The competition for top talent is fierce, and hiring the wrong person can be costly. As the market becomes more competitive, businesses need to step up their game to attract top talent before other competitors do. That’s why it’s crucial to make recruiting efficiency a priority in your business.

By implementing these strategies, your enterprise can streamline the recruitment process, save time and resources, and ultimately secure the most qualified candidates for your organization. Let’s dive in and explore how you can make recruiting efficiency a top priority for your organization.

#1: Measure Vital Recruiting Metrics

To begin, it is essential to gather recruiting data that reveals where you can make improvements to your recruiting process. Metrics across the entire talent pipeline are valuable for revealing where your highest-quality hires come from and how well they convert across the recruiting funnel. By tracking your metrics over time, you can also identify bottlenecks in the hiring process and make necessary adjustments. 

Candidate experience is another important area to consider. By measuring the level of satisfaction among candidates, you can identify how you should improve candidate nurture and outreach to better convert candidates into applicants. 

Collecting data to understand hiring efficiency is essential for businesses to remain competitive in today’s job market. However, metrics alone aren’t enough to make a difference in speeding your time to hire. You have to synthesize the data and determine where you can shorten areas of the process to make efficiency a priority. 

#2: Analyze the Data

Now that you have the data, it’s time to drill down on what it means for improving your hiring process efficiency. By analyzing the data, your enterprise can, for example, identify specific stages where the most candidates drop out of the hiring process.

Is it after visiting your career site? Before they apply for a role? While applying for the position? During the interview process? This analysis can help organizations focus on steps to enhance the candidate experience and reduce the chances of losing qualified candidates to other companies.

Companies should also evaluate the sources that they use to post job listings. Some sources may repeatedly attract low-quality candidates, leading to wasted time and resources. Analyzing the sources and shifting to more effective channels can help businesses attract higher-quality candidates.

Finally, take a look at what the data says about your overall interview process. The process should be designed to identify the most qualified candidates quickly, while ensuring that they have a positive experience. If there are unnecessary hurdles, it may be time to make some changes, which brings us to the next step.

#3: Augment and Adjust

Once you have identified some pain points in your recruiting processes, it’s time to implement changes that will improve the speed of the process. For example, now may be the time to adjust your budget to the channels that yield higher-quality candidates.

Another area that you could be losing candidates is requiring them to fill out the same fields in the online application that are already contained in their resume. This duplicated data entry is a real frustration for candidates. Look for a recruitment technology partner that can quickly and effectively ingest the resume and make the application process 10 minutes or less. 

If you notice a lengthy interview process slowing down your time to hire, it may be beneficial to create a set list of questions for interviews, designate interviewees, and require feedback from the hiring panel in your platform within a specific time frame. This helps ensure that the hiring process is consistent, and all candidates are evaluated on the same criteria. 

#4: Rinse and Repeat

Keeping a pulse on your recruitment data helps you identify areas where you can make improvements in the hiring process, such as where potential bottlenecks exist and what needs to be done to eliminate them. However, it’s not enough to gather data and make changes once. 

The key to making recruitment efficiency a priority is to continue to analyze and augment your hiring processes based on new data insights. This means that you should continuously measure and analyze your data to identify new pain points and make ongoing adjustments. 

The good news is that technology has made it easier than ever to analyze recruitment data. With the right talent acquisition technology, like the Evolve Talent Acquisition Suite, you can track every stage of the recruitment process, from applications to interviews to hiring decisions, streamline tasks, and bolster your recruiting efficiency. 

Making recruitment efficiency a priority in your organization requires ongoing effort and analysis. By continuing to measure and analyze your data, you can ensure that your recruitment process is as efficient as possible. 

This, in turn, leads to higher-quality candidates, higher retention rates, and new hires who contribute to the growth and success of your organization. Now is the best time to make recruitment efficiency a priority in your business and invest the time and resources necessary to make it a success.

Ready to make recruiting efficiency a priority in your organization? Learn how Jobvite’s enterprise recruitment solution can help you track key metrics and improve the speed of your hiring process. Schedule a demo of our Evolve Talent Acquisition Suite today.

The post How to Make Recruiting Efficiency a Priority in Your Enterprise first appeared on Jobvite.

Your recruitment strategy must adapt to changing conditions — from new business goals and headcount needs to economic uncertainty and competition for qualified candidates. The good news is there is a blueprint your enterprise talent acquisition team can use to navigate these shifts and hire top talent quickly and at scale.

Building a more effective recruitment strategy: 8 ways to improve your hiring process

Here are eight tips to strengthen your recruitment strategies and boost hiring performance.

1) Audit your recruiting people, processes, and technology

Your people, processes, and technology impact the success of your enterprise.

Human resources expert Josh Bersin indicates investing in the right hiring solutions is the first step to improve your people, processes, and technology. However, you shouldn’t empower your talent acquisition function with just any tools.

Training recruiters to use your applicant tracking system and recruitment marketing platform to source, nurture, engage, and analyze candidates will set them up for success.

Consider Holland America Group Director of Talent Acquisition Jim D’Amico, who recently told SHRM he wants to enable his TA team to build stronger connections with potential candidates.

“That means development training for my leaders, technology training for my recruiters, and conferences for my team, to take them to that next level [with our recruitment strategy],” said Jim.

2) Modernize your enterprise talent acquisition tech stack

Can your recruiters and hiring managers easily access candidate profiles in your ATS? Do you have artificial intelligence and automation capabilities that eliminate manual labor? Do your current TA tools support your high-volume hiring? Is your recruiting data centralized and easily accessible?

If the answer is no to these questions, your technology stack requires attention.

The best way to address these issues is to invest in a single solution, like the Evolve Talent Acquisition Suite from Jobvite, so your hiring team can collaborate across the entire recruiting lifecycle and streamline hiring tasks.

For example, Apex Group improved hiring team collaboration by investing in Jobvite recruiting technology. The Evolve Talent Acquisition Suite enables talent specialists and hiring managers at Apex to work from a centralized platform that provides real-time recruiting funnel insights and hiring performance data.

“Jobvite is a true single source of truth … and helps us easily track performance over time,” said Apex Group Global Talent Acquisition Projects and Programme Lead Teodora Rebic. “Connecting with hiring managers right in the system to show our pipeline efforts is invaluable.”

3) Refresh your employer branding and recruitment marketing

These two parts of your recruitment strategy go hand in hand.

First, add your employer brand messaging in job postings, your career page, on social media profiles, and other owned and external digital properties where potential candidates may find you.

By doing so, you ensure consistency with how you present your employer brand externally. And you can better compel job seekers to apply because they learn what it’s like to work in your company.

Given its importance to your recruitment strategy, employer branding deserves your attention.

Next, ensure your targeted recruitment marketing campaigns reach the right passive candidates.

Test different advertising filters, like those for experience and professional interests, in your LinkedIn job ads to connect with passive candidates whose skills and expertise align with open roles.

Send personalized messages to candidates on other career communities whose expertise matches the job role. Gauge their interest in your company and the position with recruitment messaging that features your employer brand.

4) Assess and improve your candidate sourcing and nurturing

Employ CEO Pete Lamson notes that in addition to driving a high volume of candidates, you must also focus on attracting and engaging qualified candidates.

While there may be “more candidate flow than there was previously, having the right volume of candidate quality remains mission critical for recruiters,” Pete recently told SHRM.

With Jobvite candidate relationship management system, you can use AI-powered candidate matching to get recommendations for top talent already in your database to engage for open roles. From here, you can send personalized messages to individual candidates or groups of candidates.

Over time, you can see which types of email subject lines, SMS communications, and other engagement-related elements help you move more qualified candidates into your pipeline.

5) Build an employee referral program to get bonus candidates

The Employ Recruiter Nation Report found employee referrals are the fourth-most-valuable sourcing avenue for employers, with 13% of HR decision makers citing the channel as the best place to find high-quality candidates.

Your sourcers and recruitment marketers may add the most candidates to your talent tool, but an employee referral program can provide your talent acquisition team with premium candidates too.

Samtec recruiters are notified the moment a new referral comes in, and dedicated profiles are created for referred candidates. Meanwhile, employees who refer job seekers are updated as their referrals advance in the interview process. And all without the need for any manual work.

“From employees being able to seamlessly share application invitations within the platform to integrations with LinkedIn and Indeed, Jobvite allows us to enhance and support the work we already do and focus on growing our team through the networks of our employees,” said Samtec Compliance Coordinator and ATS Systems Administrator Michael Townsend.

6) Streamline the interview process and eliminate bottlenecks

When candidate encounter inconsistent communication and bottlenecks in the interview process, they may exit the hiring process altogether. That means your enterprise may miss out on high performers, simply because of interviewing challenges.

You can prevent future candidate drop-off by keeping active candidates apprised of their status and your decision-making timeline throughout the process.

“After investing time and effort into crafting tailored resumes and cover letters, preparing for interviews, and building hope, being met with sudden silence from a recruiter can be deeply discouraging,” HR professional Scott Sparks recently wrote.

A quick email or call is all it takes to keep top talent informed and interested in joining your business.

As for bottlenecks, analyze your interviewing data to identify any stages that take longer than average. See what differentiates those stages, and pare down the complexity of those stages or eliminate them altogether to speed up your hiring.

7) Analyze recent recruiting efforts and make data-backed changes

There are two main facets of your recruitment strategy your talent team should analyze frequently:  

1. Speed: Commonly tracked speed-related metrics include average time to hire by role, team, and location, and how long it takes the hiring team to provide feedback.
2. Quality: Tracking the effectiveness of sourcing and nurturing based on application rates, engagement rates, hiring manager satisfaction, and employee retention is critical for measuring candidate quality.

The more you assess and act on these metrics, the more easily you can improve in both areas. And the best technology that enables in-depth hiring analysis is a talent acquisition suite like Jobvite.

Former GroupM Talent Manager Jennifer Gabrielle-Chapman said the company used the native reporting and analytics in Jobvite to gain greater visibility into their recruiting speed and hiring quality.

“[We would] pull weekly data reports [in Jobvite] showing the activity across our operating companies, resource management within our talent team, be ahead of the curve for seasonal peaks and troughs, placement data and hires closed off in each week — the list goes on,” said Jennifer.

Actionable analytics are invaluable to the success of your recruitment strategy. All you need is a data-driven mindset and accessible insights into core metrics to elevate your hiring performance.

8) Think globally, not locally, to address critical hiring needs

When it comes to your candidate pool, you must look beyond your office locations to fill open roles. You will miss out on a large pool of qualified candidates by ignoring international job seekers.

“If you want to go after the best talent, then you have to go for a global recruiting strategy and not just a local one,” Robert Kelley, Professor of Management at Carnegie Mellon University’s Tepper School of Business, recently told HR Executive.

Jobvite ensures that workforces spread across different countries and locales can streamline their hiring and tailor processes required to hire talent — no matter where they are.

Building more effective recruitment strategies to attract top talent requires the right enterprise recruiting technology. Book a Jobvite Evolve Talent Acquisition Suite demo today.

The post 8 Tips to Turbocharge Your Recruitment Strategy first appeared on Jobvite.

It can be overwhelming for enterprise talent acquisition teams to research the numerous types of recruitment tools on the market and determine which ones merit investment today.

Arguably the two most important questions TA teams must ask when evaluating tech options are:

1. What facet(s) of our daily recruiting and hiring efforts would X tool enhance/streamline?
2. Can X tool directly (and seamlessly) integrate with our team’s applicant tracking system?

It should be fairly easy to discern if a given recruiting tool can solve for a particular talent acquisition activity (e.g., sourcing passive candidates more effectively, syncing data with an HRIS).

And if you have an advanced ATS like Jobvite, chances are any popular tech you want to connect to our enterprise hiring software is a part of our expansive recruitment tool marketplace, which features dozens of industry-leading solutions used by today’s top talent teams.

Recruitment tools that can transform your talent strategy: 8 Jobvite partners to know

We could list a 100-plus recruitment tools below that can help transform your talent strategy for the better (e.g., ones that can help you improve your employer branding, write inclusive job descriptions, post to niche job boards universally, promote job openings via targeted ads).

For the sake of brevity, though (and to highlight some of the most widely used partners in the Jobvite Marketplace) here are eight helpful recruiting tools we think you should know about — a mix of well-established platforms and newer hiring-centric solutions.

1) ADP

We’ll call this a post-recruitment tool. The Jobvite Connector for ADP Workforce Now® enables talent teams to seamlessly sync new-hire data directly into their HR colleagues’ ADP instance.

This direct connection ensures human resources has all historical records associated with new employees sent directly to ADP, in turn reducing the risk for manual data entry issues.

Specifically, all available info tied to hired candidates in Jobvite is automatically sent to the New Hire Wizard in ADP once prospects are officially designated as new hires in our ATS.

2) UKG

It’s not just ADP that Jobvite has a direct connection with. We also integrate with UKG Pro to simplify the initiation of the onboarding process for hired candidates and ensure data across the entire talent acquisition lifecycle syncs into the HCM to provide HR with a holistic view of employees.

The transition from offer acceptance to new-hire orientation is simplified and streamlined, thanks to this built-in connection with our ATS. The bonus benefit? Enhanced collaboration between TA and HR means they can both contribute to a positive candidate experience for new staff members.

3) Bryq

Utilization of artificial intelligence tools continues to rise at enterprise talent acquisition teams.

While AI will never replace the human component of hiring (i.e., building relationships with potential candidates), it’s still an increasingly critical component to employers’ hiring success.

One particular AI-centric recruitment tool Jobvite customers leverage is Bryq.

The talent intelligence platform helps TA teams with both our solutions to blend their hiring analytics and use those merged insights to reduce bias in their recruitment process, determine prospects’ company culture fit, and — ultimately — make data-backed hiring decisions (both in terms of external, new-new talent and in-house candidates to consider for internal mobility options).

4) Criteria

Another popular data-driven recruitment tool many TA teams with Jobvite utilize in their day-to-day is Criteria, an assessment platform that empowers hiring stakeholders to make evidence-based, bias-free decisions across their entire recruitment strategy (i.e., in each hiring funnel stage).

Jobvite users can deliver Criteria assessments to candidates of interest right from our recruitment software, than have results from those tests sent to candidates’ dedicated Jobvite profiles so recruiters and hiring managers so they can review answers and provide any feedback.

5) Verified First

Background screening is obviously an essential component of any enterprise hiring process today. That’s why so many Jobvite users take advantage of our Verified First connection.

The renowned pre-employment screening provider helps HR pros easily conduct background checks on job applicants and sourced candidates who make it to the final recruiting stages.

This one-click integration helps our joint customers request checks and review findings without ever having to leave Jobvite. Once completed, all results data is passed over to Jobvite, and updated profile data from our ATS is is sent to Verified First — a seamless process that automates a once-arduous task for HR and TA teams and a reduces the potential for compliance errors.

6) Paychex

Payroll management may not be top of mind for your talent team. That said, you can set your HR department up for success with getting new employees set up with direct deposits.

The Jobvite-Paychex Flex integration ensures employers can drive efficiency by transferring all new-hire details directly into the latter platform. The primary pro of this connection? Human resources can simplify and streamline one of their most laborious administrative payroll setup tasks and ensure they have clean, de-duped profiles for all new employees added to their Paychex account.

7) JobTarget

Large-scale orgs with a national or international presence need to be able to publish job postings on boards and career communities where they know they’ll attract the right kind of candidates (i.e., those who live near one of their office locations and have role-specific skills and experience).

The JobTarget integration with Jobvite enables talent specialists to implement programmatic advertising campaigns that help get their open roles on the most appropriate job sites, based on pre-defined hiring criteria tied to geography, industry, and types of positions that are open.

JobTarget’s automation capabilities ensure job ads are promoted only in digital locales that match our customers’ search-related preferences. Applicants generated via these listings then sync into Jobvite automatically, and recruiters can see which specific sourcing channels performed best.

8) Largely

Employee testimonials are quite a powerful recruitment tool, of sorts, in modern talent acquisition.

Getting existing members of your workforce to share what it’s like to work for your company, their individual and team successes, and how they’ve advanced their careers can prove to be a compelling piece of recruitment marketing collateral that helps TA convert top talent more effectively.

Using the Largely integration with Jobvite, our customers can share the most pertinent and persuasive messaging with prospects that compels them to learn more about open roles.

Largely allows recruiters to crowdsource multimedia-centric testimonials from current staff members. These internal endorsements of the business can then be sent to Jobvite, where TA specialists can incorporate them in targeted nurtures to candidates and even published to the career site.

Speak with our team to learn more about our ATS and the dozens of premier recruitment tools you can connect to our award-winning hiring software. Schedule a demo today.

The post Must-Have Recruitment Tools for Your TA Tech Stack first appeared on Jobvite.

Your talent acquisition team, like many others at enterprises worldwide, undoubtedly tracks an array of critical recruitment metrics that provide insight into each stage of the recruitment funnel.

But, if your TA leader doesn’t assign specific key performance indicators (KPIs) tied to each metric — both at the individual recruiter level and for the overall recruiting org — it becomes quite difficult to attribute successes and identify areas for improvement with your hiring efforts.

Some large-scale employers use various analytics tools to track their pipeline performance.

Leading enterprises, however, rely on advanced ATS software with native talent analytics to keep tabs on data points tied to their recruitment speed, efficiency, and quality — and enable talent leaders to designate distinct KPIs that can help them track progress over time.

Enterprise recruiting KPIs you can assign and track with a leading applicant tracking system

Your recruitment team is not solely responsible for the success of your hiring process.

Other decision-makers across your org certainly impact your company’s ability to onboard top talent and keep your business moving in the right direction headcount- and growth-wise.

That makes it paramount to report on every aspect of your day-to-day recruitment process and long-term recruitment strategy so you can see if your talent specialists are making headway from one week, month, and quarter to the next with assigned requisitions.

So, if you need advice on what KPIs are worth setting for your recruiters — tied to every stage of your funnel: from the application process, to the candidate experience provided — you’ve come to the right place. Here are 20 specific, quantifiable goals you can set.

Top-of-funnel recruiting KPIs

1) Career site/job board engagement

Well-branded and search-optimized career sites and job postings are your TA team’s path to attracting more active job seekers, getting them to learn more about your business via other “About Us” pages, and converting many of them into new applicants you can engage for open roles.

2) Application completion rate

This obviously goes hand-in-hand with the above recruitment KPI. Another way you can get more prospects who land on one of your listings to click “Submit” is to make their application experience a quick and seamless one. (Hint: Don’t require them to log in just to apply for a position.)

3) Sourcing channel quality

Based on their recruiting experiences, your talent specialists (at least your veteran ones) certainly know which sourcing avenues lead to a high quantity and quality of candidates. Doubling down on proven channels and eliminating use of poor-performing ones is the key to achieving this KPI.

4) Nurture engagement rate

Whether you rely on email, SMS, or both candidate communication approaches, you can only bolster your engagement with prospects by routinely reviewing data tied to your outreach efforts — something an advanced ATS with built-in, easy-to-parse talent analytics can help you with.

5) Passive candidate quantity

Just as you want to ensure your sourcing efforts help augment your talent pool with the target number of applicants, you also need to focus on the quality of those passive prospects.

This can best be accomplished through lookbacks at past hiring cycles to see where top candidates (i.e., those who advance far into the recruiting process and are hired) come from source-wise.

6) Diversity sourcing and engagement

Building a diverse workforce is (rightfully) an ongoing endeavor for today’s enterprises.

Monitor your recruiters’ sourcing efforts to make sure they add members from historically underrepresented groups. That means turning to channels that generate applicants and passive prospects of different genders, gender identities, races, ages, and backgrounds.

Middle-of-funnel recruiting KPIs

7) Screen-to-interview ratio

There’s no “right” percentage of shortlisted candidates your recruiters should present to hiring managers after phone or Zoom screens. However, speaking with each hiring manager to understand the average number of leads they prefer to evaluate post-screening process needs to be taken into consideration by your sourcers to ensure hiring managers have several strong options to assess.

8) Interview speed/efficiency

Speed remains the name of the game in TA today. Continually driving down the amount of time your team takes to finish interviewing processes with top talent of interest is essential to closing requisitions in a timely manner — and boosting hiring manager satisfaction.

9) Time to provide feedback

Your talent team can only somewhat control “time to feedback.” That’s because some interviewers take their time to scrutinize candidate profiles, resumes, and related interview notes.

But, your recruiters can (and should) nudge them immediately after each interview to note they need HMs’ comments and scorecards ASAP to keep the candidates in question interested — and advance agreed-upon prospects of interest quickly into the offer extension phase.

10) Candidate selection speed

Speaking of candidate selection, it essentially comes down to your hiring managers who own specific reqs as to which individuals they think merit offers. As with feedback, ensure your TA team reminds HMs you need their choices (first, second, and third) so they can plan offer letters accordingly.

11) Hiring manager satisfaction

As mentioned, making each hiring manager happy with your team’s recruitment efforts is something that can go a long way in showing you’re putting in full effort to fill their job openings in a speedy and efficient manner. One of the best ways to satisfy HMs’ hiring needs? Have your recruiters speak with them at length about specific skills, experience levels, and other traits they prefer in new hires.

Bottom-of-funnel recruiting KPIs

12) Time to hire

This one’s a fairly obvious recruitment KPI your team should focus on improving. Regardless, you need to use your talent acquisition tech of choice to track the typical number of days it takes from the moment your team is assigned a new req to when they get a signed offer letter.

13) Cost per hire

Your executive team is always bottom-line focused. That means their attention is constantly centered on both profitability and revenue as well as business expenditures — including what your team spends to attract active and passive job seekers.

Keep a close eye on your TA budget, and ensure each recruiter (or your recruitment marketing manager, if you have one who owns all paid postings) knows what they have available to them each month and quarter — and not to go a dollar over.

14) Offer acceptance rate

You can’t force a candidate to agree to join your company. But, your talent team can liaise with hiring managers to collectively make compelling pitches to final-stage prospects. Only through this coordination — and regular iteration and optimization of their offer process — can recruiters and hiring managers continually get more high-quality candidates to sign on the (digital) dotted line.

15) Candidate Net Promoter Score (NPS)

Post-recruiting-cycle surveys sent to each candidate allows them to answer a handful of questions about their experience with your hiring team and rate your recruiting process at large. It’s simple: The higher the score, the better. You can start with modest targets (e.g., a quarterly improvement of 2-3 points). If the cNPS remains static or falls further, you can increase that goal as needed.

Discover how today’s top talent acquisition teams use the native analytics in our ATS to achieve their recruitment KPIs — and how your TA org can do the same. Get a demo today.

The post 15 Recruiting KPIs to Assign to Your Talent Acquisition Team first appeared on Jobvite.

Evolve and adapt. Without regular assessment and constant optimization of your full-cycle recruiting process, you and your talent acquisition team won’t be able to minimize the person hours and resources spent on filling open roles and closing requisitions in an increasingly efficient manner.

It’s not just on your TA team to routinely make progress in terms of improving each part of its recruiting process, of course. It’s a twofold approach, really, to ensure your hiring team at large can consistently identify, engage, and convert your ideal candidate in a predictable and scalable way:

1. Your talent leader and operations manager need to have a constant eye on your recruitment analytics so they can share actionable insights with and recommend changes to each recruiter.
2. Once they have said data and suggestions, your recruiters and hiring managers can ensure each subsequent recruitment cycle (ones tied to future reqs) is faster and more efficient than the last.

In other words? Elevating the quality of your full-cycle recruiting is a true team effort — and a process that has many moving parts. Here’s how you can enhance your TA efforts in the long run.

Benefits of full-cycle recruiting

As with any business endeavor or initiative, there are pros and cons of full life cycle recruiting.

That said, the only “downsides” (if you can even call them that) of this talent acquisition method is not being able to keep up with hiring demand, due to insufficient in-house recruiting headcount, budget, and/or resources. Of course, that’s likely not a problem for enterprise TA teams like yours.

With that in mind, here are the (many) pros of implementing the popular recruitment approach.

A better-run recruiting cycle and hiring process

A well-coordinated full-cycle recruiting process fills open positions more quickly. Plain and simple.

By proactively building relationships with passive and active candidates across multiple channels (social media, job boards, etc.) and using data to assess and improve their efforts to execute standard TA tasks (nurturing top talent via email and/or text, conducting interviews and background checks), recruiters increase their chances of discovering qualified candidates.

This ensures hiring managers always have a sufficient pool of premier prospects to choose from. In turn, this reduces delays in filling job vacancies on their teams due to a lack of talent to engage.

A concerted team focus on candidate experience

When all hiring stakeholders know their distinct function within the full-cycle recruiting process, every part of it runs smoothly. Equally as important, though, it also ensures job seekers your team engages for openings have an enjoyable experience. (Something not all enterprise employers prioritize today.)

From the moment an active job seeker applies for an open role or sourced prospects engages with your nurture messaging, to when said candidate accepts a job offer (or otherwise sees their respective recruitment journey end), their experience with your hiring team must remain top of mind.

By doing so, your TA team can help alleviate any anxiety they might feel when speaking with your team regarding the role and ensure that, whatever the outcome, their content with their experience interacting with your recruiting staff, hiring managers, and other interview panelists is a fond one.

Streamlined, end-to-end recruitment operations

Arguably the biggest benefit of full-cycle recruiting is being able to tackle each TA task in a highly organized manner — and use data tied to your hiring team’s collective efforts after to “upgrade” hiring operations each requisition is closed (i.e., post-recruitment cycle, when a new hire is made.)

Improving your full-cycle recruiting process

Establishing a dedicated talent acquisition approach is one thing. But, it’s equally essential to keep your full-cycle recruiting process running smoothly. That means abiding by FCR best practices.

Here are four specific ways you can systematically strengthen your end-to-end recruitment efforts.

1) Pay close attention to the candidate journey

A critical aspect of attracting and hiring exceptional candidates is the ever-important candidate journey. This encompasses every interaction a potential hire has with your business early on.

From the initial discovery of a role, all the way to receiving an offer letter. (Or getting passed on.)

To refresh your recruiting process and enhance the candidate experience, start by examining your org’s online presence, application process (and ease), and structured interview procedures.

• What areas of your recruiting cycle can be improved (or even sped up)?
• Are you keeping leads informed and engaged during the hiring process?
• Do your job postings reflect your company values, culture, and mission? 

Evaluating and improving these aspects will lead to a more seamless and enjoyable journey for potential hires, further enhancing your company’s reputation and appeal.

2) Use analytics to make data-backed decisions

Data-driven decision-making is a key component of effective recruiting strategies. By utilizing analytics and data points in your recruitment process, you can gain valuable insights into your talent acquisition outcomes, identify trends, and make data-backed decisions to improve your approach.

Similarly, ensure your entire recruiting staff and TA team members evaluate the right set of recruitment metrics to gauge your success (and pinpoint areas for improvement) over time.

This can include tracking candidate source performance, time to fill, quality of hire, applicant conversion rates, and more. By combining data and creative problem-solving, you’ll be able to make informed decisions to continually refine your ways of working and better your results.

3) Keep your org’s DEI hiring objectives top of mind

Consider diversity and inclusion when refining your FCR process. To make strides in this facet of your TA strategy, investigate your company’s current diversity hiring practices and bias mitigation efforts.

Are you partnering with diverse job boards and networking groups to advertise active and upcoming roles? How about utilizing candidate assessment methods that minimize recruiting biases, such as implementing blind hiring techniques or providing standardized interviews? 

That way, you’ll more naturally attract a diverse range of talented candidates. Both active diverse job seekers and passive candidates of various backgrounds who express interest in job openings.

4) Gauge the effectiveness of your employer branding

Your employer branding is crucial for attracting top candidates and retaining talented employees. A strong employer brand helps potential hires understand the unique selling points of working for your company beyond just the job description and salary.

To optimize your employer brand, assess your current branding efforts and identify opportunities to create a more authentic and appealing narrative. Take the time to highlight the various facets of your company culture, values, and employee benefits.

Utilize social media and online platforms to showcase success stories, team achievements, and life behind the scenes. By refreshing your employer branding, you’ll be able to attract quality candidates that better align with your company values.

By adapting and evolving your full-cycle recruiting processes over time, you can help your org attract and retain top candidates, leading to increased productivity, innovation, and stability.

Find out how Jobvite can help you thrive in today’s hiring landscape. Schedule a demo to learn how our ATS can elevate the quality of your talent acquisition strategy.

The post Refreshing Your Full-Cycle Recruiting Process: A Guide first appeared on Jobvite.

Your company’s success hinges on the ability to attract and hire the best talent. And your annual recruitment plan is the linchpin of your talent acquisition strategy. But, you can’t just develop a recruiting plan. You also have to revisit it frequently. (That is, at least quarterly, but ideally monthly).

Why? Because while said plan may lead to the engagement and hiring of many high-potential candidates in the initial weeks and months after producing it, your org’s business objectives will invariably change over time. And with those changes often come new headcount needs.

Put another way?

But, you and your executive staff can’t forget that every prosperous recruitment plan should include check-ins to see if it’s leading to the desired ROI. (That is, a high volume of net-new prospects added to one’s talent pool and many new high-quality hires for each business unit and location.)

Why revamping your recruitment plan regularly is critical to your hiring success

It’s impossible to overstate the significance of a strong (read: scalable and sustainable) hiring plan.

Specifically, one that leads to a streamlined and easily repeatable hiring process, thanks to the use of advanced recruitment tools and technologies by the entire hiring team. (More on this shortly.)

By regularly reviewing and updating your recruitment methods and solutions and reviewing the state of your recruiting budgets and metrics (from cost per hire to recruiting funnel speed), you can not only boost your new-hire conversion rate, but also set a solid foundation for future business growth.

Simply put, the pros of recruitment plan “refreshes” are many for your talent team and org at large.

You can increase the quality and quantity of your candidate pool

Innovative sourcing methods can greatly enhance your recruitment process. Social media platforms, online job boards, and employee referral programs can all contribute to a more effective sourcing strategy. By fostering connections in the industry and staying up-to-date on relevant communities and online groups, you can ensure that your enterprise taps into the best talent pools available.

You can better attract top talent with enhanced employer branding

The collective power of each employer brand element (e.g., your job description copy, career site layout, social media presence) impacts your ability to attract the most qualified candidates today.

A strong brand boosts the public perception of your business. As it relates to recruiting, though, it also fosters trust with job seekers and can convinces these folks your org is the right fit for them.

By investing in your org’s reputation and ensuring a consistent message through your job postings, website, and social channels, you can greatly enhance your pool of potential candidates.

You can augment interview and candidate evaluation techniques

A key part of revitalizing your recruitment plan is refining your interview and assessment techniques.

By incorporating behavioral interview questions, simulation exercises, and case studies into your hiring strategy, you can better assess each job candidate’s abilities, potential, and work style.

In turn, this can help you make more informed, confident hiring decisions.

Your can work with HR to make your new-hire onboarding seamless

Your work doesn’t end once you’ve made a job offer. A strong employee onboarding process is essential to ensure that your new hires feel welcomed and well-integrated into the company culture.

By providing the necessary resources and support to your HR colleagues from day one with onboarding a new staff member, you can contribute to the never-ending process of realizing a positive and productive work environment that encourages employee retention and engagement.

How to assess and improve your recruitment plan

Those are the pros of routinely revamping your recruitment plan. But, what are some actual tactics and activities you should look to update? We can think of a handful of focus areas for your TA team.

Clearly define the job opening and specifications

Ensure your team understands the position you are looking to fill and the required qualifications.

Begin by revisiting your job specifications to establish whether they accurately detail the qualifications, skills, and experience required for each role. In so doing, you’ll avoid wasting time on ill-suited applicants and better target qualified candidates who align with your specific needs.

Streamline your talent screening and interviewing

A well-structured and efficient interview process is pivotal to your organization’s hiring success.

By enhancing the quality of your interviews via updating interview questions, streamlining the interview process (i.e., removing unnecessary stages), and training hiring managers to conduct effective interviews, you’ll be better able to identify top “contenders” for open positions.

Don’t forget about silver-medalist candidates

A core part of any successful recruitment plan is making the effort to revisit and engage with candidates you have previously considered for other roles. By keeping a line of communication open with formerly engaged prospects, you reduce the need to source net-new candidates for roles.

Ensure you have the right ATS software

This is arguably the biggest facet of your talent strategy to regularly evaluate and improve.

Technological advancements have come to the forefront in recent years, making it easier than ever to find and manage potential candidates. Implementing an applicant tracking system (ATS) to help streamline and manage your recruitment strategy effectively is a no-brainer for your org.

“For those [talent teams] not using purpose-built technology, now could be the time, or risk losing out on top-tier candidates,” Employ SVP People & Talent Corey Berkey recently wrote for Forbes.

Find out how you and your talent team can execute your recruiting strategies more effectively and efficiently with Jobvite’s powerful enterprise applicant tracking system.

The post How to Refresh Your Recruitment Plan (and Hire Smarter) first appeared on Jobvite.

The first, second, and third priority for all of your enterprise talent acquisition team members today is to engage and convert candidates at scale and continually enhance your recruiting strategy.

To accomplish this, your best bet is to turn to advanced yet intuitive recruitment technology.

Specifically, your business should invest in a leading candidate relationship management (CRM) solution that can help you plan and carry out your recruitment marketing ideas, manage your individual and collective pipelines, nurture prospects of interest through the funnel, and analyze your recruiting team’s work — all from a single solution.

We could cover (and, well, have covered extensively) each of these TA activities and how to best conduct each one in a modern hiring platform your entire team can leverage with ease. (Hint, hint.)

Today, though, we’re going to focus solely on the first item: recruitment marketing tactics you can execute with the aid of a built-for-purpose CRM tailored to large-scale orgs like yours.

3 recruitment marketing ideas to help you get more candidates into your talent pool

Whether you’re charged with promoting highly specific job openings (e.g., those for technical or C-suite positions) or handle a high volume of requisitions each month, the recruitment marketing ideas below can help you get both your brand and latest job postings in front of the right audience.

1) Optimize your career site and job descriptions

Your “owned” recruitment marketing collateral should always be addressed before turning to paid tactics. In other words? Focus on promoting your brand and available jobs on your org’s website.

Your career site is the main gateway for job opportunities your ideal candidate profile (ICP) looks for. So, that makes it vital to regularly optimizing postings published on your corporate site. That means:

• Crafting compelling job descriptions: Ensure your job descriptions accurately represent the role-related responsibilities and expectations. Use clear, concise language, and avoid jargon. And make sure the descriptions reflect your culture, mission, and values. You want leads who land on the page featuring a job of interest to easily discern what the role entails and what your org’s all about.
• Optimizing your postings for search: Implement search engine optimization (SEO) best practices to ensure your career site and job descriptions rank high in search results for the exact job title and even variations of it. For instance, if it’s a Director of Demand Generation position, use synonym versions of that title (e.g., Demand Gen Leader, Head of Demand Marketing) in your posting.
• Designing a user-friendly interface: This task likely falls more so on your colleagues in Web/Marketing than it does on your TA team. That said, work with the relevant designer/developer resource at your company to make your careers page and job listings easy to navigate, read, and apply for. Just be sure to cater to mobile users and ensure the application process is simple.
• Highlighting your company culture: Ensure your company culture shines through by sharing employee stories, testimonials, and other info about your workplace diversity and wellness initiatives. Including images, videos, and interactive content to make the UX more engaging. (You’d be surprised how much sharing media and details like these can impact application conversions.)

In addition to job description optimization, it’s essential to revisit the language used in postings often. Candidates often apply for a job based on how well the job description resonates with them as well as how inclusive the language incorporated is. (Tip: Avoid gender-biased terms and phrases.)

2) Use social media and job boards to reach your ICP

The above recruitment marketing idea covers your owned efforts. Now, let’s turn to external channels on which you can promote your postings and employer brand at large to resonate with your potential candidates. There are two fairly obvious digital locales where you should allocate your time:

Social media

Create and share engaging content on platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook, which not only showcases your company culture but also promotes your open roles. Also, engage with your followers, actively participate in industry chats, and encourage employees to share your job postings.

As for paid ads for your job openings, A/B test different types of promoted postings on LinkedIn (e.g., ones for different kinds of roles for different teams and with different job titles) to see which perform best in terms of clicks and general engagement as well as actual application completions.

Job boards

Make the most of both popular and niche job boards to get word out about your open positions.

LinkedIn, Indeed, Glassdoor, ZipRecruiter: Those are the fairly obvious go-to channels.

That said, experiment with publishing postings to industry- and/or role-focused job boards to see how many applicants those generate. (Who knows? You and your talent team may find one or two more proven sourcing channels by investigating and posting to lesser-known career communities.)

3) Engage leads generated via recruitment “events”

Not all of our recruitment marketing ideas are ones that entail getting more leads into your talent pool. This one focuses on nurturing active candidates you earned through the two above approaches.

Here’s a common scenario your recruiting team has undoubtedly encountered over the years:

• You designate a few hundred dollars to get a posting for a highly important, senior-level role at your org to be the feature job listing on LinkedIn for a month or so.
• Thanks to the attractiveness of the role in question (due to well-written job description), you generate several hundred applicants and reach your applicant threshold.
• It’s essential to engage the most qualified candidates of interest who seem like the best fits for the position. And that requires the right talent engagement platform.

With the right ATS and CRM tools in place — with dynamic candidate profiles that are automatically created upon application submission and update as new prospect or recruiter actions are taken as well as built-in nurture features — you can easily (and quickly) a) determine who the top 3% of applicants are, and b) deliver bespoke, follow-up messaging to each of these job seekers.

You put a great deal of time, effort, and money into targeted recruitment marketing activities. Thus, you need to ensure you connect with generated leads in a timely, individualized manner.

Only when you’re able to do that in a repeatable and sustainable way can you achieve your recruiting KPIs and long-term TA goals (e.g., hiring top talent in your hiring managers’ desired timeframe).

Leveraging recruitment marketing tech 

With technology advancing faster than ever, recruiters need to stay abreast of the latest digital advancements that can help them work more efficiently and better connect with passive candidates.

One of the most effective ways to achieve this? Using leading recruitment marketing software. There are three distinct benefits of utilizing this kind of tech to engage candidates in your database.

Collect candidate details and track their preferences

With an integrated database (i.e., a CRM that has built in recruitment marketing capabilities and syncs with all other critical TA tools), recruiters can maintain more detailed and enriched candidate profiles and better understand the preferences and motivations of passive candidates. 

This insight can then be used to craft more compelling, customized messages and campaign materials. This improves the chances of converting passive candidates into engaged opportunities.

Investing in recruitment marketing tech (really, a powerful ATS and CRM) that offers comprehensive, dynamic data collection and robust applicant-tracking functionality saves talent specialists precious time (i.e., from not having to manually connect TA systems or “share” data across solutions).

With automatically updated, real-time data tied to all recruiting activities — including data related to targeted marketing ads, emails, and SMS messages — in a centralized platform your entire hiring team can access, recruiters like you can focus more on refining your nurture outreach efforts.

Organize and segment your talent pool for targeted comms

Another valuable benefit of using technology with recruitment marketing tools is the ability to segment your talent pool into specific groups based on factors such as skills, location, or industry.

By organizing your talent pool into meaningful segments, you can ensure that your outreach efforts are as relevant and targeted as possible. (And that you don’t waste any of your TA spend.)

The top recruitment technology provides customizable filters and tags. This makes it easy for recruiters to segment their candidate pool and craft custom-tailored comms for each prospect. (Something that also impacts the quality of candidate experience for each job seeker.)

Build candidate relationships with personalized, timely messages

Speaking of messaging, CRMs also offer automated email campaigns. Instead of relying on manual messaging, you can use this kind of tech to automate the delivery of personalized email to a single lead or multiple candidates at predetermined times.

Or, if you prefer to execute text-based recruitment marketing ideas (a likelihood, given how research continues to show SMS comms are preferred by many job seekers today), there’s tech that offers built-in candidate texting. Just look at Jobvite. Our customers automate responses to recent applicants to ensure they connect with them shortly after the click “Submit.”

Want more recruitment marketing ideas and hiring insights? Connect with the experts at Jobvite. Our team can explain how our recruitment technology can strengthen your talent acquisition strategy.

The post Recruitment Marketing Ideas to Attract Top Talent first appeared on Jobvite.

The number of openings reported in July by the BLS is hovering between 9 and 10 million jobs as of May 2023, with open roles outnumbering job seekers around 1.6 to 1. Recruiters and hiring managers are the first to point out how challenging it is to fill open requisitions.

Of these individuals, 58% say it’s because they cannot find enough qualified candidates, and 1 in 2 indicate they have more open roles to fill despite the talent shortage.

A tight labor market demands a new approach

While there are plenty of opportunities available for job seekers, the imbalance in supply and demand makes it difficult for employers to find the right candidates for their open roles.

First, there are significantly more jobs available than workers. According to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 3.5 million fewer people are in the workforce now than in February 2020.

The United States Department of Labor predicts this imbalance to last at least into the 2030s and likely longer, indicating the labor supply and demand imbalance is not a short-term phenomenon.

The second factor is the mismatch in skills demanded by employers and those possessed by the workforce. While this imbalance has been misaligned since before the pandemic, post-pandemic, the situation is expected to accelerate.

 According to the World Bank, over the next decade, the number of people of working age (between ages 15 and 65) will decline in the U.S. by more than three percent.

Opportunities for recruitment automation and AI

The need for innovative strategies, technology investment, and a data-driven approach in recruitment technology has never been more urgent.

With the current situation, it should come as no surprise that 47% of companies plan to increase spending on sourcing, including automated sourcing technology, according to Employ data.

Here are the top 9 ways recruitment automation and AI can help ease the burden on recruiters right now:

#1. Sourcing: Boost the recruiting capacity of your team with intelligent sourcing built to find high-quality candidates who match your open requisitions in just a single click.

#2. Job Advertising: Automated, programmatic advertising can optimize and personalize job ads or recruitment advertising campaigns. It can also maximize the reach of recruitment ads while minimizing costs.

#3. Resume Screening: Automate resume screening and shortlisting processes by scanning resumes for specified keywords and phrases.

#4. Chatbots and Messaging Platforms: Chatbots can automate communication with candidates, promptly responding to queries and questions via text or messaging platforms.

#5. Video Interviews: AI-powered video interviewing platforms can offer on-demand or live video interviews, allowing recruiters to prescreen, review and assess candidates quickly.

#6. Pre-Employment Assessments: Machine learning algorithms can support job-specific assessments, such as cognitive and technical assessments, to identify the best candidates for particular roles.

#7. Reference Checking: Artificial intelligence tools can streamline reference-checking tasks by contacting past employers in seconds.

#8. Candidate Relationship Management: AI-powered candidate relationship management platforms can enhance candidate engagement, including recruitment marketing,  personalized communications, and meeting scheduling.

#9. Improve Onboarding: AI can improve the onboarding experience by streamlining manual tasks, providing personalized communications, and generating employee performance reports.

The rewards of recruitment automation and AI

No matter how large or small your recruiting team may be, automation and AI lets you turn repetitive manual tasks into a more manageable workload that can easily scale up or down along with your hiring needs.

Let’s break down high-level rewards, benefits, and best practices of implementing automation and AI into your talent acquisition processes.

Free up valuable time

Recruiters spend countless hours on manual, repetitive tasks like posting job openings, screening applicants, and scheduling interviews.

Recruitment automation and AI-powered recruiting tools help to streamline these time-consuming tasks, so recruiters can focus on the critical, strategic elements of recruiting that require a human touch.

Source candidates faster

Competing on speed is one of the single most important areas recruiting organizations should seek to tackle.  Recruiters can reduce time spent on sourcing by around 30% using intelligent sourcing technology.

Enhance the candidate experience

When talent is tight, keeping candidates happy is critical — and communication is one of the key elements of a great candidate experience.

The human element is not removed from your hiring process; instead, it can create more space to devote to personalized, engaging experiences for candidates.

Improve hiring metrics

Performance metrics fall into two main categories: quantitative and qualitative. Recruitment automation tools and AI-powered solutions can help with both sides of the equation.

On the quantitative side, you can streamline the end-to-end hiring process, leading to improved measures like time-to-hire and conversion rate. On the qualitative side, you can reduce friction in the candidate experience, which can help to keep top talent engaged and lead to improved quality of hire.

Increase process visibility

Recruitment automation and AI tools can help to improve transparency throughout the hiring process, keeping teams aligned and ensuring that candidates never get lost in the shuffle.

Candidate profiles are managed in a single location and help give recruiters and hiring managers access to details about their current status, communications they’ve received, and next steps in the process.

Reduce unconscious bias

Eliminating bias from the hiring process is difficult because it’s seldom intentional. Recruitment automation and AI-powered technologies can help to reduce unconscious bias by taking human subjectivity out of tasks like resume review and candidate screening.

Some tools even hide personally identifiable information from a candidate’s profile, enabling an unbiased evaluation based entirely on relevant skills and experience.

Ready to begin?

The introduction of AI and automation in talent acquisition technology and recruiting software has helped talent teams speed up the hiring and recruiting process.  

And while there are an incredible amount of recruitment technology providers in the market, it’s important to know how to best leverage the right solutions for your business.

For more insight on how to deploy recruitment automation and AI to reach your hiring goals, download the comprehensive report: Automation and AI in Recruiting: Balancing the Risks and Rewards in a Modern Hiring Environment.

The post 9 Ways to Use Recruitment Automation and AI Right Now first appeared on Jobvite.

Within organizations large and small, the recruiting function has a huge opportunity to become more agile using data-driven insights, especially in light of the unsteady talent landscape.

As the talent landscape continues to evolve and challenges arise, recruiting teams have had to get even more nimble and learn how to analyze talent data in real-time to adjust and improve their processes.

From the number of open reqs to application source to candidate conversion rates, time-to-fill, quality of candidate, source of hire, DEI data, and internal mobility, there is virtually no end to the recruiting data you can track.

So, find out the most important metrics to your business and then keep a clear pulse on that data.

What is data-driven recruiting?

Data-driven recruiting is an approach to hiring that uses analytics specifically for talent acquisition to inform and improve the recruiting process.

For talent acquisition professionals, getting a handle on their analytics, creating visibility, and shining a light on the most vital aspects of their performance is critically important.

The right combination of recruitment software and services offers the capability to collect critical talent insights and provide real-time information on key recruiting metrics, making the hiring process more efficient for recruiters, more impactful for hiring managers, and more desirable for candidates.

3 reasons data-driven recruiting matters more than ever

1) Gain insights into the candidate, hiring manager, and recruiter experiences

When your organization taps into purpose-built recruitment solutions, it transforms the way teams look at the candidate, hiring manager, and recruiter experiences in their organization.

Data from AI and automation software provides a look at the hiring process from every angle to find areas of improvement and efficiency gains. Spot trends in these experiences in real-time and determine how you can improve critical areas based on the needs of your talent funnel.

Use key metrics like these to learn about your candidate, hiring manager, and recruiter experiences:

• Sourcing effectiveness
• Candidate conversion rates
• Application conversion rates
• Time candidates spend in the hiring process
• Hiring manager satisfaction
• Recruiter satisfaction
• Candidate satisfaction
• Quality of hire
• Overall time to fill
• Diversity of talent pipelines
• Employee retention rates

While many recruiting teams struggle in getting information about their talent pipeline, those that are able to quickly leverage data and the right automation tools can adapt their processes to deliver a better candidate experience and convert top talent.

2) Improve sourcing effectiveness

For too long, recruiters and hiring managers have had to find candidates based on feel and previous experience. But the sheer volume of open positions and time required to source quality candidates requires a better approach.

Data-driven recruiting can help you uncover more quality candidates by specifically understanding source effectiveness and measuring items like the number and quality of sourced hires.

Having the ability to measure, analyze, and refine your sourcing function is a key component to optimizing your entire recruiting operation.

With solid strategies, defined processes, capable CRM and sourcing technology, and thoughtful analytics, sourcing can become a core competency for any organization. This means you can find more talent from the places that deliver better hires consistently for your business.

3) Hire and retain higher-quality talent

A data-driven approach and the right recruiting analytics can help you analyze where candidates are entering the funnel so you can better nurture relationships and set your new hires up for success.

When you gain insight into your talent funnel, you can deliver a better candidate experience that drives recruiting results and leads to more engaged employees who will be engaged in their roles and stay at your company longer.

Understanding potential pain points based on data and identifying opportunities in the hiring process can help your talent team better find, attract, and nurture top talent.

Plus, managing expectations at every stage of the recruiting process can help you deliver quality candidates to hiring managers, a smoother, more engaging onboarding experience, and ultimately happier employees.

Remember, the recruiting and onboarding process is where talent acquisition teams set expectations and deliver initial impressions with candidates. This process should include providing accurate role descriptions, realistic views of the company culture, and information about remote work flexibility.

Deeper insights this way

Talent acquisition technology can bring the data together all in one place so you can see up-to-date candidate experience metrics, sourcing effectiveness metrics, and overall hiring metrics.

Tracking recruiting benchmarks can also help your business understand where their best sources of talent come from, so you can deliver more predictable hiring outcomes and get even more agile in your recruiting approach.

This piece on data-driven recruiting is an excerpt from our comprehensive guide: The Data-Driven Recruiting Handbook: Seven Ways to Leverage Talent Insights to Drive Results.

Download the full eBook for a complete understanding of how data-driven recruiting helps you reach your talent goals.

The post 3 Ways to Get Maximum Results from Data-Driven Recruiting first appeared on Jobvite.

• New product and service offerings they plan to release
• The eventual attrition of certain existing employees
• Positions that, at the time of planning, require backfills
• Desired sales initiatives and marketing campaigns
• The bandwidth of their in-house talent acquisition teams

The truth is creating a strategic hiring plan is just “Phase One” of preparations for the year ahead.

Why? Because things change (a lot and often) at every large-scale org today — internally (e.g., adoption of new or altered business model) and externally (e.g., dealing with poor economic conditions).

And the same is undoubtedly true for your business.

How talent leaders can help their teams “switch gears” amid strategic hiring plan changes

As a talent acquisition leader, it’s your responsibility to ensure you and your recruiters keep up with the fast-paced changes within the job market and your organization at large adjust on the fly if/as needed.

From labor market shifts and tech advancements, to new laws and industry demands, what may have held true at the beginning of the year may no longer be applicable or sufficient months down the line.

Here are specific facets of your recruiting and hiring efforts that must be evaluated monthly to ensure your team can make the requisite changes based on hiring plan modifications made by your C-suite.

Learn about emerging positional needs at your org

In an age of rapid digitalization and technological advancements, it’s no surprise that new job roles, skills, and competencies are emerging regularly. Revisiting your company’s hiring plan quarterly with other hiring stakeholders allows you to identify and fill any new skill gaps that may have emerged.

This regular reassessment of your recruiting insights and hiring needs ensures your company can compete for and convert top talent to fill critical roles and adjust its talent acquisition efforts on the fly.

“It’s important not to make drastic changes considering short-term economic headwinds,” Employ SVP People & Talent Corey Berkey recently wrote for Forbes.

“Instead, ensure all plans not only help overcome a potential economic downturn but also complement long-term recruiting strategies once the economy bounces back.”

Many C-suites abide by this wise approach by baking budget into their annual plans for talent acquisition to find the right individuals for future TBD positions. This way, when new headcount needs invariably arise down the line, TA has the flexibility and agility to act quickly on those reqs.

Adjust TA activities based on budget and goal changes

Reviewing your hiring budget and goals every quarter to ensures business leaders are on track and can make any necessary adjustments to stay ahead of the game.

Not to mention, in a volatile economic climate, your initial hiring budget and goals might change due to unforeseen circumstances or opportunities. Or, shifts in financial circumstances might require companies to adjust their hiring budget or redirect resources to different areas of the org.

A quarterly review allows you to make informed decisions and reallocate resources as needed, ultimately paving the way to meeting your long-term objectives.

Redefine the “perfect” candidate for each team and role

What the optimal candidate looks like for certain positions and business units will change over time, given the needs of your org and specific departments will change over time.

Revisiting the ideal candidate profile for each role and team at your company and ensuring recruiters know what to look for in leads will help you hire only the most applicable individuals.

You need to ensure the “purple-squirrel” candidates you deem ideal for your business can come from a variety of backgrounds so as to engage a diverse array of talent for openings.

Creating a hiring plan template for your ICPs is one thing. But, don’t forget to regularly revisit the core elements of your TA strategy: everything from writing job descriptions, to developing targeted recruitment marketing campaigns, to working with HR on the onboarding process.

Fine-tune your hiring process with your ops manager

Conducting a quarterly evaluation of your recruitment processes — often overseen by talent operations — enables you to identify and rectify any inefficiencies or weaknesses in your hiring strategy.

This can range from optimizing job postings on social media and job boards for better visibility and engagement to tweaking your structured interview process to improve the candidate experience.

Drawing on this data tied to your TA efforts, you can glean valuable insights into ever-evolving candidate expectations and the changing job market landscape to optimize your hiring approach.

Discover how you can execute on and adapt your hiring plan with ease using Evolve, our award-winning Talent Acquisition Suite for enterprise organizations like yours.

The post How to Adjust to Strategic Hiring Plan Changes first appeared on Jobvite.