The True Value of Great Recruiting
It’s easy to say, “our workforce is our most valuable asset,” but unfortunately, not all organizations have reached a level of understanding of the true value of recruiting to company strategy and growth. Unless you’ve taken tangible steps to show that recruiting and onboarding top talent is part of your company DNA, you’re really just paying lip service to these noble objectives. Recruiting can’t be viewed as simply a reactive process, just filling hires as they come. You need a proactive approach that enlists buy-in from the top down, engages the right stakeholders, controls costs and leverages a well-branded talent-first culture.
Here are a few ways to inspire the type of culture that elevates the value of talent acquisition.
Focus on Talent from Day One
While this tip seems to be geared for early-stage companies, the lesson can be applied to almost any organization. Management teams can often be singularly focused early on with getting products out the door and building mind- and market-share, with a trailing focus on the people that will actually fuel those critical activities. Putting the people decisions off until later creates a reactive cycle that can linger long into the future. Rather, focus on talent from day one. Build a strategic plan to get the right people in the right seats on the right team, allocate the appropriate resources, and project anticipated costs and salaries with data that can support your plan. Once you build a talent-first foundation, it becomes easier to maintain recruiting momentum and build a more predictable process.
Show You’re Dedicated to Controlling Costs
Recruiting teams have an important partner in the finance organization, through which recruiting budgets usually flow. Recruiting metrics can help show you have an eye on controlling costs to support the business. Show how much faster you are filling roles and how you’re lowering the cost of an empty seat. Quantifying cost savings is not only a best practice in recruiting, but it will also help you engage this critical stakeholder.
Make it a Collaborative Effort
Hiring managers are also key stakeholders in your quest to build the right recruiting culture. Hiring managers generally know what they want in a new hire; they just don’t always quite know how to make it all happen. That’s where collaboration and improved interaction come into play. Build a closer one-to-one relationship, share data and best practices, set realistic expectations, and make sourcing and hiring as efficient as possible to get hiring managers more engaged and excited about the process. They’ll have to do their homework too, but let them lean on you to show how the process works best, and you’ll be their conduit to a more dynamic hiring mindset.
Share Your Best Practices
Tech recruiters know that the ideal recruiting process is finding active rather than passive tech talent, with fewer interactions needed to move candidates through the funnel and producing a more engaging candidate experience. That’s great news for tech recruiters, but what about the rest of the recruiting team? Best practices such as focusing on active talent, looking more deeply into profiles to gain insights, and generating more compelling messaging to candidates are things that can be shared across the recruiting organization.
Company cultures that embrace talent acquisition know that recruiting is far more than just a means to an end. If you can get every stakeholder to buy in on your vision, you’ll be well on your way to achieving that objective.
