Despite unemployment exceeding 5% at the date of writing, many employers are still struggling to fill specialist, leadership or technical roles. And with the BBC reporting that a massive 56% of firms are planning to recruit in the first quarter of 2021 we thought we would share some tips from our 10-Point Framework for Strategic Recruitment.
Effective recruitment isn’t just about filling an empty chair or workstation. The way in which you recruit can have a direct impact on the performance, engagement and retention of the successful candidate. Mistakes or ill thought–through campaigns can result in a significant amount of wasted time (management time and delayed delivery of company goals) and money.
Here we share the foundations to strategic recruitment, which lie in the first four points of our 10-Point Framework:
1. Employer branding:
Similar to the way a corporate brand works (a value proposition to customers, defining products or services in the marketplace). Employer brand is the market’s perception of your company as an employer. This can be crucial in attracting the right candidates – when making a decision on where to apply for a job, 84% of job seekers say the reputation of a company as an employer of choice is important (Glassdoor).
Consider what your employer brand is, and how to consistently communicate that to potential candidates.
2. Employee Value Proposition:
Closely linked to employer brand is your employee value proposition (EVP). This is what you offer to your employees in exchange for their commitment, experience, knowledge or skills. Even your organisation’s mission, value, and culture play a role here, and give people a powerful reason to work for you.
Part of the picture here are the benefits you provide your employees, which often reflect your company’s values; a golden ‘hello’, volunteering days, your Christmas party. Do you provide free coffee or fruit, discounts, flexible working, childcare facilities, dental care, table football in the canteen, flexible benefits?
Consider which benefits are important to your current team, reflect your organisation’s values and would attract your ideal candidates. Once you have pinned down your employee value proposition, it will be far easier to articulate to potential employees.
3. Employee journey:
The employee ‘journey’ takes place in the time between their first contact with your organisation as a job applicant, and the point at which they leave.
Identifying the experience, or ‘moments that matter’ is an important part of mapping the employee journey and can be very helpful in improving the experience that your people have. Often, these are ‘firsts’. For example, first interview, first day, first logon to their laptop, first mistake, first promotion…. but also, correspondence about an interview, feedback from a selection day, their induction plan… and more.
How do you want your employees to feel during those moments? Ideally, we want to keep the candidates engaged along the way, rather than losing them because they had a bad experience before they’ve even started. And we want to make sure the successful candidate starts work feeling fantastic about the journey so far and is engaged and ready to hit the ground running.
4. Mindset of investment
We often feel a pressure to fill a role as soon as possible, particularly if time is short before the current incumbent leaves. Teams are under pressure, deadlines need to be met!
BUT more haste can mean less speed and poor decision making. Assuming you have a full–time role paying at least NMW you are going to be spending at least £18,500 in the first year of your new recruit joins you. Or £30,800 if use the UK’s national average salary.
If you were using that money to buy a new car, put a deposit on a flat or invest in shares you’d spend time planning, researching and making sure your decision is the right one.
Let’s transfer this investment mindset over to recruitment and so give it the attention it deserves and so that better decisions are made and we save repeated recruitment campaigns, delays and additional cost.
These are just four areas to relating to strategic recruitment, and are best considered before any vacancy arises. We will write again covering more aspects from our 10-Point Strategic Recruitment framework, and giving you handy tactics to use during active recruitment, to ensure you are finding and selecting the very best talent for your vacancy.
If you’d like support reviewing your recruitment strategy or improving the effectiveness of your approach then get in touch today. We offer a detailed review against our ten–point framework giving you simple steps to secure the very best candidates.