Hiring GlossaryWhat is recruiting strategy?
What is a recruitment strategy?
Imagine two companies that are both trying to make a lot of hires in a short period of time. For the sake of simplicity, let’s call them “Company A” and “Company B”.
Company A decides to focus on speed right now, so they publish job openings, schedule interviews ASAP with whoever’s free to participate and extend offers to any candidate who seems good enough to fit a role’s basic requirements.
Company B, on the other hand, decides to spend more time upfront. They settle on a standardised format for job descriptions (which includes outlining what will make someone successful in the role), create interview scorecards and questions based on this information and assign specific interviewers to assess candidates on particular skills.
So what’s the difference between these two approaches? Company A is taking the fly-by-the-seat-of-their-pants approach to recruiting and Company B has established a recruiting strategy. And it’s probably safe to say that being involved in hiring is a lot less chaotic at Company B.
A recruiting strategy looks at how your recruiting practices – which can include things like identifying target candidates, defining your employer brand and outlining the steps of your hiring process – will ultimately help your business succeed.
At Greenhouse, we advocate a simple recruiting strategy called “structured interviewing”, which helps you weave consistency, fairness and alignment into all stages of the recruitment process. It’s designed to help you effectively assess talent, facilitate hiring team collaboration, improve candidate experience and reduce hiring bias. To learn more about the benefits of structured interviews, see this blog post.
Why is a recruitment strategy important?
Returning to our earlier example of Company A vs Company B, we can see how these two approaches can lead to drastically different results. While Company A might be faster at initially getting offers out and new hires in the door, the likelihood of those new hires being successful in the long run is much slimmer.
And while Company B was slower to start, their strategic and thoughtful approach means they’re much more likely to make hires who stick around and make an impact on the company – a concept that’s sometimes described as “employee lifetime value” or ELTV.
Let’s consider a few more reasons why defining your recruiting strategy is so important:
- It’s a more intentional use of internal resources
Hiring is an expensive and time-consuming process. Consider how many hours it takes for a hiring team to interview candidates, share their feedback and come to a decision. When you have a recruiting strategy, your interview process is streamlined and effective, making the best use of everyone’s time. Looking for a real-life example? Discover how HubSpot doubled its employee base with 1,000 new hires and four new global offices to meet a need for speed – all in just three years – by partnering with Greenhouse.
- You’re able to rely on data rather than gut feelings
Having a recruiting strategy means you’re consistently collecting data across all stages of the hiring process, so your hiring teams can quickly identify bottlenecks and pivot as needed. The rich recruiting reporting you get with structured hiring gives hiring teams better insight into hiring trends, helping you refine your evaluation criteria and adjust your recruitment process to get measurably better at hiring over time.
- You enhance your employer brand and candidate experience
According to LinkedIn, companies with strong employer branding see a 50% decrease in cost-per-hire and are able to hire employees 1–2 times faster than their competition. Having a clear recruiting strategy elevates your employer branding by ensuring a great candidate experience and demonstrating professionalism and commitment to fairness. This, in return, helps you attract quality candidates while embracing efficiency.
Key elements of an effective recruiting strategy
Now that you’ve seen why recruiting strategies can be so impactful, you might be wondering how you can create one. Here are a few of the key elements of effective recruiting strategies:
- You define your target candidate profiles
An effective recruiting strategy starts with defining the ideal candidate through the business objective of the role. Think about the long-term contribution they will make to your company and map out the core attributes you want to screen for, then define your candidate’s success profile.
- You use data analytics to guide informed decision-making
When it’s time to review interview feedback, the hiring manager will make an informed hiring decision based on data and evidence from your interview process. Your scorecards, take-home assessment, interview feedback and other documentation should give you the necessary, unbiased data to identify your superstar candidate.
- You create a compelling employee value proposition
An employee value proposition – or EVP for short – is a statement geared towards prospective (and current) talent, creating a clear vision of why they would want to work at your company. Having a well-thought-out and clearly articulated EVP is an essential element of your recruiting strategy that can help you to both attract and retain talent. Research from Achievers shows that the culture and values of an organisation are the top factors of employee satisfaction, and over 75% of employees consider it “very important” to work for a company with defined core values.
Innovative recruiting strategies to consider
Once you’ve got those core elements of your recruitment strategy nailed down, you can start to experiment with some more innovative tactics. Here are just a few ideas to get you started.
- Leveraging social media and digital platforms
Social media recruiting is the practice of using social media to build your employer brand, grow your talent community and share job openings and company updates. When you rely on candidates visiting your company website or applying through job listings they find online, you’re limiting yourself to active, inbound applicants. But when you consistently share content through social media, you can build brand awareness and catch the attention of passive candidates who may be interested in joining your talent community or potentially applying for jobs in future.
- Utilising employee referral programs effectively
With a well-defined recruiting strategy in place, your existing employee base can be a rich source of additional candidates. To tap into this potential, you will need to create guidelines and structure for an employee referral programme. A few best practices to adopt include making employees feel appreciated when they submit referrals, keeping them informed as their referrals progress and rewarding engagement in the programme.
- Implementing diversity and inclusion initiatives
Diversity in the workplace – often described in the context of broader initiatives such as diversity, equity and inclusion (DE&I) or belonging – refers to having an employee base that’s made up of people from a range of backgrounds, which can include various aspects of identity such as gender, race or ethnicity, age, sexual orientation, religion and educational background.
“Building belonging represents the highest outcome of all our cross-functional DE&I efforts,” explains Jamie Adasi, Global Head of People Experience & IDEA at Greenhouse.
Here are some of the specific steps Greenhouse has taken towards achieving that vision:
- Creating a diverse pipeline of qualified candidates
- Mitigating bias in the interview process
- Fostering an inclusive experience for all employees
- Formalising employee resource groups with budgets and executive sponsors
- Establishing the Greenhouse DE&I Council
- Investing in DE&I product innovations and enhancements like our candidate name pronunciation feature
- Supporting initiatives that build belonging within our greater community
Consider what we’ve shared here to be a starting point – stay open to new ideas and don’t be afraid to experiment with different tactics as long as they stay aligned with your big picture recruiting strategy.
Measuring the success of your recruiting strategy
How will you know if your recruiting strategy is successful? One of the easiest ways to tell is by tracking your recruiting key performance indicators (KPIs). You’ll want to work with your company leaders to decide on the specific KPIs you’ll track, but here are a few suggestions from the Greenhouse Talent Acquisition team.
KPI #1: Qualified candidates per opening
Just like marketing and sales measure qualified leads, recruiters can measure the number of qualified candidates who have reached the first milestone of their interview process. This is a leading indicator that the interview funnel is filling up with potential hires. At Greenhouse, we measure it by how many candidates make it out of application review to the second stage in our interview process, a phone call with a recruiter. To learn more about this KPI, check out this blog post.
KPI #2: Candidate survey results
You can measure candidate survey results by the proportion of candidates who answer “Yes” or “Strong Yes” to the prompt “Overall, my candidate experience was a positive one” in a post-interview survey, like the one offered through Greenhouse. You can learn more about this KPI and why it’s so important to prioritise the candidate experience in this blog post.
KPI #3: Days to offer
Days to offer allows you to track how quickly candidates move through your recruiting and interview process. This KPI measures the number of days that pass between when people apply and when they ultimately accept or reject an offer. You can average this across all roles to get a sense of the true average speed of your interview process. Learn more about this KPI here.
KPI #4: Offer acceptance rate
Offer acceptance rate (OAR) is the percentage of extended offers that are accepted. A strong OAR usually indicates that the team has successfully filled a pipeline with qualified candidates, created an efficient and thorough interview process, put thought into the candidate experience and helped get the right offers to the right candidates. Learn more about how to measure OAR – and some common mistakes to avoid – here.
KPI #5: Hires to goal
Hires to goal measures how well you are meeting your hiring objectives overall. At the outset of every year and quarter (or maybe even every month), your team sets a specific goal for the number of hires required. The goal set should consider how long it takes to build a job req, fill a funnel with quality candidates, move these candidates through the process and close an offer. The output of that analysis is a number, like 32 hires in Q3. Tracking and reporting on your organisation’s progress towards the goal is a critical component of measuring your recruiting success. Read more about this KPI here.
While the KPIs we’ve mentioned above can help you measure your hiring process, feedback can also be helpful in understanding what’s working well and identifying areas for improvement. In addition to running candidate surveys, you may also want to collect feedback from hiring managers and other hiring team members. Do they notice any bottlenecks in the process or any opportunities to move faster? Do they have advice on how to better assess candidates’ skills in certain areas?
Finally, keep in mind that while the core of your recruiting strategy and the way you measure it will probably remain constant, the talent market is always changing. This means it’s important to keep an eye on what’s happening and adapt your approach based on market trends like remote work, flexible hours and salary expectations for specific roles.
Getting started with your recruitment strategy
You’ve now got a good sense of what it takes to build a recruitment strategy, but how do you actually get started?
Step 1: Assess your current recruiting strategy
Take stock of how your company approaches recruiting today. Do you see any gaps or areas for improvement? Could you be more consistent or add more structure to any aspect of your hiring process? Which recruiting KPIs (if any) are you already measuring? Is there an opportunity to try out one or two innovative tactics? If you need more help with this, check out our Hiring Maturity assessment, a short quiz that will give you insights into how to improve every aspect of recruiting.
Step 2: Evaluate your tech stack
Next, take a look at your tech stack. Tools and technology like an applicant tracking system (ATS) can support your recruiting strategy by streamlining processes like writing job descriptions, interview scorecards and interview questions. Recruiting tools can also collect data so you’re able to measure how different teams and departments are performing. And they can automate tasks to save time and create a better experience for candidates.
3. Build a team of supporters
Finally, make sure you’ve got a team in your corner who champion working this way. If your company currently has more of a chaotic approach to recruiting, it’s unlikely to change without support from your CEO or other leaders. Make the case that the initial time and effort it takes to build a recruiting strategy will pay off in the very near future when you have a consistent, scalable hiring process and data that gives you up-to-the-minute insights on your performance.
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