• Can't even define the term "strategy" as it relates to their needs
• Don't know the available strategies in recruiting
• Don't have a name for their own recruiting strategy
• Don't know the steps involved in preparing a recruiting strategy
• Have never written down their strategy so that others can follow it
• Have never compared their strategy in recruiting to their competitors' recruiting strategies in order to ensure that theirs is superior
• Measure the effectiveness of their recruiting strategy
What Exactly Is a Strategy?
The basic premise of having a clearly defined strategy is that by focusing your efforts and looking at the big picture, recruiting activities will produce results aligned with needs and have a significantly larger economic impact on the business.
Having a clearly defined strategy sets up an architecture to focus your efforts and planning beyond basic tactical recruiting and towards establishing a competitive advantage in recruiting. A strategy focuses the actions of a recruiting professional, or group, telling everyone what to concentrate on and what is unimportant.
From a practical standpoint, being strategic includes these elements:
• Establishing a competitive advantage. The primary goal of a strategy is to drive actions that gain your office a sustainable competitive advantage in your industry. It demands an ongoing competitive analysis of major "talent competitors" and adjusting of strategy to keep competitors from mirroring or gaining an advantage over current recruiting efforts.
• Demonstrating economic impact. Strategic impact is measured in profit, return on investment (ROI), increased revenue, higher market share and increased margins. They rely on extensive information gathering and forecasting of the business environment.
• Continually evolving. Being strategic means continually evolving and reacting to any change in the environment. It requires you be proactive and aggressive. If requires that you seek out problems and opportunities.
• Data driven. Strategic functions rely heavily on the analysis of data and the measurement of outcomes.
• A way of thinking. Being strategic is as much a way of thinking as it is a way of managing.
What Are the Available Recruiting Strategies?
Depending upon your resources, marketplace, lines of business, and company objectives the right recruiting strategy for your organization is unique. In fact, strategies cannot be “generalized” from company to company. Recruiting strategies are complex and individual to the organization. A solid strategy, does, however, contain up to 12 distinct elements. In order to develop a complete recruiting strategy, select one or more items from each of the twelve elements. These elements include:
• The primary goals of recruiting
• The prioritization of jobs
• The performance level to target
• The experience level to target
• The employment status of the candidate to target
• When to search
• Where to search
• Who does the recruiting
• Primary sourcing tools
• What skills to assess
• How to assess skills
• Primary selling points to offer
Comprehensive recruiting strategies cannot be accurately covered in with a single word or even a simple phrase. Before you can put a name on your strategy, you first need to make a variety of decisions within each of the 12 different strategy elements.
The net result is a strategy that might, for example, sound something like this:
An external, hire-to-learn strategy targeting top performers: Our strategy is a skill-building, "hire to learn" strategy focusing on hiring experienced top performers (who are currently employed by competitors) into pre-identified key jobs. Our strategy employs a pre-need, external "within the industry" search that primarily utilizes sourcing and recruiting specialists. A branding strategy and employee referral program are utilized to attract candidates. Candidates are selected primarily through interviews that screen candidates for pre-identified corporate competencies. The primary "candidates selling" approach is a great culture and proven learning and growth opportunities.
With a strategy in hand, you can not only focus your internal resources to the task of attracting top talent, you can bring into line outside resources to your company’s distinctive strategy to ensure consistent messaging in the candidate marketplace regardless of the spokesperson.
