4-Step Recruitment Action Plan to Attract and Hire Top Talent

Recruiting top talent is a challenging job. It’s tough to attract and hire candidates who can perform their best to meet company standards and contribute towards the overall business growth.

Recruiters believe that a face-to-face interview is the right time to judge a candidate’s skills. This may not be true. The process of getting to know more about a candidate and knowing if they would be a perfect choice, begins long before the interview. It starts with a well-thought and structured recruitment plan.

To make a recruitment plan successful, a recruiter needs to clearly-define job role, advertise brilliantly on multiple channels, search for top talent by screening job applications carefully. Initial stages of a recruitment process are crucial and must be strategized carefully. Once the candidates are shortlisted through a well-defined applicant tracking process, hiring managers meet only the most suitable candidates during interviews. The potential hires are interviewed where interviewer evaluates their status as the best fit for the position.

Here is a 4-step recruitment plan to implement and hire top talent.

STEP I - Design Job Descriptions Carefully

Write a well-defined, clear job description (JD) to mention the requirements, specifications about the role, work conditions, expectations and skills required to spend less time on screening applications. Follow below tips to make a JD effective:

1. Choose a Job Title that is commonly used by everyone in the industry. For instance, a person managing digital marketing and search engine optimization responsibilities can be called “SEO Specialist” or “Digital Marketer”.
2. Provide Company Information and explain what is special about your work culture to attract potential candidates. Feel free to mention company values, mission, accolades and other information.
3. Write Job Responsibilities very clearly to help candidates know if they would be interested to take on the role or not. List most important tasks and exciting features about the job role too.
4. A brief mention about the Qualifications is must. List degrees or minimum qualification required to fit a specific job role.

STEP II – Promote Job Ads Using Most Efficient Recruitment Tools

Once the job description and ad are ready, next step is to publish it on the job portals to receive applications from interested applicants. It is important to choose the best way to promote a job ad. The ad must reach to the right targeted audience. Recruiters can use recruitment software or other online tools to publish the ad on the website or on external job portals.

Before you get started, take time to experiment and think which recruitment software would map to your needs and work best for your organization.

Besides, make the right use of social media platforms too. LinkedIn is a most extensive platform to post job ads and identify & recruit candidates who possess required skills.

STEP III – Start Screening the Applications and Applicants

This stage in the recruitment and hiring process requires maximum attention. Once hundreds of resumes are received, put efforts to parse or screen each candidature carefully. It would be the first step for choosing potential new hires.

Select resumes and get contact details of the applicants. You can screen candidates in 3 suggested ways:

1. Make a phone call to talk to the person and understand if he/ she is really deserving for the job role. Also know if they would be interested in the job offer.
2. The next step could be calling the interested candidates for machine or skill tests. Conducting various tests would help in evaluating the skills, qualifications or values of the applicants, and know if they closely match for the job role.
3. See portfolio of the applicants. Get an idea about the candidate’s previous work to assess their abilities.

STEP IV – Meet and Interview the Best Candidates

Interview gives the opportunity to assess one’s skills and qualifications, and to see if the shortlisted candidate would take up the job role as enthusiastically as required. Hiring managers can ask behavioural, situational and job-oriented questions to analyse the candidate’s personality on multiple factors.

1. Behavioural questions focus on analysing problem-solving skills, confidence and creative abilities of the applicant.
2. Situational questions are asked to make the candidate aware about potential situations that could possibly arise. These questions help in evaluating an individual’s presence of mind, the attitude towards dealing with unexpected work-related situations, their work methods, knowledge and professional skills.
3. Job-oriented questions are designed to analyse technical skill set of the potential hires. If a software programmer is to be hired, asking coding/ programming concepts is a good idea.                                                                                                                                

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Once done with interviews, rank or rate all interviewees to compare their strengths and weaknesses. That’s how you will end up choosing the right candidate.

Send the offer letter and start with the onboarding process. Make sure that your onboarding program is equally effective, and it ensures less time-to-productivity of the new hires.

Traditional recruitment process has many challenges. Implementing a strategic action plan and an automated recruitment software increases the success rate of attracting, hiring and retaining top talent. When new hires get positive recruiting experience, they tend to remain satisfied, loyal and engaged for longer term. Using a recruitment software streamlines all the processes while cutting down costs and making everyone happy.