Yesterday, SmashFly CEO Mike Hennessy and VP of Sales & Customer Success Mary Grace Hennessy were featured guests on the DriveThruHR Internet Radio Show hosted by William Tincup and Bryan Wempen (you can listen to the recording here.)  On the show, they spoke about current trends in recruitment marketing and sourcing and William asked a pretty interesting question:

In today’s recruiting environment, do you think it benefits any company to outsource their recruiting instead of building the strategy in-house?

The question is an interesting one and you’ll get a wide variety of responses (especially from RPO’s).  But I think there were a few points made that are important.  One is that outsourcing can be very helpful when hiring for generic high churn, high volume jobs.  Second is that outsourcing can be a good facilitator initially to help your organization start transforming your internal strategy.

The question though is how to do you begin that process of transformation and how do you determine what it will look like?  Let’s take a look.

Getting the Transformation Started

The recruiting / sourcing industry is evolving rapidly by the day.  From the multitude of channels you can use to post jobs to the expansion of tools to proactively source and campaign to contacts and you have a number of new ways to think about your recruiting strategy that can help your organization get more for less.

The fact is, however, that updating and improving your process to take advantage of these new concepts and tools can be a process in and of itself.  And many recruiting organizations don’t have the luxury or downtime in their recruiting cycle to dedicate their full attention to this transformation process.  That’s where RPO’s can come in to help shoulder the load or a re-dedication of resources can be made in order to focus on both real-time and future needs internally.

But where do you get started with your process when you have the time to begin thinking strategically.  Here’s a few things to think about:

Map out your strategy: While this seems common sense, it’s important to identify your strategy before implementing anything.  I would start with addressing the major problems in your current recruiting process and understanding the goals you want to achieve with your recruiting budget.  It is at this point that it makes sense to start talking with vendors, consultants and fellow recruiters about what’s possible and what works.  Once you have these internal and external discussions, it’s time to map out the capabilities you need and want so you can start building internally and evaluating technologies to help you achieve this strategy.

The key here is to not take any insights you receive during this process as gospel.  Understanding and getting advice from vendors and other recruiting organizations is great but make sure that what you take away fits your organizations, the type of candidates you recruit and your unique business objectives.

Technology to Facilitate: You do not achieve a transformation by simply getting a shiny new technology and implementing it.  There needs to be thought first on what your strategy will be to help determine the technology you need in order to make it succeed.  That’s not to say you shouldn’t be open to hearing about new concepts and technology functionality that you should add to your strategy but you should have a clear idea of the function that technology will provide in your strategy.  A great example of this is Davita and their focus on “quality” with their media & metrics ...

Budget & Resources: While it’s important to flesh out all the things you would like to do, make sure to also keep in mind the current budget & resources you have available and the future resources you expect to have.  This can help you prioritize what aspects of your strategy are the most important and what are nice to haves.  For instance, depending on your team size having a person dedicated to social recruiting may not be a priority if you have a small team (as it should have a dedicated resource.)  You may put more priority for that team member to help in screening rather than devote the time into social.

In a perfect world, you could do everything you wanted to do but with shrinking or set budgets and limited resources, it’s important to prioritize your needs.

There is no magic formula or one click solution that can help to transform your recruiting strategy but a true transformation is the product of research, collaboration and implementation.

Remain Ahead of the Game

The roles of recruiters and recruiting teams are changing.  While picking up the phone and talking with candidates will not change, new skills such as social recruiting, mobile recruiting, Talent Network campaigning, content creation and media metrics evaluation will be increasingly needed for the next evolution of recruiting.

It’s important to start looking at the trends that are happening today and the possibilities for tomorrow as well.  Take the best of what you find that fit your organization and determine where your organization and recruitment marketing strategy need to be in order to stay ahead of the game.  And most importantly, make the necessary steps to get to that point.

Transforming your strategy while ensuring it keeps evolving for the better is not an easy task but the rewards of thinking strategically about your process can be immense in today’s world of limited budgets and resources.