bars
No matter the size of your growing business, there is always a need to recruit new talent. This is an especially challenging task as job vacancies rise due to growing skill gaps: a problem that affects many industries.
For example, in 2021, the estimate is that there will be 3.5 million job vacancies in the cybersecurity sector alone. And in manufacturing, there may be a job gap of 2.4 million jobs between 2018 and 2028. Such gaps make recruiting the right talent difficult but vital to the long-term health of your business.
To overcome workforce obstacles like this, it’s essential to build a strategic recruitment plan. Building and executing a great plan will increase your overall candidate engagement, reach skilled workers and decrease turnover.
A strategic recruitment plan outlines your annual hiring needs and recruitment approaches. A typical recruitment plan contains some of the following points:
It is important to build a detailed strategic recruiting plan to ensure all potential recruiting needs and variables are considered. To help you get started, we have outlined some steps below!
Defining goals allows you to measure hiring outcomes, plan backwards and establish hiring expectations. When identifying your recruiting goals, think of both short- and long-term goals. For example, if your business intends to achieve 5% growth this year, it could mean that you need a hiring increase of 5%.
When generating your hiring goals, you’ll want to consider the following points:
Now that you have some clear and quantifiable goals, it’s time to create an annual hiring calendar. Timing is critical in the recruitment process. Most industries fluctuate in both need and availability of candidates. That’s why it’s essential to understand and map out the annual hiring patterns of your business. Doing so will allow you to plan ahead and reach candidates before the need negatively impacts your hiring pipeline. To help identify these fluctuations you can:
Although an annual hiring calendar can serve as a great planning tool, there is no way to predict every possible hiring situation. That’s why it’s important to consider how internal and external changes might impact your hiring pipeline, and develop contingency plans around these potential circumstances. Such circumstances can include events like economic depressions, environmental disasters and governmental policies. The necessity of contingency plans has never been more apparent with the rise of COVID-19 and its impact on the recruitment process.
When developing hiring plans for environmental changes consider the following questions:
It is crucial to keep your plan flexible, and revisit it regularly. Pay regular attention to things like population growth and unemployment rates in case those factors impact your recruiting and continue to develop intervention plans as environmental changes occur.
Now that you have a detailed plan to help your recruitment approach, you can now standardize how your business attracts the right people. Creating a job posting template is a great way to build consistency and make sure to always communicate job details that attract candidates with the right skills.
Effective job posts also consider the interests and desires of potential candidates. Many companies include the responsibilities of a role but fail to communicate how the job will better the life of an employee. Consider adding employee benefits – both tangible and intangible — to the recruitment plan. Below are some employee benefits to include:
Congratulations on creating your recruiting plan! But don’t let it gather too much dust. Iterating on your recruiting plan is just as important as creating it in the first place. We recommend reviewing and updating your approach every six months. Regular revisions will not only ensure a successful 2021 but success for years to come.