HR Processes

How to Develop an Effective Recruitment Plan

 22nd March 2022  About 8 min read
How to Develop an Effective Recruitment Plan

In this day and age, relying on a recruitment agency is simply not enough for many companies and businesses. If you want to hire high-quality talent without relying on third-party agencies, it’s best to have a killer recruitment plan.

This article will discuss how you can create a recruitment plan that will give your in-house teams the ability to make consistent, top-notch hires.

Do you need a central pace to keep track of your recruitment strategy and goals? Download this free recruitment strategy template to align your team and management on what's most important.

 

7 Steps to Develop an Effective Recruitment Plan

In this section, we’ll give you tips on how to create an effective recruitment plan for your in-house team.

 

1. Determine Your Recruitment Goals

Setting comprehensive recruitment goals doesn’t just mean pointing to a vague ideal and saying, “there’s our goal.”

Many recruitment managers mistake simply reiterating their company mission and vision or giving a vague statement of what their recruitment goals are. Your goals should serve as guideposts – standards by which you can measure your success (or failure).

Developing an effective recruitment plan means that you have a functional direction: your goals must serve a purpose.

But how exactly do you determine the right recruitment goals? Here are a few tips.

  • Find the right metrics to measure. There are plenty of key HR metrics that you can track. You should sit down with your team and determine which ones apply to your goals.
  • Know your current numbers. Before you can start measuring your progress, you need to have a baseline. This might entail conducting a comprehensive survey or consulting records from your office to establish how well you’re doing now.
  • Set up a regular measuring system. With your chosen metrics and established baseline, you can now determine how any change in your policy might affect your progress towards your goal.

Having clear goals doesn’t just mean having nice-sounding words on paper: actual units of measurements and a straightforward method of assessing your progress are simply much more effective.

 

2. Create a Hiring Calendar

Now that you have relevant, measurable goals to aim for, you need to plan how to implement them. This is the role of a hiring calendar – it will act as your guide, bridging your goals and your execution.

Your hiring calendar should contain your plan of action and your recruitment schedule.

These two need to work together. Setting a schedule without a set plan of action will be inefficient and cause you issues later down the line. In the same vein, you also need an action plan to bring your ideas to life, or you won’t be going anywhere.

Your hiring calendar must combine these factors and integrate them into a concrete solution. Here’s how:

Creating an action plan

Your plan of action refers to the steps that you need to take to make your recruiting process happen. This means that you have to consider the most crucial factors underpinning any recruitment drive: needs and budget.

  • Needs. Simply put, your needs are the job vacancies you need to fill. These vacancies might result from a regularly occurring process, such as a resignation, your standard turnover rate, or an expansion. However, it could also result from a skills-gap analysis you conducted within your workforce.
  • Projected budget. Your budget is how much you believe you need to spend to hash out the logistics of your recruitment. Under an ideal scenario, how much would it take for you to get the kind of results you want?

Tie these factors together and form the rest of your action plan around them. Some examples include the following:

Creating a recruitment schedule

With your action plan firmly in place, you need to schedule it. Ensure that your schedule works best for whoever is involved with the recruitment process, whether they’re part of the pre-screening, screening, or interview process.

This ensures that recruitment teams can focus on what they need to do for that time.

LeadershipIQ’S study has found that many new hires turn out to be bad employees, simply because the hiring managers couldn’t make a proper assessment due to being too busy.

Thus, you need to ensure a schedule where decision-makers can focus on whatever they need to do to secure the best hire for your company.

While this doesn’t have to be set in stone, an approximate schedule will help you organise your team tasks better.  

 

3. Select the Right Recruitment Tools

Modern technology has allowed many different advancements in HR, the most practical of which revolve around creating a smarter way to automate processes during recruitment.

This is the role of recruitment tools.

Computer software can now do things that used to consume a lot of time and effort – and there’s plenty of them around. As long as you know what you need to achieve, you won’t have any problems selecting a good recruitment tool.

Here are a couple of technical must-haves for your in-house recruitment teams:

  • Applicant Tracking System. A dedicated ATS like SeeMeHired offers tools that streamline many of your recruitment processes.
  • Recruitment Marketing Platforms. This software works with an ATS to allow your in-house team to deploy extremely concentrated job advertisements to your ideal audience, i.e., those who will most likely apply. All without special training needed.
  • Robust Website. Specifically, your company website should have up-to-date content, strong branding and a solid careers page. 
  • Onboarding Software. These are specific programs and apps that allow hiring teams or department heads to create automated, electronic processes for employee onboarding.
  • Engagement Software. An engagement software lets HR teams collect information on their current employees, allowing you to measure job satisfaction levels and boost overall morale.

 

4. Set a Realistic Budget

Back in step two, we recommended that you create a tentative budget to accomplish your hiring needs. In this stage, you will match that tentative budget to your actual financial capabilities.

No matter how your company is set up, nobody has unlimited resources. Thus, you must ground your ideas and compare them with reality in the following steps.

  • Use your action plan and identify what items or activities will incur the biggest expense and for how long.
  • Estimate the numbers to put on the expense drivers to the best of your ability. 
  • Assess how much budget you can allocate to each particular activity and adjust if necessary.

Another thing worth mentioning: although you can set a concrete budget at step 2 instead of estimates, it would be more efficient to leave actualising your activity budget proposal in the latter parts of your plan.

This is because, before this step, it’s expected that many factors are still impermanent.

Hashing out final figures for your budget proposal must come when your plans already have some semblance of permanence.

 

5. Create Your Job Description Templates

Effective job description templates are a must if you want to hire at scale, save time and effort.

Here are a few tips on creating effective job descriptions: 

  • Make your position title easily understandable. Let the applicants know what they’re in for the moment they glance at the job vacancy.
  • Put a face to your business. Dedicate a few concise lines explaining your company, what you stand for, what you value, and what your goals are.
  • Be clear and concise about the specific job. Your job description needs to be a comprehensive yet brief summary of the role and responsibilities. Ensure that the description is honest and not sugarcoated, as being less than honest will have detrimental consequences later on.
  • Don’t be too restrictive on your qualifications. Ask yourself what essential characteristics and skills are necessary for the job – including soft skills, don’t just stick to the traditional technical skills.
  • State the next steps. Detail what steps the applicants need to take to apply for that job.

 

6. Prepare for Candidate Selection

Your candidate selection process will be one of your most time-consuming areas – but this doesn’t mean that there’s nothing you can do to make it more efficient.

We can give you several tips in preparing for your candidate selection. This includes the following.

  • Use pre-screening techniques. Pre-screening weeds out the decent from the cream of the crop. Implement tests, hypotheticals, or short interviews to remove those who don’t have the bare minimum from the list.
  • Standardise. Suppose you’re going to be recruiting for many vacancies across different teams. In that case, one of the most proactive things you can do is create standardised processes such as criteria, questionnaires, and interview guides.
  • Conduct background checks. This is especially crucial for high-level hires because you don’t want complications down the road, especially for a critical position. Background checks are one of the most efficient things to ensure an effective result.

 

7. Continue Enhancing Your Recruitment Plan

Your recruitment plan is not a static document: it needs to evolve with your organisation. That is all the more true, considering that technology now seems to change the landscape in leaps and bounds. 

This means that you need to give room in your recruitment plan for growth.

A genuinely effective recruitment plan will grow with time and experience, much like the company itself. In that sense, there are several tips to consider when creating a flexible process.

  • Continually gather data. You can do this in periodic surveys or as part of your employee engagement platform. Collecting data regularly will give you insight into which aspects of your recruitment process worked and which didn’t.
  • Store your information correctly. The data that you gathered has to go somewhere. Don’t wait too late to start warehousing your data. The more you accumulate and the more accessible it is, the better it can inform your decisions.
  • Secure your means of improvement. So you have mountains of data – so what? From this, you will need to glean exactly just what you need to improve and how.

 

Developing an Effective Recruitment Plan: Wrap-Up

Having an effective recruitment plan is crucial in today’s HR and TA teams. Without an effective method for your hiring needs, you will be forced to rely on other services or risk the quaity of hires you make.

If you’ve reached this far, we hope that you have a better foundation for what you have to do to in order to streamline your hiring with a recruitment plan.

And if you're ready to take the next step for improving and automating your processes, learn about SeeMeHired in a free demo below.