When you need to acquire top talent you have three options: recruit from within your organization, recruit from outside your organization, or rent talent from a staffing agency. There are benefits and advantages to each option. There are also potential disadvantages associated with each option. Creating a successful recruiting strategy is neither easy nor straightforward. This guide will provide you with a broad strategy as well as tactical insights to generate a successful recruiting strategy.

Grow Your Team From Within

There are incredible upsides to recruiting from within your company. The candidate has already proven their worth to your organization, they fit in with your company culture, and the cost of promoting from within is immensely less than other options. There are also some cons to recruiting from within. Firstly, many companies just aren't big enough to fill the need from within. Also, top talent is rarely lying in wait, biding their time for a promotion. Additionally, if you promote from within, you'll end up having to hire a replacement for the promoted individual. So what do the other options look like?

Grow Your Team From Without

The primary reason to recruit talent from outside your organization is quality. You need the very best candidate and the individuals you currently have lack the experience or expertise you need. The primary downside of hiring from outside is cost. The true cost of hiring a new employee is going to be different for each organization but the issues will be the same. There are costs associated with employing HR staff, costs associated with paying to promote the job to candidates, and costs associated with screening, interviewing, and onboarding new hires. The market your organization is based in can exacerbate the issue by increasing costs and competition. For instance, hiring in Los Angeles, California is generally going to be more expensive than in Fargo, North Dakota.

Work With A Recruiting Agency

Hiring a temp through a staffing agency can be an effective alternative to options 1 and 2. The service does cost money. However, you will reduce your costs by saving time in the hiring process and being hand-delivered the perfect candidate. The first two options are most often viable. When they're not, staffing agencies like Premier are here to help. If you're going it alone, you'll want to develop a cohesive recruitment strategy. Let's get started with some high-level strategy.

Forecasting

As you plan your organization's future, factor in your staffing needs. While generating your annual operating plans create a workforce plan as well. What are your critical roles? How many hires will need to be made in the coming year? What scenarios could affect these numbers? Identify key performance indicators for each role. Evaluate talent availability internally and externally. When evaluating internally perform a review of potential candidates for the critical roles you'll be looking to fill. Think about succession plans for those individuals as they'll be leaving vacancies behind. When evaluating externally perform a market analysis. Does a talent pool exist? If so what are the going rates and benefits for each position?

Build Value

Once you know who you need, identify how to appeal to them. Why would someone want to work for your company? If there aren't a lot of good reasons, work on that. Poll your current employees and find out what they like or dislike about your organization. Fix the things they don't like and frame the things they do like as a value proposition. Once you identify the pros of working with you, work that into your job descriptions.

Attractive Job Descriptions

Job descriptions are often the first interaction a candidate has with your organization. You can convey a lot about your company through job descriptions. This is where building value is most important. You're promoting the company as much as you're promoting the job opening. Make sure your job descriptions are compliant with all federal and state regulations as well as any terms associated with job boards where you'll be posting them.

Perfect Your Interview Process

Plan everything from the screening process all the way through onboarding the new hire. Each organization is different but one thing is consistent across all industries and company sizes... planning pays off. Figure out whether you need to do any skills testing, how many interviews are necessary, and who is necessary to be present for each interview. Once you have a precise interview process, you'll need some candidates to interview.

Promote Your Open Positions

Post your jobs to job boards such as Indeed, Monster, Glassdoor, or LinkedIn. But don't stop there. Atypical promotion efforts are often underutilized. Capitalize on the opportunities your competitors are ignoring to achieve the maximum exposure.

• Host a meetup event for your company. Showcase your company, the benefits of working for you, and allow candidates to meet their potential coworkers.
• Implement an employee referral program. Referrals are known to be more effective than cold contacts. Reward your current staff for referring talented candidates and reap the rewards.
• Don't ignore passive candidates. Promote your jobs and/or your company to potential employees using sites like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter.
• Utilize niche job boards. While the big hitters like Indeed are a great place to post your jobs, there are other sites that can perform well for niche industries and positions. Perform a quick Google search to see if there are niche job boards in your industry.
• Reach out to former applicants. If you've hired for a similar position in the past, reach out to the candidates that didn't make the cut.
• Reach out to former employees. If a former employee left on good terms and has acquired some good experience since they left they could make a great candidate. Don't be afraid to reach out to former employees.

Be Prepared To Make Competitive Offers

When doing your forecasting for the year you should identify what a competitive offer looks like. Be prepared financially to make such offers. All of this will be for naught if you can't match an offer from a competitor.

By now you should be on track to create a successful recruiting strategy. If you need any help along the way or are seeking a temp or new hire, reach out to us today. We'd love to help.