Every recruiting manager should strive to be perceived as an expert who significantly contributes to the strategic goals of his company. How can you connect a company's recruitment strategy with its overall strategy and prove the business benefits of recruiting?
"After decades of research, I have identified 10 critical action steps that can lead to the recruiting function being considered as a corporate strategic hero," writes John Sullivan, world-renowned consultant in the field of HR and current professor of management at San Francisco State University, in his recent article on the Recruiting Trends website. He described individual recommendations, in the order you should implement them.
1. Acknowledge the importance of recruitment's direct and quantifiable impact on corporate goals
Does your company's annual report include any information on recruitment? Your goal should be to get recruitment in the annual report as an important strategic function, the impact of which can be quantified on the performance of the company's strategy.
2. Get in touch with the Chief Financial Officer
The aim of this cooperation is to ensure that your demonstration of the recruitment's impact on corporate goals is credible. No one can express the direct correlation between improved recruitment results and improved business results better than a finance expert.
3. Clarify the goals to focus on
To determine the key strategic goals, cooperation with your company's top management is crucial. The annual report can help you here as well. The goals will probably include revenue, profit, level of innovation, market share, etc. Prioritize these goals depending on how much they can be influenced by the recruitment function.
4. Increasing the company's revenue is the most important goal
Recruitment may influence revenue by focusing on filling vacancies in key business units faster and better. Start by measuring the average revenue by employee. Then compare the results of individual types of positions with the average. Your goal is to show that specific improvements in the recruitment process lead to better results in specific positions.
5. Focus on the most profitable positions
If you are to achieve the highest possible profit from your actions, you should invest your limited resources in priorities. Identify jobs generating the highest revenue and focus on how to fill them with the best talent.
6. Use the most effective recruitment tools
Focus on processes leading to obtaining the most innovative on the one hand and best performing talent on the other. Support these processes and get rid of the inefficient ones.
7. Create a process to demonstrate your ability to support your company's expansion and growth
Expanding into new geographical and product areas is another typical strategic goal of companies. Therefore, focus on how to get the best people for the new positions arising from the expansion most effectively.
8. Create a process to demonstrate your ability to deliver competitive advantage
Beating the competition is a strategic goal for companies. Recruitment, therefore, needs advanced processes to ensure better results in comparison with the competition. Do you count on the fact that the employees currently working for your competition may soon work for you?
9. Ensure that recruitment metrics reflect corporate metrics
Use the same language and the same measuring techniques. Co-operation with the finance department is important here again. You will be measuring e.g., the monetary value of recruiting innovators or best performing workers for the most profitable positions.
10. Constantly work with managers
Recruitment is the joint responsibility of recruiters and hiring managers. The recruitment function must therefore establish a process to clearly show how it helps managers to choose the best performing and most innovative people. Educate your managers, and provide them with effective recruitment tools that they can apply in the process of selecting the best ones from the high-quality candidates you find for them.
-KK-