If you’re trying to hire new talent without a recruitment plan, things are probably looking pretty hectic for you right now. It’s easy to get lost and disorganized somewhere between intaking new job briefs, sourcing talent, conducting interviews, and coordinating offers for multiple vacancies.
The best way to ditch the stress in the recruitment process is to put some time aside to evaluate and improve your recruitment plan. When we’re multitasking under pressure, we tend to follow the path of least resistance, using what’s always worked best. But often what worked well yesterday isn’t necessarily what’s going to work well tomorrow. That shift can even occur from one job requisition to the next.
While a recruitment plan is no magic wand, it will bring order to the chaos that can come from recruiting for several positions simultaneously. Let’s explore the process of creating a recruitment plan, and why it’s necessary.
What is a recruitment plan?
A recruitment plan is a strategic blueprint that outlines the entire hiring process—from identifying staffing needs to onboarding new employees.
These plans help companies streamline their recruitment efforts by setting clear timelines, defining roles and responsibilities, establishing a budget, and using the right tools and methods for sourcing, interviewing, and selecting candidates.
Why have a recruitment plan?
Having recruitment plans in place for each requisition—and as an overarching strategy that your company follows—helps hiring teams efficiently manage their hiring processes and align talent acquisition to wider business goals.
Here are some specific reasons why every company should have a well-structured recruitment plan:
- Improves hiring efficiency. A recruitment plan streamlines the hiring process by setting clear timelines and procedures, reducing time-to-fill and ensuring a smoother candidate journey.
- Enhances candidate quality. By defining specific job requirements and using targeted sourcing strategies, recruitment plans help attract candidates who are a better fit for the role and company culture.
- Reduces hiring costs. A structured and repeatable hiring plan minimizes unnecessary spending on ineffective recruitment methods and helps avoid costly hiring mistakes.
- Aligns hiring with business goals. A recruitment plan ensures that hiring efforts are strategically aligned with company objectives, helping to meet current and future staffing needs.
- Boosts collaboration among hiring teams. Recruitment plans clarify roles and responsibilities, enhancing communication and collaboration among HR, hiring managers, and other stakeholders.
- Improves employer branding. A well-organized recruitment process reflects positively on the company, enhancing its reputation as an employer of choice.
- Mitigates risks of bad hires, By standardizing the evaluation and selection process, recruitment plans reduce the chances of making poor hiring decisions.
Of course, a recruitment plan is only beneficial if it’s a good one. Working through the appropriate steps to evaluate your needs, set a hiring strategy, and execute the plan in a repeatable manner is key to reaping the benefits outlined above. Let’s talk about how to do that.
Factors that impact your recruiting plan
Before creating a recruiting plan, it’s important to understand the factors and variables that need to be accounted for before setting your hiring direction. These aren’t just recruiting considerations, either. They include everything from external market conditions to internal resources and recruitment team capabilities.
Here are some key factors that will impact your recruiting plan.
- Company growth and expansion goals, including short- and long term growth projections, new strategic projects, or new market entry that will require additional staffing and skill sets.
- Economic conditions and job market trends, such as talent shortages, steep competition for in-demand skill sets, and compensation expectations that will alter how you appeal to specific types of candidates.
- Turnover and retention rates, which may necessitate targeted or aggressive recruiting efforts to replace lost institutional knowledge.
- Available recruitment budget, which will impact the scope and tactics used to source new candidates.
- Your company and employer brand, which can impact how aggressively you need to source inbound candidates versus how much you can rely on your brand reputation to attract top-tier talent.
- Internal mobility, referrals, and promotions, which may allow you to alter or scale down your external recruitment efforts in favor of an internal candidate.
- Technological advancements, such as the adoption of new recruitment technologies on your team that can streamline the process, improve hiring efficiency, and allow for more aggressive or intricate plans with existing or less resources.
This list isn’t comprehensive, of course. There are many different factors—unique to your company, market, and areas of operation—that will impact how you construct your recruitment plan. The point is that no recruitment plan should be created in a vacuum. A variety of factors, opportunities, and constraints should be considered to ensure you have a well-informed and well-balanced recruitment plan.
How to create a recruitment plan
Creating a recruitment plan involves a series of strategic steps that help you align your efforts with your company’s goals. This includes accounting for strategic staffing needs and the tactics and processes you’ll use to fill those gaps.
Here’s a general framework to follow when creating your recruitment plan.
1. Assemble a cross-functional recruitment team
As mentioned earlier, planning your recruitment strategy in a vacuum is never a good idea. While recruiters are, by definition, experts in hiring new talent, they don’t necessarily have deep knowledge of the company’s strategic needs, the state of specific industries and professions, or what top-tier candidates with specific skill sets are looking for in a new employer.
To gain these insights, it’s helpful to assemble a cross-functional recruitment team, with representatives from across the organization. This will help provide the context outlined above, ensuring that the rest of your recruitment plan forms from a place of deep understanding.
People to include on this recruitment team include:
- HR and recruitment team members, who understand recruitment strategy
- Hiring managers, who understand their niche industries and areas of expertise
- Department heads, who have knowledge of the company’s wider strategic priorities
- Finance teams, who can help set realistic budgets and resource allocations for the plan
- Marketing and brand teams, who can provide direction on employer branding
- Current employees, who can provide input and feedback on the current hiring process and where it can be improved
Assemble this team, either as a group, or individually with 1:1 conversations to gather their insights and perspectives. This will ensure you start from a strong, informed position when planning the rest of your recruitment plan.
2. Identify skills gaps and hiring needs
After context gathering, the next step in the recruitment plan process is identifying your immediate and long-term skills needs. That includes taking stock of current and imminent job requisitions and performing a skills gap analysis to understand future needs.
To do so, assess the growth of your company and consider key factors such as employee turnover, anticipated promotions, and potential new projects that could impact your hiring needs.
This analysis will help you determine which departments or roles need strengthening and why—whether it’s replacing a departing team member, scaling up for a new project, or addressing gaps in skills that are crucial for your company’s future. By identifying these needs early, you can proactively align your hiring with your staffing requirements, ensuring your team is prepared to handle future workloads.
3. Develop a recruitment calendar
Once you have identified your hiring needs, it’s time to turn your analysis into action by converting your list of short and long-term needs into a concrete recruitment calendar.
This calendar should outline the number of hires needed, the departments involved, and the anticipated timelines for each role. By mapping out when each position needs to be filled, you can better prepare for future needs and start recruitment efforts well in advance to avoid last-minute scrambles.
Create a visual recruitment calendar that includes quarterly hiring goals, total headcount requirements for each department, and a timeline for when each stage of the hiring process will occur. This structured approach will keep you on track and ensure that recruitment efforts are consistently aligned with business demands.
4. Define job requirements and create compelling job descriptions
Once you know which roles you’ll be hiring for, clearly define the requirements for each position.
Meet with hiring managers to discuss the skills, characteristics, and qualifications needed to fill each role effectively. This step ensures that everyone is aligned and reduces time-to-hire by clarifying expectations upfront.
Write job descriptions that highlight your company’s mission, culture, and the unique aspects of the role. Avoid using generic or outdated descriptions that fail to capture what makes your company and the position attractive to potential candidates. Remember, a compelling job description is an opportunity to sell the role to top talent.
5. Establish a recruitment budget
Setting a recruitment budget is essential for managing costs and ensuring a sustainable hiring process. You’ll likely have an idea of a macro budget after your early conversations with finance and senior leadership, but this is where you’ll start to allocate specific budgets to each new job requisition on your recruitment calendar.
Estimate your recruitment expenses for each new requisition based on historical data, such as cost-per-hire, and consider various factors like job advertising, recruiting technology, employer branding, in-house salaries, background checks, and travel expenses for interviews.
Working through this process ensures you can allocate resources efficiently, prioritize your spending, and effectively measure ROI. Regularly review your budget and adjust it based on the effectiveness of your sourcing channels and any changes in the hiring landscape.
6. Create a structured candidate selection process
A well-defined candidate selection process is key to making informed hiring decisions. Outline the steps of the selection process, including the number of interview rounds, the use of pre-employment assessments, and who will be involved in interviewing and selecting candidates.
Avoid a one-size-fits-all approach. Instead, work with hiring managers to create tailored assessment processes for each role to ensure proper screening based on the required skills and competencies for each position.
Incorporate assessments such as personality tests, cognitive evaluations, and skills tests to gain deeper insights into each candidate’s suitability for the role. Use a collaborative hiring approach during this phase and encourage members of your hiring team to share feedback about candidates. This will help to create a more well-rounded and objective picture of each candidate before selection.
7. Conduct background and reference checks
After identifying your preferred candidate, you may consider conducting background checks to verify their experience and what they told you on their resume and during interviews.
Reference checks provide additional insights into a candidate’s past performance and help confirm whether they align with your company’s values and culture. Ask open-ended questions about their previous roles, accomplishments, and any challenges they faced to gain a comprehensive understanding of their capabilities.
While background checks are typically optional, some roles and industries may require this step.
For example, positions with access to sensitive information or company finances may require police background checks and other forms of heightened scrutiny to ensure that the chosen candidate has a positive track record. Some industries may also require security clearances that will require candidates to clear background checks to clear the recruitment process.
In all cases, it’s important to plan for background check requirements early in the process so that you don’t delay the hiring decision and risk losing out on a highly qualified candidate.
8. Make the job offer and manage the acceptance process
Once you’ve selected the ideal candidate, extend a job offer promptly to avoid losing them to competitors.
Determine in advance who will make the offer and handle any negotiations to ensure a smooth candidate experience. Communicate clearly about salary, benefits, and other terms to align expectations and prevent misunderstandings.
After the candidate accepts, follow up with an official offer letter that outlines the agreement in writing, and maintain engagement with them through pre-boarding activities.
9. Plan for onboarding and integration
A successful recruitment plan doesn’t end with the job offer. Rather, it extends into employee onboarding to ensure a seamless transition from candidate to employee.
With the hiring manager, define the steps for pre-boarding and onboarding, including training schedules, orientation sessions, and initial project assignments. Assign responsibilities to team members to ensure that the onboarding process is well-coordinated and supportive.
Effective onboarding helps new hires feel welcomed, engaged, and prepared to contribute, reducing the likelihood of early turnover.
10. Continuously review and optimize your recruitment plan
Recruitment is an evolving process, and your plan should be continuously refined based on qualitative feedback from candidates and quantitative signals from your recruitment analytics and business intelligence tools.
Use data to track key metrics like time-to-hire, quality of hire, and early turnover rates. Analyze those metrics to help you identify potential areas of improvement. Solicit feedback from new hires to understand what worked well and where there’s room for improvement. Regularly revisit your recruitment strategy, tools, and processes to ensure that your plan remains competitive and aligned with your company’s goals.
Successful hiring starts with a strong recruitment plan
When a new job requisition lands in your inbox, it’s tempting to jump into action immediately. But doing so without creating a well-informed recruitment plan can lead to mistakes, missed opportunities, and mis-alignment between company goals and hiring tactics.
Recruitment planning is an ongoing priority for all hiring teams—big and small. They’re used to create both the high-level strategic recruiting processes used for all hiring projects within an HR departments, and the strategies used to fill individual job requisitions.
Recruitment plans should be clear and structured, but flexible to adapt to specific hiring needs and market factors. They should incorporate cross-departmental feedback, but follow tried and test recruitment practices, honed through trial and error by the HR team. Recruitment plans never stop evolving and improving based on objective and subjective input from candidates, new hires, and cross-departmental teams.
If you don’t have one already, now is the time to start building your own recruitment plan.
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