Originally posted on the SmashFly Recruitment Marketing Blog.

At some point, everyone has asked themselves the question: if I had it to do all over again, would I change anything? They look back, take a look at their actions and how everything turned out. And wonder. There is of course, no real way to change any of the outcomes from these past decisions, but the key is learning from them. While changing the past is impossible, changing the future is far from it.

We get so caught up in our daily lives and so determined to continue down our current path that we rarely get the time to stop and figure out if we are really going down the right path at all. It’s important to set up times to re-evaluate what your goals are and determine the right strategy for getting there for everything you do. And for companies, recruiting is no different. Companies are continuously on the lookout for new top talent to bring their company to the next level, mostly using the same techniques that “worked” time and time before.

But when is the last time your recruiting organization took a step back and really looked into what their recruiting strategy is and if that was the best use of their limited recruiting budget. If the answer is not in a while (or ever), set up some time discuss what you would want your recruiting strategy to look like if you started from scratch today! Here are some questions to pose as you discuss re-tooling your recruiting strategy:

What are the best recruiting channels for us? - Sure, you may have contracts set up with job boards or channels that you’ve used with moderate success forever, but are these methods really the ones that you should be using? Are there recruiting channels that you think would be worth it to try? Where does our top talent look for jobs?

The key here is figuring out the channels you want to test and setting up a system of recruitment metrics around them. This way you can know what channels work the best for specific jobs you are looking to fill.

How can candidates learn more about our company? - Sit down and look at your recruiting process from a candidates point of view. How can qualified candidates currently learn about your company, job opportunities and most importantly interact with your company? It’s not only important how candidates find your job ads, but also important how easy it is for them to find information on working for your company.

What recruiting activities are we spending the most time on? – What tasks are wasting your recruiters time? Is it job ad distribution, searching through candidate resumes, setting up interviews, etc.? Whatever the culprit, invest in some technology that can alleviate that time necessity so that your recruiters can focus on finding and contacting top talent for your company.

Take some time and re-evaluate your recruitment marketing strategy because if you haven’t, you’ll be left behind!

About the Author: Chris is the Marketing Analyst for SmashFly Technologies. SmashFly is the provider of the first recruitment marketing platform called WildFire that enables companies and staffing firms to easily distribute and more importantly measure the performance of their recruiting efforts online.