Conscious Recruitment

Throughout my career in recruitment, I have heard a great number of HR leaders complaining about various problems, such as high turnover, employee demotivation, lack of engagement and shortage of talents. However, being conscious about the corporate recruitment processes and finding links between the various fields of HR can provide you with the keys to resolve your company’s specific HR related issues.

Links between Recruitment and other fields of HR

Although, I consider it essential to have separate teams for the different HR functions, constant communication and cooperation are required between these teams in order to be able to analyse entire processes, not just certain phases. For instance, in case of high employee turnover, it is worth exploring the reasons for employee disengagement as well as the phases and elements of recruitment practices, including jobboards, tests, suppliers, ATS etc. Introducing talent programmes, for example, does not only improve employee retention, but affects recruitment as well: it will attract talented and motivated employees who wish to develop and advance in their careers.

It would also be necessary to define the major characteristics of our company culture, how we might want to transform it, and what type of candidates will belong to our target group of potential employees.

How to make recruitment conscious

1.Analysing metrics: It is important to choose relevant and informative metrics to analyse the recruitment process efficiently. It is definitely worth measuring how many candidates come from various sources, i.e. jobboards, agencies, referral programmes, what percentage of them gets hired, and what the average length of employment is for employees coming from different sources. This type of data analysis can definitely help you to formulate recruitment strategy as well as to reduce costs: it will provide you with information about the best jobboards, most effective suppliers, best interview techniques etc., to summarize, what is worth investing in.

2.The composition of the recruitment team: If you have a well-defined recruitment strategy, you also need to be clear about what type of roles are needed in your team and what type of skills recruiters should have. It needs to be decided how many researchers and junior or senior recruiters are required, whether they should have agency or corporate recruitment background, experience in sales, call centre environment or administrative roles, or they should have leadership influencing experience and knowledge about employer branding.

There is one factor which definitely has to be considered planning a team: the recruitment function has to have a reputation within the company which enables HR to be considered equal partners by the management and participate in strategy formation.

3. The reputation of the company:It is a fact that recruiters become the faces of a company, therefore, you need to select carefully who will represent the brand. But in today’s recruitment practice it is not only the direct contact with candidates which can contribute to a positive impression of an employer, but the company’s presence on social media sites and its employer branding campaigns. The more active a company is on social media, the more engaging communication strategy it has, the wider the talent pool becomes, and the more talented candidates it is able to attract, therefore, the more competitive the company becomes in the market.

What I could say as a conclusion of this article is that consciousness can not be forced, but if you always seek opportunities to improve processes, you will achieve your goals. Because ’best practices’ do not exist, just ’better practices’, which can always be developed.