It may fill you with excitement or even trepidation, the mere thought of recruiting a new member of staff and creating a new job advert. Regular recruiters will tell you that there is something very satisfying in running a successful recruitment campaign, but most will share with you far more horror stories about how it can go wrong. It is not so much an art as it is about making the right decisions and following the right processes, but if no one ever showed you, that might be why it goes wrong.
Here is our simple 8 step guide to a successful recruitment campaign.
1. Create A Job Description
The first thing you need to do is create a job description/specification for the role you need to recruit for. This document should be comprehensive and should include the details of all the responsibilities for this role, including where they’ll fit into your existing team, along with details of the key skills and education you’d like them to have. Creating a job description at the beginning of the process like this can really help you to figure out this new employee’s role within your business and will come in handy later down the line when you have to draw up the employee’s contract.
2. Research The Market
The next thing you need to do is research the market to see what is the most appropriate job title and what other job titles candidates might be using. It is also worth looking at what a similar job in your region might be offering salary-wise because you want to make your role relevant and attractive to potential candidates. So it is important to make sure it’s labelled up correctly in terms of job titles, and it’s offering an attractive and competitive salary.
3. Create The Job Advertisement
Once you’ve chosen your job title and salary, it’s now time to design your job advertisement. Let’s be clear; your job advertisement should be very different to your job description – and yes, you do need both! While your job description is extremely detailed in regards to what you are looking for, it is more used for internal purposes. Your job advert should be shorter and focus on selling the opportunity to potential applicants. Your advert can be much less formal and can convey your business’ personality and values.
4. Optimise your advert for keywords
Candidates search for jobs using job titles and keywords, so it is essential that you factor this into your job advert writing. Candidates generally use a combination of the most generic job title and location as the key components in their search string, but technology jobs may also include a technical keyword too.
5. Choose Your advertising channels
There are obviously lots of job boards and other advertising channels to choose from. Some are generic and others are niche and others are geographically orientated. Prices can vary from £0 up to £900 per advert, so choosing the right option for you will ultimately depend on your budget, level of difficulty or importance and the sector. Over 70% of all candidates that search for a job start in Google, so this is a good place to start looking. Try running a few searches as if you were the candidate and see what channels come out on top. We recommend that you select at least 2 or 3 channels to get maximum coverage, especially for senior, hard to fill and critical positions. The best solution for getting maximum value for money might be to select a multi-posting job advertising and management service, where you pay a single fee and enjoy maximum exposure across multiple advertising channels.
6. Manage The Applications effectively
The options here tend to be:
– Use a 3rd party or a recruitment agency to manage all your applications
– Have them sent to your inbox by email
– Use an Applicant Tracking service
– Use a free Online Campaign Management tool
It is important to remember that a well-written advert distributed across the right advertising channels is likely to attract a reasonable number of good quality candidates who are currently in work and only tentatively looking. Therefore, it is critical that you manage the recruitment campaign efficiently if you do not want to lose good candidates throughout the process. This is both annoying and unnecessary, especially when there are free recruiting platforms out there to help you.
The other important aspect of managing the recruitment campaign effectively is all about protecting your corporate brand.
7. Establish your Screening process
Most of us working in the recruitment industry are familiar with the statistic that over 80% of people that leave a job in the first year, do so for behavioural reasons and not because they couldn’t do the job. When you consider the real cost of making a bad hire is likely to be £30 – £60k after you factor in initial recruiting costs and time, induction and training, salary, impact on the business and other staff members, you start to realise the importance of performing proper due diligence and behavioural and cultural assessments. This might sound scary, but in fact, can be relatively straight forward and not too costly either.
8. Measure and record
Last but not least, always record and measure how you did on each recruitment campaign!
Keep a record of each job advert, where you advertised it, the amount of response you had, the number of interviews and the time that it took you to get to offer.
Over 98% of all business owners believe that the recruitment of new staff is by far the single most important facture for effective company growth. Get it wrong and it can kill an organisation, but get it right and you can enjoy the rewards of your endeavours.
About The Author
Mark Stephens has over 20 years of business management experience, across Sales, Marketing, Recruitment and Technology environments.
Mark is a serial entrepreneur and is the founder of Smart Recruit Online and The HR & Recruitment Resource Library.
Mark has established a reputation for his passion and enthusiasm over twenty years working in the recruitment industry, both client and agency side. For the last seven years, Mark has been researching the recruitment landscape from both a technology and people perspective. His insights into market trends are often used and quoted across the industry’s leading publications.
Smart Recruit Online offers an award-winning talent attraction software that can streamline and revolutionise your recruitment. To find out what we can to for your recruitment strategy, book a demo by clicking here.
