Let’s say your company is about to go through a huge growth spurt and you are in charge of ramping up the company’s employee base from 500 to 1000 employees in the next year. What do you do to achieve this aggressive growth?
In my experience, most recruiters and recruiting managers are ill equipped to put together an appropriate recruiting strategy, so I have outlined below some of the key steps.
1. Understand the business goals and requirements
Often the business units overstate or oversimply their business requirements. You and your team need to meet with them to truly understand their hiring needs. Do not just look at requisitions or accept business unit assertions. Meet to determine short-term and long-term hiring needs as well as expected attrition.
Action: Set up business unit meetings with executives and local human resources present (skin in the game) and outline on paper what those needs are and what the required timeframes are for the hires to be in place. Perfection is not required, as you will continue to host these meetings on a monthly or quarterly basis to work on joint recruitment project plans.
2. Build a workforce plan
Following the business unit meetings, pull together an initial workforce plan with the roles, locations, hiring timeframes and attrition data so that these can be signed off by the unit team and ultimately by the HR VP and CEO. This is your road map and will continously evolve as you and your team deliver on the plan.
3. Develop a sourcing/recruitment strategy
Based on the meetings, difficulty of recruiting for certain roles, competitors, compensation, etc., pull together a recruitment strategy. This will usually involve recruitment project plans under the leadership of a project manager, recruitment events, social media strategy, hiring of search firms or external parties for additional research/sourcing (if necessary). Make sure you identify key metrics for the projects and overall recruitment strategy to be successful. You should be budgeting and identifying ROI, team member deliverables, key roles, executive sponsors and other details.
I could write a book on this subject, but let’s just leave it as developing an appropriate plan of action to deliver on the results. Call me to discuss if you need help here.
4. Integrate the recruitment strategy with your recruiting/people technology solution
Hopefully your organization has invested in the right technology solutions, not in some inflexible, non-social, process-driven recruitment/HR monolith. Integrate all or most of all metric and process-driven activities into the solution for fast and seamless sourcing, engaging, hiring and on-boarding activities.
Even if you have a monolithic monster, doing this strategy on spreadsheets will move you lightning years ahead in your recruitment efforts.
5. Measure and communicate results regularly
To members of your team, this should mean weekly. For hiring managers and or executives, this should be determined at the initial meetings. Usually the larger or more important the project, the more often you should communicate. When executives, hiring managers and HR partners on the line see frequent communication, they tend to develop a comfort level with the effort and results. Remember, the recruitment strategy engages and makes executives, hiring managers and HR business partners accountable as well, so reporting results engages everyone.
Note: If you have never done this type of process before, it’s going to take some effort the first time to engage executives and managers in the process. Also, once you communicate results and identify any project or recruiting bottlenecks, you are sure to also get some pushback and negativity. The key is to ensure you have strong executive support and that agreement was given for the strategy at the front end. Be diplomatic but push through hard to achieve the business results; that is your mandate.
Good luck and if you want more details or want to engage me on some of your projects, tweet or email me at francoisguay83@gmail.com.
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