Your recruitment process only needs to focus on strategies around reach and process.
Defining the recruitment process
Defining the recruitment process isn’t easy, but why complicate and lengthen it when a shorter version makes sense? I’ve done a few searches for “recruitment process” and found up to 45 steps on a slideshow for a recruitment company in the USA.
But in many job searches for the right skills, you find that most of the steps don’t apply, or that you skip past some of them, or even that you add in others due to specifics on the candidate side of the equation. Since each placement takes a different shape or form, there really are two steps: reach and process management.
Reach
Your reach is in essence the ability for your company to get your job to the right ears and in front of the right eyes, in an enticing enough format to motivate them to apply. It may be an advert or through a recruiter, but if you can’t reach the right candidate, you’re not going to get their application. So you have to sit down and carefully think about your reach, for each and every position and in general for your organisation. This is seriously something your recruitment division should be brainstorming on and reporting to the CEO on (weekly or monthly).
There are so many online recruitment marketing options nowadays, from job boards and job aggregators to social media and cost-per-click (CPC) campaigns to name a few of the simpler ones.
Process
Once you have done your marketing, posted your vacancy’s advertisements, etc. and are drawing in all the applications for the position, your start on the process management part – working out which lucky candidate gets the job. To do this is entirely different for most companies and even jobs, even different each time you recruit on exactly the same job. How you go about it to manage the time and budget available is absolutely crucial to a successful overall recruitment drive.
Databases of all the candidate that have ever applied are used by small and large firms alike. These often include software to help sift through the plethora of initial applications and this starts to become an ATS (applicant tracking system). Other forms of process management are in how you cope with the flow of applications through the company and regret unsuccessful applicants. For all of these operations and more, there is software available. The are even ATSs with multiposter functionality, whereby you post adverts online to multiple job boards, aggregators and websites by adding the job on their software and only clicking “Submit” once.
With the recruitment process trimmed down to reach and process, you should be able to think more clearly about how you attend to each job, each division, each skill and the overall recruitment function in your company.
