Building a Winning Hiring Strategy

To ensure future growth and success, it’s essential that you develop a strong hiring strategy for your business. Your approach to hiring is one of the key deliverables of your workforce planning efforts.

By creating a well-thought-out strategy that encompasses recruiting, hiring, and onboarding, you align this important process with your overall company goals. You’ll also be at a competitive advantage when it comes to building teams with the competencies to meet upcoming challenges.

The ideal recruiting strategy is developed with business objectives in mind, tested and perfected, and repeated across multiple hiring circumstances. It should make the job of recruiting and hiring easier.

What is a recruitment strategy?

Your recruitment strategy is a detailed plan that establishes the processes you will follow during all parts of the hiring process. It is directly connected with your workforce planning, as that is where you uncover your current and future talent needs and skills gaps. Additionally, your hiring strategy will encompass the following:

• Tools and technologies you will deploy
• Detailed recruiting and hiring budget
• Employee value proposition
• Recruiting sources
• Screening criteria
• New and modified job descriptions
• Recruitment marketing

It may help to think of your hiring strategy as the foundation of your efforts to create the workforce your company needs. At any given time, you may adjust the specific tactics you deploy based on your immediate needs. However, your strategy will always be a touchstone.

Hiring strategy and workforce planning: aligning goals

The seven steps of strategic workforce planning are:

1. Identifying stakeholders
2. Setting the organizational vision and strategy
3. Analyzing the current supply of talent
4. Conducting a future needs analysis
5. Identifying gaps
6. Creating workforce solutions
7. Analyzing and monitoring

If your workforce planning identifies current or future gaps, this is where an effective hiring strategy is necessary. It will provide you with a detailed roadmap to building a staff that has the capabilities required to achieve your organizational goals.

Developing a hiring strategy: Six things to consider

Before you develop a hiring strategy, it’s important to understand what that encompasses. There’s more to it than simply recruiting employees and hiring them. 

This is a complex process that businesses are currently undertaking in one of the most competitive hiring environments in recent memory. It’s important to get every detail right to achieve your objectives and avoid losing talent to competitors. 

1. Developing an employee value proposition

An employee value proposition (EVP) is a succinct statement that details why talented prospects should choose to work with your company instead of a similarly positioned competitor. Some important things to address in an EVP are culture, professional development opportunities, DE&I, and benefits.

2. Modern hiring: Remote recruiting strategy

Video interviews are increasingly more common in the word of remote work.

Remote work may have become popular because of pandemic restrictions, but many companies have found good reasons to hold onto this practice. There are several reasons to allow remote work:

• Companies with remote options are more attractive to tech-savvy employees
• Remote work allows brands to recruit from a global talent pool
• Allowing employees to work remotely can remove barriers to employment
• Remote work boosts workforce agility

However, some complexities come with remote work. In order to successfully engage in remote recruiting, organizations must ensure they have a clear remote hiring strategy and the required resources in place. 

This process includes identifying the right recruiting sources, implementing technology to conduct remote interviews and assessments, and creating onboarding processes that are specifically designed for remote workers. If remote work is going to be the norm, it’s also important to understand how to scale a remote organization.

Recruiting and hiring teams must also be familiar with laws and regulations that could impact remote hiring, especially when they work with candidates from different states or countries.

3. Creating effective job descriptions

A job description serves two functions. First, it should work as a sales and marketing tool to engage potential hires and generate enthusiasm for the position. Second, it should be an honest and complete description of the position, duties, responsibilities, reporting structure, and purpose of the job. 

The following tips can help attract skilled workers to fill in employment gaps and ensure this part of your workforce planning is executed successfully:

• Involve current employees in creating job descriptions
• Avoid jargon or superlatives in titles or descriptions (e.g., ninja or guru)
• Use gender-neutral language
• Highlight culture
• Use images, videos, and interactive elements to stand out

Functionly includes the ability to build job descriptions from its inbuilt responsibilities library, then export.

It helps to complete some of these tasks ahead of time. For example, don’t wait for an urgent hiring need to create a detailed description of each role in your company. A comprehensive organizational chart that is updated regularly can be used to store information about roles, responsibilities, and reporting.

4. Recruitment marketing

Recruitment marketing is a talent acquisition strategy designed to help employers attract, hire, and retain staff. It replaces older, more transactional styles of recruiting with processes that more closely resemble consumer marketing. The key difference is that the end goal is hiring the right person instead of selling a product.

Why engage in recruitment marketing? There are several reasons. The first is that other companies are already doing this. They are mapping candidate journeys, working to remove friction from the hiring process, and keeping workers engaged with relevant and personalized content. It also uses data and technology to understand and deliver better candidate experiences.

Like consumer marketing, recruitment marketing happens across multiple channels. Organizations will use social media, video, dedicated career pages, blogs, and more to reach prospective talent at different stages of the hiring journey.

5. Refining hiring processes

Workforce planning involves a significant amount of current state analysis. The purpose is to identify where the current workforce isn’t aligned with organizational goals, to recognize where current gaps exist that are impacting productivity and morale, and to predict where gaps will exist in the future as the organization grows and pivots.

Because developing a hiring strategy is such an important part of workforce planning, it’s also necessary to review existing hiring processes. This is how organizations can identify strengths and weaknesses in recruiting, screening, hiring, onboarding, and retaining staff. 

Here are some of the improvements organizations can make to their hiring processes:

• Offering self-service options for interview scheduling and assessments
• Improving and standardizing interview questions
• Increasing transparency
• Creating a referral program
• Investing in internal recruiting

Functionly gives leaders comprehensive forecast analysis to understand future hiring needs.

Any decisions that are made in recruiting processes should be based on data and trustworthy sources. Seek feedback from recent hires, existing employees, and past candidates. They will have important insights into hiring practices. 

Additionally, examine any available data on hiring and retention. This may reveal patterns such as recruits dropping out of the hiring process at a certain point or specific business areas struggling with retention.

6. Onboarding retention and development

A hiring strategy doesn’t end with the prospective employee accepting an offer. Organizations must also incorporate onboarding, employee retention efforts, and professional development into this strategy. 

If these aspects of retention aren’t executed successfully, businesses will struggle to maintain the skills and worker headcount they need to achieve their organizational goals.

A hiring strategy is what allows your company to take many of the issues identified during workforce planning and create a roadmap for solving them. This component of workforce planning ensures that organizations are able to close their hiring gaps by successfully recruiting and hiring the talent they need.

Many organizations make Functionly a part of their recruitment planning process - give it a go today for free.