I received an email recently asking for information on recruiting best practices within immature companies. It’s a solid request but broad in scope because, depending on who you ask, “recruiting best practices” will vary with the number of people you ask. What I feel are recruiting best practices may differ at many levels from someone else’s. I say this because it was my experience with the recruiting practices at many of my former clients that ultimately drove me out of recruiting and into what I do now. There is a school of thought that small companies need to approach recruiting best practices differently from large companies. At a high level I disagree. I believe that a company, regardless of size or maturity, needs quality, effective recruiting practices and has the ability to implement them. You can spend some money now or spend much more later on. In determining what these best practices are for your company a number of questions need to be asked and evaluated. That said there are some issues early stage companies deal with that large companies don’t and vice versa.
Recruiting best practicesI suspect that if I asked 100 recruiters what they consider to be recruiting best practices I’d get similar responses at a high level and different responses at a granular level. For example, if I asked recruiters whether or not candidates should receive a response to job inquiries I believe they’d all say “yes” (high level). Where many people would differ is in answering the question, “How should I respond and in what timeframe? (granular level)” Elaine Orler wrote a post recently and told a story of an individual at a large company who asked each of his recruiting departments around the world a question with a negative consequence to get ideas on how to make the candidate experience better. It was a very interesting approach to get his recruiters to look at issues in a new way. The bottom line is, overall there are practices that we can probably agree are positive to our organizations. How they’re implemented is where we may differ in our approaches.
Regardless of the practices you implement and the way you choose to implement them, they need to align with your answers to the questions I pose below. There are some questions that will be more appropriate given the size and maturity of your company, but in general there are certain questions you need to be asking to begin the process. This list is not comprehensive but will give you a good jumping off point.
What is your business strategy?
Are you working into the business strategy and is everyone in the company aligned with it?
Is your executive team operating according to values, vision, mission, and strategy? Is everyone else in the company?
What is your turnover rate? Why are you having turnover? What is turnover costing?
What is the experience we want our candidates left with?
What are the common denominators that appear in our successful and unsuccessful employees? You need to look at skills, abilities, personality traits, work ethic, motivators, etc.
Have we built hiring profiles according to items 1, 2, 3, & 6? Are we clear on our corporate culture and including that in they types of people we need to hire?
Are our recruiters in partnership with our hiring managers? Do our hiring managers see the value in the recruiters?
The questions I’ve posed are imperative to begin to determine not only your recruitment strategy but also recruiting best practices that follow and align with this strategy. Remember that your talent strategy (which include recruiting best practices) needs to align with your business strategy. Without this alignment you won’t truly have a successful talent strategy.
