Building a successful Internet recruitment strategy is much like building a custom home.
It takes careful planning, the proper mix of supplies and labor, a well-coordinated and well-thought-out scheduling of components, and most important, a good initial vision. To really understand what it takes to build the custom dream home recruitment strategy, one must first understand that the primary benefits of the using Internet are that it is fast, easy and relatively inexpensive to generate candidates.
Below are five components that should be included in the blueprint for your successful dream home recruitment strategy.
1. Candidate database. Some type of private, searchable database is critical to a successful strategy. With a little research, you can find a suitable database regardless of how challenging your budget is.
Solutions range from as high to as low as you can afford to pay, depending on what functionality you can or can’t live without.
2. Centralized recruitment. Too often, companies keep recruitment as just another part of a human resource generalist’s duties. Unless the company is very small or has virtually no turnover, this approach will usually be a strategy killer and result in increased use of expensive third-party search firms.
Ideally, a company would have dedicated recruiters broken out by functional area, with a close working relationship with the hiring managers in those functional areas — an in-house search firm, so to speak. This enables those recruiters to become specialists in their areas and be very effective.
3. Job boards. Now it is time to frame the house. Since your private, searchable database is ready to start receiving candidates, and your focused recruiters are ready to start screening resumes, it is time to generate your candidate pool.
First, identify the foundational board or boards for the strategy. This will guarantee an influx of candidates and allow for the support of all kinds of positions throughout the organization.
The next step is to identify key niche job boards whose candidate profile is similar to that of your company work force. For example, a large IT company’s strategy may consist of two foundational boards, one or two IT-specific boards and a diversity site or two.
By incorporating the proper mix of general and niche sites, you ensure not only a large candidate pool but a quality one as well.
4. Streamline sourcing solutions. If a strategy includes three or more job boards, and a manual posting and sourcing strategy is in place, it is important to provide cost-effective technology to enable the recruiters to post jobs to multiple job boards from a single interface and also to source resumes from a single interface.
5. Narrowing or screening technology. Like candidate databases, there are a slew of solutions to help screen and narrow the candidate pool. Choose one that will fit within your price range, because without this component, you risk severely limiting the number of job requisitions that can be effectively supported by your recruiters, not to mention the risk of burnout by those recruiters.
The difference between a successful Internet recruitment strategy and an unsuccessful one may be just a few subtle changes in your blueprint design specifications. Instead of cutting back on the budget, the answer may be to slightly increase it.
Your dream home recruitment strategy may be a lot closer than you realize. Mark Anderson ([email protected]) is part of TruStar Solutions’ executive team as the director of business solutions. He has been a featured writer for various industry publications on the topics of human capital and sales strategy. Prior to joining TruStar Solutions, he worked in the financial industry for organizations including Home Gold Financial and Bank One Corp. Reach him at (317) 813-0500.
