On this blog and in our conversations with recruiting organizations, we talk a lot about having a “comprehensive recruitment strategy”.  But in some of the conversations I have with folks, it’s not really clear what this means.

So let’s aim to clear this up!

It’s not just one thing

Now in the marketplace today, there are a number of voices locking into a few areas and stressing their importance.  “You need to be doing Mobile”, “A CRM is a must”, “Social needs to be part of your strategy”.  And while I agree on some of these thoughts (I’ll get to mobile and social in another post), it’s really not about one of these things in particular but creating and leveraging all of recruiting tools to improve and max out the return of your strategy.

A comprehensive recruitment strategy enables you to make use of all these destinations and tools to create a unique process that helps you attract more qualified candidates to your organization through the collective power of having them together.  I use the word unique here because every organization will utilize the different pieces above in different ways and varying frequencies.  And you can only find the best mix for your organization by having complete visibility into everything you do from a recruitment perspective and how it helps you attract qualified candidates.

Now let’s look at all the options you have today to find qualified talent.

Harnessing the Recruiting Chaos

Remember the good old days of posting your jobs on a few job boards, getting all the candidates you need and hiring the best one.

Well, the recruiting world has changed a lot since then.  While job boards are still a part of the puzzle, we’ve seen an amazing influx of other channels and activities that can help to attract the right candidates to your organization.  Recruiting destinations and tools such as:

• Major Job Boards
• Niche Job Sites
• Career Networks
• Universal Tracking
• Mobile (across the strategy)
• Social (across the strategy)
• Resume Databases
• CRM
• Web Sourcing
• Career Site Optimization (Mobile / SEO)
• Talent Networks / Communities
• Career Fairs / Events
• Email & SMS Engagement
• Referrals
• Candidate Experience
• Employer Branding

No recruiting organization can complain about the lack of options.  But how can we leverage all of these solutions and understand which ones fit best in our unique strategy.

A Comprehensive solution for a Comprehensive strategy

The major problem today is that leveraging and experimenting with all these options usually means the organization has to purchase and use multiple point solutions.  This leads to a number of problems with integration, budget, vendor management, recruiter transparency and most importantly disjointed recruitment metrics / analytics.

And while these solutions may be good at the narrow area that they focus on, in order to have a truly comprehensive recruitment strategy, you need a solution that is just as comprehensive as your strategy.

That’s where solutions like Recruitment Marketing Platform come in.  These solutions integrate all the solutions you use to attract and source candidates to your employment opportunities.  This enables you to execute, manage and measure your entire strategy from a centralized location.  Improving your recruitment return and process while providing full visibility into the activities that work in your recruiting strategy and ones that don’t.

Let’s go into this last point a little deeper.

What does full visibility mean?

We use full visibility a lot in our conversations with recruiting organizations and I wanted to take the time to explain what we mean by that.

The end goal of any successful recruiting strategy is the ability to gain insight and have actionable knowledge that can help improve your overall strategy and produce better future results.  Through every job requisition filled an organization should in theory become more intelligent about their process and understand what really drives performance becoming better with every iteration.

That’s where we want to be from a recruiting strategy perspective but let’s take a step back and see how we actually accomplish this.  Actionable knowledge does not come from a silo or from thin air but only comes from having accurate comprehensive data available to those that need to analyze it.  To go deeper, actionable knowledge is achieved not just by capturing the data in some form or fashion but moreso by ensuring that that the data is together in a format that allows for easy analysis.

And that’s where visibility comes in.

Visibility is not about the end goal intelligence per se but it’s about ensuring you have all the right metrics and data needed in a central place so that you can work towards that intelligence and actionable knowledge.  Without the visibility, the conversation of continuous intelligence and actionable knowledge is a moot point (as you are working off of inaccurate, disjointed and/or incomplete data.)

When we talk about visibility in your recruitment strategy, we are really talking about measuring everything you do across similar performance metrics and data.  It means capturing this data for every job that you fill and measuring the performance of all your channels and sourcing activities in terms of the qualified candidates they are driving to apply for your organization.

It’s with this that a centralized and comprehensive Platform is needed.  A Recruitment Marketing Platform will help to capture this data centrally to enable the analysis across all your recruitment activities.  The key here is making this data available in the aggregate across all jobs while also enabling your organization to drill down into the data based on certain factors and criteria.

Getting there

In order to remain competitive with the best candidates, organizations need to think differently about their recruitment strategy.  That means diversifying the ways that they market, attract, educate and engage with candidates and consistently improving how the integrate all these sources and activities into a comprehensive strategy.

This type of strategy doesn’t happen without the right base from a technology standpoint.  It’s possible to do this by custom integrating various point solutions, however, this option provides little flexibility and growth in the future.  The other and better option is to look for a solution that is comprehensive enough to not only manage all these channels but measure and report on them centrally.

Once you have this complete visibility, it’s just a matter of time before you have the intelligence and insight needed to improve your strategy and attract more qualified candidates than ever before.  That’s the goal and it starts with thinking broader than what you are doing today.