How to Create the Perfect Recruitment Plan
A recruitment plan outlines a recruiter’s strategy for finding, screening, and hiring new employees. Read further to know about the steps in developing a recruitment plan.
Whether you work for a small startup or a big organization with thousands of employees, a recruiter will need to know how the team is going to grow over time. In other words, who the recruiter or HR is going to hire and when. That’s why it is better to develop a recruitment plan to help streamline your hiring processes. A strategic recruitment plan is not only important for filling job vacancies, but also because poor recruitment decisions can cost the company a lot. By taking a proactive approach and building out a plan in advance, one can save time and money.
What is a Recruitment Plan?
In short, a recruitment plan refers to a pre-arranged strategy for hiring employees. It acts as a timeline for companies to find qualified applicants without causing downtime or delay for the company. A recruitment plan identifies the goals for every job position.
What is the benefit of a Recruitment Plan?
Recruitment plans make the hiring process go smoothly and act as a qualifying guideline for applicants. This helps employers to ensure that they are hiring individuals with the right qualifications and skills needed to do the job.
The benefit is keeping the company on its course and running. With a good recruitment plan, many companies are able to find qualified employees in an orderly manner and prevent lapses in employment which might add cost to the company.
Steps to create the perfect recruitment plan
If you are a recruiter and have a predetermined plan in place, you can be consistent in your recruitment efforts. To create a recruitment plan direct your resources to a series of the following strategies that will help you find the kind of people you want to hire.
1. Figuring out what position needs to be filled
You can’t hire new employees unless you know exactly what role you need them for. If you’ve noticed a gap in your company’s workforce that has been created by someone else’s departure, or by the growth and evolution of your organization, that gap needs to be filled by someone who is qualified and is able to meet the demands of that particular role.
Anytime you begin the recruitment process, you should start by identifying what the company is looking for.
2. Deciding how the vacancies will be filled
Knowing what positions are vacant is only the start of the plan. How are you going to meet the needs of the company? Will you hire multiple people? Are you going to look for a part-time or full-time employee? Will there be any trial period? Will you hire over the course of the next week or the next month? All of these are important questions that need to be answered when you are drawing up a recruitment plan.
3. Create a recruitment calendar
You can build an entire recruitment calendar for the year. This could include the positions you’ll need to hire per quarter, total headcount for each department, and a hiring timeline for when each round of hiring will begin. An example you can see below
4. Identify the tools and software that you will need
You need to identify the tools you’ll need to execute the recruitment plan. Some of the most critical solutions for your recruitment tools are an applicant tracking system (ATS) that can help with various online job boards, pre-employment assessment, and screening, etc.
These tools will help the team to organize and streamline the company’s hiring efforts, automating time-consuming tasks, and improving the candidate screening process. You should invest in the tools that are needed to get the job done, but also make sure that everyone involved has access to the tools and is trained to use them.
5. Deciding the type of candidates that should be targeted
What type of characteristics make up your target team? It might be education, work experience, geographic location, or some other attribute. Picking out several characteristics like this can help you to narrow down your search pool and have a better idea of where to look.
For example, seasoned professionals are likely to frequent LinkedIn and keep an up-to-date profile rather than those who aren’t professionals.
6. Build a Recruitment Budget
The recruitment budget is an overall estimate of costs that will be incurred during the hiring activities throughout the year. Whether it is direct expenditure on various channels such as recruitment marketing, job boards, and staffing agencies or other unplanned recruiting costs that pile up through the process, planning the recruitment budget requires a correct understanding of the hiring requirements and overall recruitment plan of the company.
7. Meeting and evaluating the candidates
This is the main step and also, the main reason why a recruitment plan is being implemented, to interview and hire candidates. A job interview is a must for any position, but job interviews can be conducted in a variety of ways.
Some companies prefer a series of interviews so that they can narrow down candidates. Others conduct only one interview but ask the candidates to take a short assessment that tests their skills or knowledge in a certain area.
8. Conduct background and reference checks
Once you’ve selected a candidate, a background check will be needed. This may not always be necessary, depending on company policies and the role you, as a recruiter, are hiring for. Determine whether background checks will be needed early on or later when the candidate is settled as an employee, as this will help to avoid potential process delays down the road.
9. Define what happens after the job is accepted
The best recruitment plans don’t stop with the offer letter or an appointment letter. As you are nearly at the end of developing the plan, define what will happen after the job is accepted.
Who will be in charge of the preboarding? How will the onboarding take place? By answering these simple questions in advance and having a plan in place, the recruiter can make seamless transitions of an applicant from a candidate to an employee.
10. Optimizing your recruitment plan
Lastly, you should leverage new hire feedback and analytics to direct your recruitment plan and optimize it accordingly. You can also make good use of your recruitment analytics.
Review main recruitment metrics like time to hire, quality of hire, early turnover rates, and cost per hire. Then find out the ways how you can improve your recruitment process based on those insights. The recruiting industry is always evolving, your recruitment plan should also develop over time.
To wrap it up
A recruitment plan can solve many of the problems that many recruiters currently face but it is complex to develop one. However, it plays a big role in avoiding many common problems and streamlining the recruitment process. It does make the common facets of the hiring process more uniform. You need to tweak the process for each position at every stage. A recruitment plan empowers recruiters to rethink the way they can hire and do so in an efficient manner.
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