Recruitment Strategies

Recruiters employ various tactics to bring the best talent to their companies. Find best practices and research strategies in employment branding, sourcing techniques, social recruiting, and stay on top of the latest recruiting technology trends.

Recruitment, covering the entire process of sourcing, selecting, and onboarding employees to an organization, is a function typically housed within Human Resources. The person responsible for developing effective recruiting strategies will usually be a talent acquisition manager, director of personnel, or a recruiting/sourcing manager. Recruiting program changes at a strategic level may include the enhancement of candidate communications, the development of talent pipe-lining, succession planning, the optimization of recruitment channels, re-evaluation of interviewing processes, and the deployment of new recruitment technology.

Effective recruitment strategies are a pivotal aspect of procuring and retaining high-quality talent to contribute to organization's success. The job market is becoming progressively more competitive and skill sets continue to grow more diverse. Given this environment, recruiters are required to be more selective in their candidate picks, since under-performing recruitment measures can have a long-term negative impact on an organization. Among these effects are high training and development expenses necessary to counteract the prevalence of poor performance and high turnover rates, which reverberate into aspects of employment such as morale, productivity and the preservation of the desired corporate culture.

The recruitment process supplies the organization a pool of potential candidates from which thoughtful selection should be made to fill positions. Successful recruitment begins with proper predictive measures. In this phase of the recruitment process, an organization develops plans to fill future job openings based on an exploration of future requirements. Steps must be taken to measure available internal and external talent and the present and expected resources available to be expended in order to attract and retain talent.

Recruitment may be conducted internally through the promotion of current employees or by way of employee referrals. Internal recruitment is generally the most cost-effective recruitment approach. Job openings can be advertised through physical and electronic job postings, in organizational newsletters and office memos. Not only are these methods low-cost, but are also completely controlled by internal recruitment managers who are more in line with the corporate mission and goals.

Internal recruitment strategies do not consistently produce the number or quality of personnel needed. In these cases, the organization needs to recruit from external sources, either by encouraging walk-in applicants, publicizing vacancies in periodicals and Internet job boards, and utilizing visual and audio media sources. More direct talent "head hunting" is available in the forms of third-party employment agencies that orchestrate and maintain thorough talent searches, corporate job fairs, and college recruitment efforts.

These topics include strategies for determining where the job is posted, how candidates are asked to apply, and how the applicants are selected. As technology has changed, strategies have also evolved to include broader avenues of seeking good employees.

Human resources departments are always busy trying to fill positions within the organization. Therefore, they should use the most cost-efficient and effective strategies to fill them. Some organizations may choose to outsource the task to professional recruitment agencies who can separate the qualified candidates from the unqualified candidates. Managers and executives of organizations should be willing to try different ways of hiring employees and should work closely with the human resources department

Recruitment strategies are what determine the quality of an employee hired for an organization. If several poor employees are hired in succession, perhaps the strategies should be rethought. Organizations will have to be more aggressive in their strategies when the economy is good so that they will stand out to applicants and convince them that they would be good employers.

Nearly everyone knows about the traditional strategies, such as use of classified advertisements and job fairs. But more and more organizations are utilizing nontraditional strategies such as former employees, group interviews, headhunters, interns, Internet searches, job offers to stellar employees of other businesses, mentors, most-wanted lists, multimedia job descriptions, previously overlooked applications, open houses, personalized gifts, professional organizations, public records, recruitment managers, referral incentives, scholarships, social network sites and special-interest meetings.