Recruitment Strategy is probably one of the most misunderstood and misused terms tossed about in our industry today. Try asking your clients and colleagues to define the term, and we guarantee that you will get very different responses. Recruitment Strategy means entirely different things to different recruitment stakeholders (line managers, hiring leaders, HR professionals, recruitment professionals). Still searching for answers…try googling the term or searching through respected industry resources like Access , ERE, or the Recruitment Roundtable. Good luck….you won’t find much of relevance or interest!

This is typical of the responses we get from people we put the recruitment strategy question to:

• Recruitment policies and processes
• Candidate attraction programs
• Applicant Tracking Systems
• Careers websites

These things are most definitely enablers, tools or drivers of your overall strategy, but are not in themselves an organization’s recruitment strategy. So what exactly is Recruitment Strategy then, and how do we as recruitment professionals create one for the organizations we work for? We don’t claim to have all of the answers, but the working definition we discuss with our clients goes something like this:

An Organization Recruitment Strategy is a blueprint consisting of levers or enablers (structural and organizational delivery design , strategic programs, policies, and technology) that drive desired recruitment outcomes (quality of hire, world class hiring leader and candidate experience, etc.).

Think of an Organizational Recruitment Strategy as a framework or model, a blueprint to drive desired outcomes. A great place to start in creating this strategy is to define the desired outputs of recruitment in your organization which should focus primarily on these themes:

• Improved Quality of Hires
• Enhanced Hiring Leader and Candidate recruitment experience

Then outline potential drivers of these outcomes:

• structural delivery options (insource, outsource, hybrid)
• recruitment organizational design (centralized, decentralized, hybrid)
• recruitment talent
• candidate attraction and sourcing strategies
• recruitment policy and process
• technology
• hiring leader & other stakeholder recruitment capability

One of the biggest challenges we are faced with as recruitment professionals is getting on the same page with our clients, internal or external. How we define Recruitment Strategy with our clients is critical to expectation setting. If our mission is to build best in class recruitment capability, then we need to think macro and educate our clients accordingly. Ensure that you are speaking the same language as other recruitment stakeholders, or be prepared for disappointment. Recruitment or HR should not be creating an organization’s recruitment strategy in isolation. Get the business side of your organization involved in the creation of the recruitment strategy. Approach recruitment strategy like any business would approach their strategy.

For more information, please contact:

Shane Creamer
shane.creamer@graniteconsulting.ca
(647) 827-1106

Granite Consulting
15 Toronto Street, Suite 304, Toronto, Ontario