Recruiting is the stage of the employee life cycle in which prospective candidates are sourced, interviewed and assessed in order to identify the best fit for a job opening. This process of identifying who will be hired is typically based on required skills, relevant background and whether or not the person is culturally additive to the organization. In other words, is the person a great fit based on their qualifications and alignment with the company’s values?
How Does Recruiting Work?
Recruiting typically follows this process: sourcing, recruiter screen, hiring team assessment and finally, the offer stage.
Sourcing
Sourcing begins the process of recruiting, and can be classified as either passive or active. Generally, recruiters will utilize both ways of sourcing.
- Passive sourcing is when a recruiter sources by posting open positions on the company’s career site and various job sites in order to collect applicants.
- Active sourcing is when a recruiter directly reaches out to prospective candidates who closely match job requirements for an open position. Recruiters do this outreach over various online networking platforms and social media, as well as during in-person events.
Recruiter Screen
Once a recruiter successfully sources a candidate, they’ll follow up with a recruiter screen with the candidate. This initial screening phase allows the recruiter to get a sense of the candidate’s background and skills in order to identify if they should move forward in the process. This also allows the candidate to get more information about the role and the company, as well as ask questions that are important to their decision making.
Hiring Team Assessment
Candidates that pass their initial screens will make their way to the hiring team interview phase where there is a greater focus on assessing the candidate’s skills. Depending on the role’s required skills, these assessments can vary and include coding assessments, writing challenges, Q&As and more.
Job Offer
Candidates who are identified to be the best fit for the role based on the hiring team’s needs are extended an offer. In this stage of the process, the recruiter’s goal is to close the candidate and get them to join the team. Recruiters will usually go over the total compensation for the role, including salary, performance bonus, benefits, perks and additional forms of compensation such as stock options.
Why Is Recruiting Important?
As a key part of the HR team, the recruiting function enables the company to compete for and acquire talent that is essential to the success and growth of the organization. An effective recruiting team is able to attract and recruit a diverse pool of candidates for the hiring teams with whom they partner. Being one of the first experiences of the employee life cycle, recruiting is critical to providing an excellent experience for potential employees, while building talent brand awareness for a company.
Types of Recruiting
- Internal recruiting is the act of recruiting by promoting job openings to existing employees as a way to provide career development opportunities and help with employee retention.
- Technical recruiting focuses on recruiting candidates for technical positions, such as engineering and product roles. Some of these roles may include software engineers, network architects, product managers and QA specialists.
- Executive recruiting focuses on recruiting candidates to fill executive level positions, such as CFO, CTO, and CEO. Executive recruiters may also work on other senior management roles that may not be at C-level.
- Full cycle recruiting, sometimes called end-to-end recruiting, describes the holistic recruiting process in which a recruiter is not only responsible for sourcing and hiring new employees, but also for onboarding them into the company.
Recruiting Benefits
- Effective recruiting can boost positive brand awareness as a recruiting team’s outreach extends to more people.
- As candidates consistently experience a great interview process, it is more likely for them to engage with the company’s brand and refer others.
Recruiting Risks
- When ineffective, recruiting can negatively affect a company’s talent brand.
- In cases where candidates go through a bad interview experience, it’s possible those candidates may speak negatively about the company, whether by leaving a review online or through word-of-mouth.
What Is Recruitment 3.0?
Recruitment 3.0 is a blend of strategic employer branding and inbound recruiting designed to capture the attention of passive candidates.
It combines aspects of traditional recruiting with modern digital and content marketing methodologies to connect with candidates in an organic and meaningful way. It allows recruiters to sidestep traditional recruiting platforms and professional networks and take their message directly to candidates.
Simply put, Recruitment 3.0 reflects two core challenges of modern recruiting:
The most in-demand candidates aren’t browsing traditional job boards for their next opportunity — Traditional job boards are losing their appeal to top talent, especially those with a tech background. Fewer than 14 percent of software engineers reported using a job board to find their current job.
Candidates are doing more research than ever before applying — If you are lucky enough to capture the attention of an elite candidate, you better hope your online presence tells a good story. Modern candidates use an average of 16 research tools during the job hunt, so there’s no hiding your dirty laundry.
To address these challenges, recruiters must leverage new platforms and techniques to fulfill their obligations. Enter Recruitment 3.0.
The Case For Recruitment 3.0
We’ve covered a few statistics already, but let’s take a deeper dive into the modern recruiting landscape.
76 percent of decision makers believe candidates have grown wary of traditional job boards. Traditional job boards certainly still have their place, but these days they shouldn’t be the core of your recruitment strategy.
88 percent of recruiters believe that informed candidates are preferable to uninformed candidates. This makes sense, but ask yourself this: are you providing candidates with the information they need in order to be informed?
63 percent of recruiters report an inability to find qualified candidates as their primary challenge. Looks like those informed candidates are hard to come by after all.
62 percent of software developers — the most in-demand talent out there — are open to new opportunities, but only 13 percent of them are actively looking. Just one more example of the opportunity that’s out there for recruiters that can find a way to connect with passive candidates.
The average time to hire is 23.8 days, while the average cost per hire is $4,129. If nothing else can convince management to make recruiting a priority, perhaps the bottom line will.
Job seekers consider recruiters to be the fifth most trusted source of information about career opportunities. Yikes. The average candidate considers your career page to be more trustworthy than a recruiter.
69 percent of candidates would reject an offer from a company with a bad employer brand, even if they were unemployed. For nearly three quarters of the workforce, even the fear of unemployment isn’t enough to overcome a negative employer brand.
The average candidate will read six reviews about your company before deciding if they’ll apply. Job seekers are getting better and better at doing their research. Will they like what they find out about your company?
Recruiters claim they can’t find qualified candidates, while candidates claim they can’t trust recruiters. Plenty of passive candidates are open to new opportunities, but recruiters can’t find a way to connect with them. Traditional job boards are disdained by most candidates, but recruiters continue to use them because they have no better option.
And in the midst of this, candidates have become more savvy than ever. From employer reviews to your employer brand, they have access to vast amounts of information, and they’re using it to their advantage.
