How to Set Smart Recruitment Goals for Your Team

Recruiting is a never-ending battle for talent that becomes increasingly difficult as competition grows and talent pools decline. In order to improve your outcomes and gain a competitive advantage with job seekers, be sure to set actionable recruitment goals, track your efforts and implement new strategies. 

This guide will show you how.

Read More61 Recruitment Tools You Should Know

Benefits of Setting Recruitment Goals

It’s no secret that recruiters are up against a major talent shortage. As roles become more in-demand, competition becomes even more cut-throat. This poses a serious obstacle to your recruitment success, but not one that’s altogether insurmountable. 

By setting strategic recruitment goals, hiring managers and recruiters can improve their productivity, making them faster while at the same time becoming more effective at appealing to ideal job candidates. Working to meet these hiring objectives can help companies:

• Streamline the application process.
• Promote a larger and more diverse pool of candidates.
• Save money.
• Fill vital job openings faster.
• Hire applicants who are an optimal fit for each position.
 

How to Set Recruitment Goals

Before you can set reasonable, worthwhile recruitment goals, you need to evaluate your current team and efforts to determine whether you have enough people on your team to tackle recruiting needs. 

Start With Some Calculations

Calculate your current cost-per-hire, time-to-fill and turnover rate. These metrics are extremely important to know and track as they directly indicate the success and efficiency of your recruitment process.

Knowing your turnover rate is important to proactively building your talent pipeline before roles become vacant. If you know that for every five salespeople you hire one leaves within the year, you can better plan your subsequent recruitment cycles and spend more time sourcing the quality candidates you will need to backfill roles.

Make Your Goals SMART

The most successful recruitment goals — and business goals in general — are SMART goals. They are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-Based goals that provide a clear objective and action plan. Establishing these kinds of benchmarks helps each recruiting team member understand their individual responsibilities and how those duties contribute to overall success.

Using the data you collected during your assessment of current recruitment efforts and KPIs of interest, set goals that are: 

• Specific — Simple and clear
• Measurable — Quantifiable and able to be tracked over time 
• Achievable — Reasonable and attainable 
• Relevant — Significant and worthwhile 
• Time-based — Set with a target date in mind

Prioritize goals based on your business objectives and work with the leadership team to ensure your approach aligns with the company’s broader strategy.

Track Your KPIs

Get in the habit of regularly evaluating your performance and tracking your KPIs, whether on a quarterly or monthly basis. If you’re continuously reaching your benchmarks, adjust your goals to be more aggressive. 

Tracking key performance indicators is crucial to creating actionable recruitment goals that will drive your business forward. Home in on your KPIs and carefully evaluate your efforts in order to make improvements that will give your company a leg up on the competition.

Further Reading8 Recruitment Metrics That Matter Most to Track

6 Effective Recruiting Goals

1. BUILD OUT YOUR EMPLOYER BRAND

If you want to improve your recruitment outcomes, start by focusing your efforts on employer branding. Your employer brand is your reputation among job seekers. While you can’t forcibly control how people perceive you as a potential employer, you can influence their opinion by simply telling your company story.

Create engaging, long-form content that speaks to your target audience and shows off your industry know-how to prospects. Share social media posts about the exciting things happening in your office — work-related or otherwise — to let job seekers get a sense of what it’s like to work at your company. Additionally, create employee spotlights to show off your people and their passions, and to promote testimonials about how great it is to work at your company. 

A strong employer brand will increase the quality of your talent pool. The candidates you don’t hire can then become part of your talent community which you can tap into when other roles become open.

2. ENHANCE YOUR CAREER PAGE 

Your career page is a major attraction for job seekers. If your career page offers a poor user experience, prospective employees will struggle to uncover information about your company. This can make your company appear disingenuous for withholding information, or obsolete for having a clunky and outdated website. 

Invest in improving your career page to create a solid candidate experience from the get-go. If you can’t dedicate the developer resources to overhaul UX/UI, ensure that every piece of information a job seeker might be interested in is included and visible on your career page. The ultimate goal is to answer your prospective employee’s questions. Improving your career page will strengthen your employer brand and enhance your candidate experience. 

3. IMPROVE THE QUALITY OF YOUR JOB DESCRIPTIONS

Writing stronger job descriptions — more clear, compelling and concise — will get you better candidates. Lean on hiring managers and team members to create accurate candidate personas that will help you attract the right people for the job and more carefully vet candidates during the interview process. 

Additionally, eliminate any nonessential responsibilities and qualifications from your job descriptions to avoid excluding qualified candidates. Women are less likely to apply to a job if they don’t meet 100 percent of the criteria. Using engendered language such as “salesman” instead of “salesperson” in your job descriptions will also deter individuals from applying to your open roles and may hurt your employer brand. 

Higher quality job descriptions lead to higher quality applicants, which in turn increases your quality-of-hire. Furthermore, if applicants have a solid understanding of the role, responsibilities and your company culture, you’ll be able to expedite the interview process and evaluate candidates on secondary qualifications like work ethic and dependability.

4. BUILD A TALENT COMMUNITY

Creating and regularly adding to your talent community can greatly improve your time-to-fill and quality-of-hire. When every open role receives several standout candidates, those you don’t extend an offer to can be leveraged to build your talent pipeline. 

This means that as similar roles become available, you already have a pool of previously vetted candidates to choose from, which reduces the amount of time you need to source and screen applicants. 

Of course, being able to rely on these individuals assumes they’re still interested in the opportunity. Keep members of your talent community engaged by nurturing them with additional branded content, and keep them interested by continuously evolving your employer branding strategy to stand out from the competition. 

5. INVEST IN CANDIDATE MATCHING TOOLS

Candidate matching tools rely on smart-matching technologies and artificial intelligence to simplify the sourcing process for recruiters. These tools generate candidate suggestions based on manually set criteria, such as skill set, experience level and geographical location. 

Candidate matching improves your applicant pool by creating smart recommendations that address the role’s — and your team’s — specific needs. Additionally, expediting the sourcing process improves the efficiency of your recruitment process as a whole, and increases your quality-of-hire by giving your team more time to evaluate candidates during interviews. 

6. UP YOUR RECRUITMENT MARKETING EFFORTS

Recruitment marketing is the process of promoting your employer brand to job seekers and utilizing marketing best practices to attract top talent. To reach and exceed your goals, you need to get serious about your recruitment marketing strategy. 

Text recruiting is a relatively new addition to recruitment marketing, but it has a significant impact on the success of the application process. It helps automate the process and ensures quality candidates don’t slip through the cracks due to a lack of communication. 

To further improve the quality of your talent pool and time-to-fill, host or attend recruitment events. Connecting with prospects face-to-face, as opposed to via their resume, makes it easier to identify the truly great candidates and fast-track the process from there. Giving potential applicants the chance to evaluate your organization upfront and in person will help sell them on your open roles. 

Set clear, actionable recruitment goals to ensure your team is tracking toward success. Utilize these tactics to get started, but be flexible with your strategy — every company is different and what works for some may not be suited for you. Tracking your KPIs will help you spot weaknesses before they become problems, so be prepared to pivot and keep moving forward.