At Beacon Lane, we are talent acquisition experts who have worked with organizations of all sizes to implement an ATS, build recruiting functions, and attract top talent. We have a trademarked Recruiting Excellence program, the basics of which I will share, thinking especially of those smaller businesses that do not have a huge team to develop this plan on their own.
Recruiting Essentials: People, Process, Technology – In that Order
When we talk about recruiting excellence, we’re really talking about three components: people, process, technology. In HR and in building your recruiting strategy, it all begins with people.
- Identify all stakeholders. Don’t just list the roles; use a spreadsheet and add names and titles.
- Choose which people with whom you’ll conduct one-on-one discovery sessions. Depending on the size of your organization, you may choose to do one-on-ones with some people and then develop surveys for other groups to learn what they need from the recruiting function. Smaller organizations can most likely speak to everyone.
- Establish a list of questions for your stakeholder groups. Prepare questions to ask at the conclusion of the discovery sessions. At the end of every one-on-one session, ask each person to tell you one thing they would start, stop, and continue doing. This can lead to really valuable insight.
- Conduct discovery sessions. Once you’ve established your list of questions and have identified the people with whom you’ll schedule one-on-one meetings, conduct the discover sessions. Do less talking and more listening. The idea is to gather as much information as possible about the entire process.
- Analyze feedback and document themes. Identify the problems, gaps, and pain points discovered. You’ll be tempted to start fixing everything, but for right now, the idea is to gather information and identify the themes that are common within each stakeholder group and across all groups.
All of this information is used to assemble the story you’ll be presenting to your leadership team. As a recruiting leader, especially if you’re new in the role, knowing how to gather information and develop the story can be overwhelming. But having this story is essential for mapping your recruiting excellence process.
Mapping the Recruiting Process in 7 Steps
Beacon Lane maps the recruiting process across 7 milestone steps in the recruiting life cycle. We often refer to it as the Global Recruiting Framework.
- Workforce Planning – Right now, you’re just learning and gaining an understanding about how the business identifies the organization’s talent needs. More often than not, it is difficult for Recruiting to have a seat at the table for workforce planning. Don’t let that deter you from learning what’s on your stakeholder’s minds.
- Create & Approve Requisition – When Beacon Lane is working on an ATS implementation or process design, this is where we tend to spend the most time. Discover how the process works. Get granular. How are requisitions created? What kind of information is needed? Who is providing that information and how? What path does the request take? How is it getting routed for approval? Who is in the approval chain? Are there bottlenecks? How does the information you are collecting feed into systems further into the process?
- Post, Source, & Screen – How does this process function in your organization? This is a really good time to look at your job boards. Where do you post jobs? What boards are yielding you the best talent? Is everything captured in one place? Is there transparency? Who is screening candidates? What is the candidate experience? How are you tracking progress?
- Interview & Select – While mapping the process, you will need to identify how the interviews are scheduled. How are candidates tracked? What is the experience like for them? During the interview process, who is actually conducting the interviews? Do the interviewers assess for different competencies? How do they know what they’re measuring? Are the interviewers trained? How are they putting what they learn about each candidate into the system? How are candidates selected and moved into the offer status?
- Create & Approve Offer – Put a microscope to your offer process. Document how offers are routed internally for approval and how candidates are receiving the offers. What happens if an offer is outside the approved salary range? What happens to candidates who don’t get an offer but may be a good fit down the road? Do you have a silver medalist program? All of these key pieces of information will help inform the strategy you are going to put together.
- Preboard – Preboarding is everything that happens between the acceptance of an offer and day one on the job. It is during this stage that the transition from Recruiting to HR happens. It’s important to work closely with HR.
- Onboard – While HR typically takes over during this final step of the process, Recruiting is secondary in the narrative. It’s an important part of the story to include in your recruiting strategy story.
Achieving Recruiting Excellence
Developing recruiting excellence requires mapping the process before you implement any technology. You must be able to identify the gaps and issues with your current recruiting process and address them – technology doesn’t make a good band-aid solution.
When you’re ready to talk about your strategy or ATS implementation, Beacon Lane is here to help. And if you are interested in developing your recruiting team, we have a variety of programs available to help you formalize your talent acquisition program.
Schedule a call so that we can discuss where you are and where you need to be – and how we can help you get there.
