finding new people to join an organization or support a cause. You may have heard of recruitment officers working to get new soldiers to join the military, or perhaps colleges looking to recruit new sports stars for college athletics. In the business world specifically, recruitment refers to the responsibility of finding new employees and everything that goes into the hiring process. 

Many smaller businesses start off recruiting employees on their own. As these businesses grow, however, they generally find that outsourcing the recruiting process can be a profitable investment due to the amount of work required. There’s much more to hiring than posting a job ad, doing a few interviews, and getting a warm body in a vacant seat. 

In order to determine the best strategy for your business’s recruiting process, it’s important to understand all the parts of recruiting. So, what are the stages of recruitment? Let’s take a look. 

What are the 7 Steps in the Recruitment Process?

The steps of recruitment will vary from business to business depending on many factors. However, whether you are looking for “​​recruiting services near me” or you are planning to do the recruiting yourself, our HR support team at Milestone has found these seven steps to be common cornerstones of the recruitment process. 

1. Prepare

Preparation is usually good for any business process, but especially recruitment. Before posting a job ad or hiring a third-party for recruitment purposes, there are a number of factors a company must consider and ask themselves before moving forward with hiring, such as:

• Who will be involved in the hiring process? Trusting this responsibility to only one person is not the best route to go, as another person or two may catch things one person might miss on their own. Larger companies should at the very least involve someone from HR, the direct manager of the new employee, and maybe one other senior employee. 
• How will hiring a new employee help the business? Any business should be well aware of the challenges they face. Rather than narrowing in on what exactly this new employee will do, consider how their addition to the team will help solve any big-picture issues. This will generate clear expectations across the team as to the specific experiences you hope to find and utilize in the best candidate.  
• What is the timeline for hiring? A business that loses an employee unexpectedly will have a different timeline to hire than one looking to add new employees. Additionally, if there are major events or impending goals needing to be met, that might call for a tighter hiring schedule. Make sure that everyone involved in the process has a clear timeline, from posting the job ad all the way through onboarding. 
• What is the current job market like? Is there a very small pool of candidates for the position you are looking to fill, or are there too many candidates for the job openings out there? What are your competitors offering for similar positions? Researching and knowing the answers to these questions will help you define the parameters of your search and attract quality candidates. 

2. Write a Job Description

A job description is the first impression a potential employee will have of your company. If you’re looking to bring talented people to your business, an attractive and clear job description is key. When our Milestone team is working with our business partners to draft effective job descriptions, we always keep in mind the following:

• Salary and Benefits – Consider this LinkedIn job description heat map study. Not surprisingly, salary range and benefits were the most highlighted portions of the entire description. Additionally, compensation ranked as the number one most important part of a job description among those looking for work. However, depending on the position, it may be prudent to leave out the salary range, as sometimes candidates will choose a job that pays less for the right opportunities. 
• Conciseness and Clarity – Another study found that shorter job posts (under 300 words) had candidates applying 8.4% more than average, while long posts (600 words or more) only did 1% better than average. This doesn’t necessarily mean that you must keep a job description under 300 words, but it does show that people appreciate a job description that gets right to the point. 
• Responsibilities – Rather than simply outlining the skills you are looking for in a candidate, it is helpful to provide a summary of what the expected duties of the position will be. Perhaps your company is going through a merger and looking to hire someone for a managerial position to assist with the transition and expected growth. Mentioning this in the job description can attract someone with a background in mergers, and it also helps you or your recruiter narrow down candidates to people with similar experience. 
• Tone – As we said, the job description is your first impression, so it’s important to use a tone that matches your company’s culture. In that same heat map study, LinkedIn created three mock job descriptions for a fake job: one generic, one formal (including more jargon), and one casual (conversational with jokes). The casual version performed significantly worse than the generic or formal tones. Again, though, this doesn’t mean you must stay away from casual tone completely in a job description. For more creative positions, it might attract the right candidates. Ultimately, the tone you choose should accurately reflect your business’s culture and the personality of the candidate you hope to hire. 

3. Find and Attract Talent

Once your team is prepared for hiring with a job description in hand, you can begin the recruitment and selection process. Most businesses will have two main sources of recruitment to consider: internal and external.

Internal recruitment is especially important for employee retention. If employees feel their employer provides ample opportunity for career advancement, they will more likely want to stick with that company. For internal recruitment, many business adopt these strategies: 

• Succession planning, which involves identifying the critical roles within the business and planning ahead for filling those roles through internal promotion
• Posting job ads on internal forums
• Upper management nominating candidates for specific roles as they arise

For attracting external candidates, recruiters have many options for reaching this talent pool, such as:

• Posting the job ad online (on the business’s website, Indeed, Glassdoor, Monster, etc.)
• Hosting an open hiring day for larger organizations
• Networking at professional events
• Running a booth at a job fair
• Considering employee referrals
• Recruiting on college campuses 
• Advertising the position on social media

4. Choose Candidates for Interviews

Now that your business has run the job ad for a set period of time, you are faced with choosing candidates that are qualified enough for the interview. This part of the process involves reviewing hundreds or even thousands of resumes and cover letters. Many recruiting services will utilize an applicant tracking system (ATS) to filter candidates down to the most qualified. Additionally, some businesses find that it is useful to implement a scoring system to determine which candidates are interview-worthy. 

5. Interview and Assess 

This part of the process tends to be longer the larger the business is and the higher up the position is. For example, hiring a new CFO will probably necessitate multiple rounds of interviews and assessments versus hiring an entry-level employee, since there is more at stake with the higher-level position. We find that this step generally includes:

• Preparing job interview questions
• Scheduling the initial job interviews and any additional rounds of interviews
• Interviewing the candidates
• Conducting any necessary background or security checks
• Contacting the candidates’ references
• Assessing the candidates through additional means, such as mock demonstrations or further competency testing
• Discussing candidates with the whole hiring team

6. Make a Job Offer

After rigorous interviewing and testing, your team has finally landed on the perfect candidate. While this may feel like the ending triumph to an arduous process, it’s not quite so until the candidate has accepted and signed a job offer. If you delay in this part of the process, that perfect candidate may be snatched up by a competitor, so it’s important to act quickly. 

It’s best to first make the offer via phone. This will confirm whether or not the candidate is still interested in the position, if they have any rivaling offers, and if they are agreeable to the offered salary. If further negotiations are needed, this call is the prime opportunity for these negotiations to happen. 

After confirming over the phone that the candidate is ready to move forward, follow up with a formal offer letter. This should clearly outline the position for the candidate, including details like:

• Salary
• Benefits
• Job description
• Who the candidate reports to
• Starting date
• How to accept the offer

Once they accept the offer, you and your team can certainly celebrate. However, there is still one vital step remaining. 

7. Onboarding

Every business wants its recruits to be as productive as possible as quickly as possible, but of course, there is a learning curve for every new hire. Navigating this learning curve effectively is the final step of recruitment. Like the other steps of this process, this will look different depending on the size and type of company, but onboarding will generally include:

• Orientation
• Job-specific training
• Introductions to other team members
• Partnering with more experienced employees during training period
• Completing HR paperwork

Recruiting new employees is not a short and sweet process, which is why many employers choose to hire staffing and recruiting services, such as a recruitment agency. 

What Do Recruitment Agencies Do?

Companies that offer hiring as a service can assist with some or all of the steps we mentioned above to find the perfect candidate for any role. Let’s look at a couple of commonly asked questions about recruitment agencies. 

How Do Recruitment Agencies Find Candidates?

Recruiters can use the traditional means of finding candidates, such as posting the job ad online or recruiting in various physical locations. However, one benefit to using a recruitment agency is that they are hiring experts. They have gone through every step of the recruitment process significantly more times than the average business owner, as that is all they do. This means they have their own special databases and networks to draw from when sourcing potential candidates for any open positions. They may also have candidate resumes from other job postings that would be better suited for the opening you have instead of the one they applied for. 

How Do Recruitment Agencies Make Money?

Most recruitment agencies will require an agreement between your business and the agency itself, usually in the form of a contingency fee structure or a retainer fee. 

• The contingency route means the recruiter does not receive payment until they have found an employee for your business and that employee is officially hired. If the recruiter fails to find an appropriate candidate, they don’t get paid. 
• The retainer route involves upfront payment. This type of recruiter-employer relationship usually involves more commitment by the recruiter, as they have been retained to provide a service: finding you the best candidate to fill a role. 

Some agreements may involve a mix of contingency and retainer, such as paying the recruitment agency a small fee upfront to retain them with the remainder of the fee contingent on their success. 

Now we have reviewed the steps of recruitment and how recruitment agencies work. If you’re feeling overwhelmed, we get it, and we want to help.

Milestone: Meeting and Exceeding All Your Recruitment Expectations

Hiring employees isn’t easy. It’s a multi-step process with many opportunities for lost time and money. Being able to offer a solution for these losses is one of the many reasons we created Milestone—to meet these HR needs. Our HR team has been involved in the hiring process for thousands of employees. We understand how to view recruiting strategically, and as a critical aspect to getting your business the best talent available. 

Whether you’re building a nationwide, remote workforce or only looking to hire a few new employees, you want someone who can tackle a recruiting function that accomplishes your business goals. From preparation to onboarding and beyond, our outsourced HR services can handle the internal HR processes that lead to successful recruitment program.
Think you’re ready to hand off the time-consuming recruiting process, or eager to learn more? Contact us today to see what unique HR solutions we can design for your business.