It’s crucial for your clients to understand how to optimize their recruitment process. Luckily, there are ways to improve the process and steps a recruiter takes to promote a client’s job order, sourcing strategies, vetting candidates, and securing the best hire. A recruitment cycle is a bit more complicated than just posting a job, submitting a couple of candidates to the client, and hiring them. A recruiting process requires substantial planning, and automation is highly recommended. Here are steps that staffing agencies and their clients can use to help the recruitment process run more efficiently.
Pipeline Management
Most recruitment firms and HR professionals feel that their recruiting process is most effective when using their applicant tracking system (ATS). Beyond keeping top candidates moving through your client’s ATS and recruitment process, it is also smart for them to keep any incoming leads properly categorized and searchable for sourcing later. However, recruiters don’t need to do additional data entry for uploading resumes, that’s what automation is for.
Plan
Once a job order hits the recruiter’s desk, it is time for research and planning (especially for new clients). Recruiters should collaborate with the salesperson and retrieve plenty of background information prior to speaking with the client/hiring manager. Then, campaign planning can begin for a new job, which should be shared and optimized across the organization. This could be a simple checklist or a completely automated chain-of-events. It is vital that recruiters are equipped with the tools they need to prevent the “process” from becoming a waiting game for an application to come in.
Create a Job Description
The job description should be used to make the job attractive to potential candidates and optimized for search engines, either for Google or a keyword search on your firm’s favorite job board. The software can be used to have job descriptions automatically match jobs to candidates already in the ATS, notifying them by text or email when the job is posted.
Source Candidates
Typical sourcing channels include:
- Firm’s website
- Job boards
- Social media
- Firm’s ATS via email, text, and calling
It is crucial to track a leads’ source, the placement rate by source, and the cost of placement by source. Recruiters must analyze what is working for the firm and cut out what may be hurting the bottom line. Proper planning will help the firm find and execute their ideal sourcing strategy. Recruiters, the marketing department, and leadership will have to work as a team with the outline in hand, strategizing to find which sourcing channels, verbiage, and timing have been the most successful. Then, they can standardize the flow with automation.
Qualify and Pre-Screen Applicants
Qualifying applicants are an essential part of the recruitment process, so recruiters don’t waste time vetting unfit candidates. Surveys can be used to help, and once the basic qualifications are met, the recruiter can then go deeper with the candidate, talking through the job and the candidate’s expectations, concerns, and goals.
Schedule Client Interviews
Coordinating schedules and sending all the information to candidates can take up way too much time. It is best to automate many of these communication steps to ensure the candidates have all of the information needed, making a better experience for them and reducing no-shows. Suppose a candidate is rejected after the client interview. In that case, it is important to keep them engaged by sending automated followup emails with additional jobs for them to consider.
Hire, Onboard and Redeployment
When a client decides to hire the recruited candidate, everyone is happy. However, it is extremely important the recruiter remains in contact as falling short on onboarding could lead to the whole process being scrapped.
Typically, the recruitment process continues until a candidate is placed. If it is a contracted employee, they should be engaged throughout their assignment, and towards the end, communicate about what could come next for them. Redeploying existing contractors is excellent to capture more value from candidates and create a better experience for them.
Other Considerations
With more and more job candidates being passive rather than active job searchers, recruiters are feeling the pressure to find a well-conceived recruitment cycle. It takes collaboration from recruitment, sales, and marketing teams, working together so that communication and automation create a seamless experience for clients, candidates, and employees.
About World Wide Specialty Programs
For the last 50 years, World Wide Specialty Programs has dedicated itself to providing the optimal products and solutions for the staffing industry. As the only insurance firm to be an ASA commercial liability partner, we are committed to that partnership and committed to using our knowledge of the industry to provide staffing firms with the best possible coverage. For more information about Staffing Professional Liability Insurance or any other coverage, we have available to protect your staffing business, give us a call at (877) 256-0468 to speak with one of our representatives.