The 7 Key Steps for your Recruitment Strategy

Drake Editorial Team

No matter how strong an organisation’s strategic plan and strategy, or the state of the economy, without an effective recruitment process, their business will struggle. Simultaneously running a business while recruiting quality candidates requires a carefully thought-out hiring plan. Without a strategy, your hiring process will take longer with more chances of recruiting the wrong people and losing money. During challenging times, your recruitment plan, a prearranged strategy for hiring employees, becomes even more important to effectively ride the waves amidst uncertainty and chaos.

There is no better time than right now to revisit your recruitment planning process to make your hiring easier, faster, and more effective. Here are the seven key steps for your recruitment strategy:

1. Humanise your brand with compelling stories

Attracting the right people to your organisation doesn’t happen by chance.

To attract and hire quality employees, showcase your company as a great place to work by telling stories. These can be in the form of video content, testimonials, social media, promotional and marketing materials. When a company’s corporate culture thrives with happy, engaged staff, and the word gets out, you will attract others who want to get on board.

2. Identify who you need, why, and when

Productive and engaged employees are essential in good and tough economic times. As you plan your organisation’s future, factor in your staffing needs. Planning ahead is your pathway to success. 

Start by analysing your company’s short and long-term goals. Then, determine what specific people skills it will take to achieve them. What are the critical roles? How many hires do you need to make? What scenarios could affect the numbers? 
Also determine where flexible staff can be brought in on a temporary basis to keep overhead costs down.

Detail job specifications. Outline the education, training and experience required as well as other relatable skills. Job specs are primary tools in the selection process. They work in tandem with detailed job descriptions when positions are posted, and interviews take place.

3. Pinpoint the personality traits of your high performers

Look at the high achievers you have on board. When you need to fill similar roles, first identify the skills and knowledge they possess and their personality behaviours — their top performer traits. 

Top performer profiling will help you more accurately target the right candidates. Those possessing similar abilities and personality behaviours as your current top performers are more likely to succeed in the position.

4. Narrow the pool of applicants 

Pre-screening applicants is a must to eliminate candidates from the hiring pool in order to find the very best.  Once all resumes have been reviewed and matched against the job specs, pre-screening proceeds to telephone interviews for those candidates you are highly interested in.

Asking them a series of pre-screening questions will enable you to find out more information on their abilities, knowledge, and career goals. 

In addition to candidates’ hard skills such as specific technical knowledge and training, also focus in on their equally important soft skills such as their interpersonal skills, ability to communicate and problem solve. It’s important to screen out candidates who may have the skills you need but who may not be a good fit overall.

5. Don’t simply take a candidate’s word for it 

When you are interviewing your top candidates, you need to ask questions that are more pointed, probing, and specific. Behavioural-based interviewing explores how a person has acted in a specific job-related situation.

For example, ask them for a goal they reached and how they achieved it; where they had to use logic to solve a problem; how they implemented a decision that was unpopular. How they behaved in certain situations in the past will help predict future performance.

When circumstances prevent actual in person interviews, ensure you utilise other technical methods for ‘face-to-face’ meetings. You need to be able to assess body language and other vital non-verbal cues. 

6. Add science to your selection process 

Scientifically based, on-line personality assessments will help you get to know your candidates better and faster. They highlight key traits, communication styles, and motivational aspects to take the guesswork out of predicting performance and behavioural compatibility with the job.

Your recruitment process should look at not only a candidate’s merits and qualifications, but also at your desired core competencies such as flexibility, ability to work in teams, to effectively communicate and lead. Using science-based data to match positions to personalities will help you hire the right person with the right fit for the job and the company culture.

7. Ensure you are making the right decision 

In the recruitment process, people may misrepresent their background and credentials. Reference and background checks are essential to enable candidate facts and claims to be explored further. 

You need to know if what an applicant says about his or her background is true. Counterfeit candidates will say what is necessary to secure the job offer. 

Verifying reputation and trustworthiness is a must. Do they have a past experience that may cause problems later on, for example? Failure to perform due diligence can result in bad hires that can cause your company grief and financial loss. 

Your recruitment strategy means more than hiring the right person for the job. Bad hires have far reaching consequences. Filling positions too quickly and cutting corners during the recruitment process can result in decreased productivity, a damaged corporate reputation, and money wasted on training and staff turnover.

Effective recruiting can be complex and time consuming. You need to get it right, from the very start. Drake can assist you with every step, and at any stage, in the recruitment process. Simply call our office nearest to you, and let’s get started.