Recruiting is a time-consuming job. There are candidates to hunt for, resumes to read and job seekers to interview. Should your company be recruiting full-time, or only when the need presents itself?
Recruiting on a regular basis can provide you the opportunity to find top talent in an instant. Waiting to recruit only when you have an open position may save on resources, but it puts you at the mercy of a limited number of candidates. Which is the best way?
Here’s what we recommend:
Any good recruiter will tell people to keep their resume up to date and never wait until they need a job to do so. Well, let's follow our own advice. We should be recruiting all the time — at the BTS / MRT stations, at parties, at networking events, online. Don't wait until you have a job opening to look for someone. Build your pool early and often.
The ABCs of sales, “always be closing,” apply 100% to the recruiting world. Recruitment teams should always be recruiting. Talent acquisition is not a reactive function. Companies that wish to take proactive measures to build solid talent pipelines for current and future needs should start by identifying the critical talent segments of their business. These are critical roles that are in some cases tougher to fill.
In our opinion, we should recruit only in response to newly opened positions. First of all, because hiring demands can change every quarter, it's neither efficient nor fair to your HR team to expend resources on positions that may change or disappear entirely. Secondly, if recruiters are actively working on a position that doesn't exist yet, it can make existing team members nervous, leading to employee churn.
You should always be developing relationships with people, who may be not suited for your needs now, but maybe a perfect fit for great roles in the future, or may even become clients. Maintaining an active and live network is important to reduce the time to hire, but much more importantly, to shape the empathy and personality of your company's brand and culture.
Organizations should always be recruiting to keep a finger on the pulse of available talent, with interviews framed as exploratory conversations. Doing so keeps the company top of mind with candidates, while also determining their overall interest in a future open position. This saves time and money, creates a pipeline of ready candidates and also shortens the interview-to-onboarding process.
Today it’s an employee’s market, so it's obligatory to make sure I’ve got a good bench of potential employees in case I need to add to my team or there's an opening because someone took a position at another company. I always want to have an idea of the type and quality of candidate out there should the need arise. It's important, though, to be honest, that there's no immediate opening.
If you want to find the best talent, the latent talent, the happy-at-their-jobs talent, you must recruit on an ongoing basis. And it needs to be a small part of every leader's and manager's job. Have coffee with potential candidates to get to know each other, or ask someone in your network for referrals to top talent. Share that info with your recruiters and keep the pipeline full.
Companies need to focus on promoting their company brand online. Showcase current employees and post pictures of employee events, meetings, and accomplishments. Promoting the company brand and employees throughout the year will allow visitors to see what the company culture is like. When you are ready to post a position, the job seeker will look at the company website and social media and see a glimpse of what your culture is about.
You should be recruiting all year long regardless of how many positions you have open. The best way to do this is through the use of talent communities. Many HR software tools offer solutions for collecting contact information of candidates so that you can stay in touch with them through updated company news briefs or targeted campaigns to keep them engaged and interested in your company.
For most positions, ongoing recruitment is ineffective. But for hard-to-fill roles, it is essential. Roles that generate revenue for the business should always be open — you can always make room for a super salesperson! It also helps to see what your competitors are doing. Other hard-to-fill roles, like those in cybersecurity or new technologies, can also benefit from having an open role.
HR should recruit in accordance with a talent management plan that anticipates needs years down the road. Rather than continuously recruiting for the same, stale positions through the years, HR needs a dynamic, proactive approach that shifts with the organization. This is achieved by working closely with leadership to align talent acquisition with operating models changes on an ongoing basis.
If you’re only recruiting talent when there are open positions, you’ll end up with the best of the leftovers. Unless your product or service is extraordinarily niche and the only game in town, recruiting must be constant and consistent. Continuous recruitment boosts your brand and helps you establish critical relationships with top talent who may never work for you, but they may refer to others.
For a company with relatively stable employee retention, it makes sense to only recruit for positions as needed. However, if you are a company in an industry where employees are constantly being poached (e.g., tech), it is wise to have a repository of resumes you can turn to should the turnover rate start to spike. Odds are at least a handful of those applicants will be in the market for a new opportunity.