“Plan your work.  Work your plan.”  I’ve seen those words attributed to the great Green Bay Packer Football (not futbol) Coach, Vince Lombardi.  Trainers have applied those words to all sorts of training exercises, generally in business.  Why are they universally understood?  The quote applies to all areas of our lives.  It especially applies to successful recruitment programs.

What is the basic premise of Behavioral Interviewing?  Once we find a way to be successful accomplishing a task, we will continue to attempt to perform the task the same way forever – or until it becomes too painful.  This premise applies to recruiting also.

When a small retail store needs to recruit full or part time help, what do they do?  Stick a Help Wanted sign in the window and by the cash register.  Then they wait for someone to apply.  That becomes their recruiting strategy.  As they grow and need more employees, they stick the Help Wanted sign up more often.  Generally they have enough success to continue to do so.  Finally as they grow into a large enterprise, how do they recruit new employees?  Well some actually kept their well worn Help Wanted signs and now place them on the fence or front entrance.  Or if they feel really adventuresome, they begin to place their Help Wanted sign online – on corporate websites, job boards, etc.

This is called the “Just Recruit” recruitment strategy.  Obviously it is working well enough that no one gets fired (yet).  Is their company hiring the best candidates or only people who respond to Help Wanted signs?  I think we know the answer to that.  Occasionally at SHRM Human Resource meetings I hear, “Everyone knows you can’t recruit for this location!”  When I ask why not, their response generally is “It’s a fact!”  If I ask them what their recruiting strategy is, they say they posted the positions online and no one replied.  As long as their employer accepts that logic, they will receive the quality of candidate that their Help Wanted sign attracts.  However, that is not recruiting.  It is shuffling electronic and paper resumes.

How do you build a corporate recruitment strategy?  Obviously it requires work and a couple of years of effort, especially if your company does not know its cost per hire or where the successful candidates/employees come from.  It is also important to keep in mind that recruitment is a sales process.  If the mindset is to screen out candidates from the beginning, the company will lose the attractive passive candidates.  It is like throwing the baby out with the bath water.

The corporate recruitment strategy needs to be developed in conjunction with the corporate budget.  While creating the strategy, it is important to keep in mind the employment market.  Today we have a market where companies feel they have many choices of candidates (and yet somehow still have difficulty attracting the right candidates).  Therefore the supply of available candidates outstrips the need.  This employment market will eventually change and there will be fewer qualified candidates to choose from.  The employment market impacts a recruitment strategy that is dynamic.  While developing a recruitment strategy it is important to have the same “long view” that a CFO has while working on the budget.

Working hand in hand with the executive staff and contributing to their efforts to become more profitable is the best way a Human Resource professional may be perceived to be a business partner.  A recruitment budget that nearly always overspends is broken.  Generally recruitment goes over budget either when the business decides it needs to add headcount mid-year or there was not enough thought in the recruitment strategy.  If the strategy is the “Just Recruit” strategy, it will cost a company that valuable income.

While developing a recruitment strategy, review what worked well in recruiting for your company last year and so far this year.  How is your qualified candidate flow?  Does it appear to be trending up or down?  Are you happy with the flow?  What is your cost per hire (include job board fees, 3^rd party recruitment fees, salary of staff recruiters, advertising, new Help Wanted signs, applicant tracking software, social media, relocation, promotion items for career fairs, office supplies, manager interview training, etc).  Obviously if your company has a year where you are expanding your executive staff, your recruitment costs will be higher because of the relocation costs and potential retained search fees.

Working with your executive staff, determine what positions will be added in the coming year.  Then look at current open positions to determine if they may carry over into the new year as open positions.  Ask the following questions:

1)     How many of those candidates do you forecast will need to be relocated?

2)     How many of those candidates will be sourced through contingent or retained search?

3)     How many positions does your company currently have in a job board package?  Will the package need to be renegotiated?

4)     Does your company have a .jobs Top Level Domain (www.goto.jobs) to draw candidates directly to your list of open positions?

5)     Based on your employee retention rate, how many employees will you have to replace in the next year and typically at what level?  This enables you to better determine your resource allocation and costs.

6)     When during the year are the new positions planned to be filled?  For instance, if the executives expect positions to be filled in the first month of the new fiscal year, you now know to begin recruiting for them during the last quarter.  This question also helps in resource allocation and to determine if your company needs outside resources during peak recruiting periods.  It’s better to include the costs in the budget now than surprise executives later.

Obviously budget discussions will help your company better determine a recruitment budget and strategy.  As a result of those discussions, the executives may decide to postpone the targeted start date of one or more of the positions.  Once the positions and targeted start dates are established (and they can very well change in the dynamic world of recruitment!), the Human Resource department may now determine how to allocate staff resources to best fill those positions.

If the enterprise has more than one recruiter, each recruiter should develop a proposed plan how they will recruit for each of the positions they are responsible to fill.  It may be helpful to develop a template to simplify the process for them.  This is a good career development exercise to help them think more strategically.  In order to create a partnership with the hiring managers, it is important for the recruiters to meet with the hiring managers for their thoughts on sourcing these candidates.

While meeting with the hiring managers, it is critical to discuss the 3 month, 6 month, 9 month and 12 month goals for the position.  If these goals are not required in the job description, they should be because they are the foundation to the successful recruitment process.  Once those goals are determined, the skills and experience required to be successful the first year become crystal clear.  Then the sourcing becomes more successful, interview creation is focused on the right skills and experience, and the selection of the best candidate is based on an important set of metrics.  Once the new employee starts, the goals are discussed to ensure the manager and new employee are on the same page.  During the employee/manager meetings through the year the goals are discussed.  Now you have engaged managers and employees.  At the end of the year, the goals are attained – or not.  Most importantly, the annual review should not contain any surprises for either side.

After the meeting with the hiring manager, the recruiter completes their plan to recruit for that position.  What sourcing or relocation costs are expected for each position?  The costs are reviewed against the budget.  Then the recruiter returns to the hiring manager to discuss the proposed recruitment plan and ask for any additional suggestions.  Now the manager is a partner in the recruiting process. 

Once the recruiter develops a plan for all of their responsible positions, the recruitment strategy begins to come together.  Review expected costs against those projected in the budget.  Add in the expected costs for replacement of employees who may leave during the year (and the expected recruitment staff resource).  Now your company has a much more viable plan for your recruiting in the next year. 

During the year, track and measure where sourcing worked and did not work as well.  “Where did you learn about us?” should be a question asked of every candidate where it is not obvious (i.e. your corporate website).  What were your recruiting costs?  How many people did your company hire?  Now you have a cost per hire.

This plan gives your company a strategy to recruit that is tied to your budget.  It breaks down the silos between Management and Human Resources.  The more effective job description and follow up should improve the quality of hire, employee/manager engagement and retention.

Maybe Coach Lombardi had a good idea – “Plan your work.  Work your plan.”