You ever wonder what recruiting would look like in a perfect world?  What your recruitment strategy and process would be if you didn't have supply or demand problems in your recruitment funnel?

I have and here is what I think of when I visualize the steps of a perfect recruitment marketing process:

1. Job Opening: First and foremost, the recruiting process will start with your company opening a position.  While this isn't much different than today, we'd expect your workforce forecasting to be efficient and you to be hiring (which in this economy isn't a given).

2. Finding Candidates: In today's world you're probably distributing your job ads out to job boards, doing Sourcing campaigns on LinkedIn or doing Social Recruiting, for every new job that opens up to find new candidates that would excel in the position.  But would you do this in a perfect recruiting world?

In a perfect world, you would cut through this process and have all the best candidates within your Talent Network.  You wouldn't need to spend money on distributing your job ads but would have great candidates already within a Recruiting CRM or database, to be able to sort and find the best candidates for the position.  Finding the best candidates would start and end here for every job you need to fill.

3. Interviews: The interview process would reflect the skills and competencies needed for the position.  Candidates that go through the process would be filtered to make sure they can not only do the job but excel in it.

4. Hire: You not only hire the best candidate but you are able to create jobs for other candidates that were excellent as well.

4 Steps and you are done.  Not too bad, huh?

Now that's in a perfect world and we all know the world is far from perfect especially in the recruiting sector nowadays.  But the question is what can you do to try and make your recruiting process perfect?  Is there any initiative that you can do to step towards this goal?

Here are a few ways to change your process to hopefully make a perfect recruiting future:

Opt-In: Start building your Talent Network with a simple Opt-In form on your Career Site and during your recruiting process with dual-purpose job ads.  These two channels will be able to help you exponentially increase the number of contacts you have in addition to other sourcing efforts you do already.  And best of all it's pretty easy to set up!

Up to Date Contacts: Having a large Talent Network is one thing.  Having an up to date one is another.  Make sure that you reach out to the candidates (especially the best) in your Talent Network and ask for updated contact information.  Also, ask your technology provider what solutions they provide for updating contacts.  Whether it's automated quarterly emails, utilizing LinkedIn to discover changes in information, mobile recruiting or other methods.

Keeping candidate contacts up to date may be more important than building your Talent Network in the first place.

Strategically use Internships: Internships are a great way to guage ability and the propensity to excel in certain positions and environments.  They are essentially a 3-6 month interview for a full time position.  Be sure to include internships strategically across your organization and focus on areas where you can and will hire interns into full time positions.  If you set them up right, they can be feeder systems into areas of need at your company.

The future won't be perfect but that doesn't mean you shouldn't strive for perfection.  Visualize what a perfect recruiting process would be for your organization and try to implement changes to your process that can help your recruiting organization get to this goal!