How to Determine Your Recruitment Goals and Needs
An adequate, effective, and valid hiring process represents a step-by-step systematic procedure for hiring a new employee. The first foundational step of a hiring process is identifying your hiring needs.
There are many benefits to an organized, strategic approach. It ensures a more positive outcome, helps achieve organizational objectives, creates a strong network of candidates, increases employee morale and establishes a process that the whole organization can use. Sometimes recruiting strategies fail, despite all our best efforts, but in the end, will help you find a suitable candidate and reach short-term and long-term company goals.
A successful hiring process consists of several crucial steps, which will be detailed through this and the following articles in the series:
- Identifying a hiring need
- Developing a recruitment strategy
- Writing a job description
- Advertising the position by posting the job description to job boards, various social media channels, and other valuable places job seekers frequently visit
- Sourcing candidates and recruiting them
- Reviewing the obtained applications
- Conducting phone or online screenings (performing the initial interviews)
- Interviewing process (its length and steps vary depending on the company and its hiring goals, preferences, needs, and recruitment plan)
- Background check and reference check (not every organization includes this step into their hiring process; still, it is considered by many hiring teams and managers that this step represents another relevant insight)
- Decision making
- Sending a job offer to the most qualified and fitting candidates + negotiating with candidates
- Hiring (the administrative part that comes after a candidate accepts the job offer)
- Onboarding a new employee.
There are several accurate ways and steps to identify and fulfill hiring needs. It is essential to be objective, analytical and realistic while evaluating your hiring needs. The most efficient way to achieve hiring goals is to start from the beginning.
- Requirements
- Planning
- Job Description
- Compensation
- Marketing Strategy
Step one: Requirements
What do you need? How many? Who are you looking for? What’s the role or position? If you’re in need of a qualified new team member, make sure to have the list of necessary hard and soft skills, experience, background, and desirable candidates’ aspirations in order. Before you start searching and recruiting, define the criteria to know what exactly you are looking for.
Requirements and fundamental responsibilities associated with a role are significant. You must also distinguish your “wish list” from the “must-haves” to properly inform and evaluate the candidates and job seekers.
When evaluating hard and soft skills, use this quick example guide:
- Hard skills are both measurable and teachable abilities that are usually obtained through training and on-the-job experiences such as equipment operation, computer programs, literacy and numeracy skills
- Soft skills are the fundamental traits that can make a strong employee; communication, active listening, conflict resolution, and teamwork.
Not sure what skills to include? I can help you with that!
Step two: Planning your approach
Once you’ve identified the job requirements and the type of person you need to fill them, you must plan how to find that candidate. Start with your internal requirements.
Ask yourself the following questions:
- Who needs to be on the hiring team?
- Is it a new position or an open position you are backfilling?
- If it is open, do you need to hire a temp in the meantime?
- Have you determined the salary parameters and benefits?
- Estimate your timeline: What is the optimal time to hire and time to fill?
- Where and how are you most likely to find the best candidate?
Step three: Job Description
Once you have an internal game plan for the position/s needs and who will be working on the recruiting process, you need to ensure you have a job description or posting that accurately reflects your company and its needs. More now than in previous years, potential candidates are drawn to stand-out marketing: what can you include that gives your job posting an edge over the competition?
New to job descriptions or job posting writing? The HR Toolkit on go2HR’s website has a sample template to get you started. Job posting can be less detailed in terms of the detailed task breakdown. Start with defining a stand out marketable posting first by laying out the job title, an overview of the daily work (what is it like to work for you?), an overview of your company, and the required skills: hard, soft and experience or education levels. Think of the job posting as a sales pitch to potential employees. Ensure you inform the candidates on how awesome your business is and showcase your brand and community (especially if you are searching outside of the local area). Adding a list of benefits, such as compensation, medical, dental, usage of company products, accommodations or any other great perks you can offer, can make you stand out!
Step four: Compensation
If you still need to set a compensation strategy for the position or the organization, research can assist you in determining a competitive but affordable wage to post. Including a wag in your posting is unnecessary, but listing ‘competitive wage’ can be a draw. Compensation is edging out as the most important factor to job seekers, with work/life balance and workplace culture on par in evaluating applying to or accepting a position. Total compensation isn’t just the monetary side but also the flexibility, the workplace culture, the benefits plan and the options.
Competitive wage breakdowns in the region and current labour market conditions can be easily accessed through go2HR’s extensive resource library. Knowing competitive salaries can help you budget for future personnel costs if you are in the compensation assessment stage. It can also help you allocate and plan remunerations for new hires depending on the most essential skills your business currently needs. Knowing and paying the right salary helps to avoid attrition/turnover and the associated costs of recruiting, hiring, and training.
The compensation you can provide to a new hire should be aligned with their knowledge and skill-sets and should be competitive, and not burn through all your cash. External recruitment support is often available via recruitment agencies and investing in technology or candidate sourcing platforms. In the past, external support for Tourism and Hospitality employer recruitment might have been a non-viable cost; however, with go2HR at your fingertips, I am available to support all Tourism sector employers in full-cycle recruitment needs.
Step five: Audience and Marketing Plan
Consider the skills, qualifications or experience you most want in a candidate: can you determine the most likely areas to post positions that will connect with those candidates? It would be best if you met the job-seeker where they are at and market effectively. Will they be online, on social media, or job search sites? Can you source them through local connections with employment agencies or partnership recruiting?
Each candidate profile might have a best practice strategy for recruiting; as an example:
Suppose your candidate requires knowledge of a certain degree, diploma or certificate for example. In that case, you might advertise on alumni job boards from academic institutions that offer those programs to promote the opportunity to qualified alumni.
Once you have a target audience, it’s time to decide how you will market toward them. Think about the kinds of advertising open to you and what best fits your needs. If you don’t know where to start, then connect with me, and we can begin the process together!
