For many businesses, recruitment is reactive - once a role becomes available, the recruitment process starts. While logical, such an approach is short-sighted and could ultimately derail your business strategy.
It might sound extreme, but consider the fact that whatever your business objectives, whether it’s to grow a subscriber base, develop an app or provide outstanding customer service, you need people with the right skills at the right time to deliver them.
A slap-dash approach to recruitment could result in hasty hiring and a delay in achieving your business goals or, in the worst case, your business strategy falling apart altogether. In this blog, we examine the importance of developing a hiring strategy aligned with the needs of your business and some of the key elements it should include.
Utilise data
With skill needs across all industries rapidly evolving, the most successful organisations use talent analytics to analyse and assess the skills they require today and in the future. While there are several points in the recruitment process where you can glean information about the job market (job boards, competitors, candidate feedback), effective data-driven hiring involves understanding the skills that will propel your business strategy.
The good news is that you don’t need to be a data scientist to be data-driven. A report by Gartner, How to Use Analytics to Predict Skill Needs, outlines the categorisation of skills into four broad categories:
- Declining skills (low demand, low growth)
- Legacy skills (low demand, moderate growth)
- Prevalent skills (high demand, moderate growth)
- Emerging skills (low demand, high growth).
Using these categories, you can start to map out the skills you have in the business right now versus those you need to fulfil future goals, identifying any gaps in the process and preparing for them well in advance.
Look inwards
According to LinkedIn’s The Future of Recruiting 2021 report for Europe & the Middle East, there’s been a 13% rise in internal mobility year over year. Employers are increasingly partnering with learning and development (L&D) and broader HR to build robust internal mobility programmes, rather than leaving the responsibility of recruitment to hiring managers and ad hoc practices.
A good place to start is conducting an audit of your business's current skills and experience and engaging with employees about their career aspirations. From this point, you have visibility of your internal talent ‘pipeline’ and knowledge of the L&D resources they need to fill any upcoming skill gaps you have identified.
Determine set time frames (and stick to them)
A recruitment strategy that’s too reactive in approach can often result in two things:
Hastily hiring to fill a position as quickly as possible, meaning the wrong person is selected.
Leaving a position open until you receive enough suitable applicants to shortlist, meaning roles remain vacant for much longer than they should.
To ensure a business operates at its peak, a set date that a candidate needs to be onboarded should be determined so that you can work backwards to calculate the time you have to source, evaluate and hire them.
Once you have determined the right time frame, it should be cemented in the hiring strategy to help your business stay on track and within budget. According to research by Glassdoor, the average length of the job interview process in the UK is 27.5 days. Use data from your past (positive) hiring experiences to determine precisely how long it should take and set accurate and realistic expectations for your business.
Find a recruiter who works with you (not for you)
Working with a recruiter doesn’t mean handing over an element of your process for a fee. The right recruitment partner can help you determine whether the skills you need to make your business strategy a reality are actually available in the market. And if they’re not, they’ll tell you the reasons why and how long it will take to secure them.
A specialist recruiter will have the market knowledge and insights to help you find solutions that prevent your business strategy from stalling. For example, if you’re a software company that requires Java development professionals for upcoming projects, an IT & Tech recruiter will be able to provide you with a profile of the types of candidates you can expect to hire. There could be a shortage of candidates with 5 years+ experience but an abundance of those with 2-3 years experience. Alternatively, they might advise you to make some roles fully remote so that you can tap into skills outside your geographic area.
Additionally, a recruitment partner can provide real-time data on how much money it will cost to hire the talent you need. If skills shortages mean certain salaries are out of your price range, you can use this information to reconsider how vital the project is to your overall business strategy.
nufuture can help
We work with IT & Tech professionals within a range of industries and sectors every day and have extensive knowledge that can help inform your broader talent strategy. Whether it’s updates on market conditions, external perceptions of your brand or something as specific as the salary expectations of Infrastructure Engineers from Milton Keynes - we’ve got you covered! Connect with a member of the nufuture team today to find out the value we can deliver as your IT & Tech recruitment partner. Give us a call on 01344 289224 or email info@nufuture.co.uk. Alternatively, complete this form, and we’ll give you a call back.