Is perfect recruitment possible?
What if we told you there was such a thing as perfect recruitment?
You may scoff at the idea.
But aren’t we all aiming to be the best we possibly can at our profession? We all want to come up with the perfect process and generate the most creative ideas that are going to find our businesses the best talent in the most simple and effective way possible.
So, shouldn’t perfect recruitment be the goal of every HR and recruitment professional?
In this article we take an analytical look at how we can define perfect recruitment and then give some practical tips on how we can move towards achieving it.
What is perfect recruitment?
To give a precise and recognised definition of ‘perfect’:
“ Being entirely without fault or defect; satisfying all requirements; corresponding to an ideal standard or abstract concept” Merriam-Webster.com
This shows that, in practicality, ‘perfect recruitment’ is highly subjective.
With this in mind, we must first create our own detailed check list of what perfect recruitment means to us. At eRecruitSmart we would define perfect recruitment as having the following characteristics:
Securing our business the best talent
Giving recruiters a high number of quality candidate options
Low cost processing
Easy & stress free
Although these points may vary between businesses, the fundamental point behind them are likely to remain the same.
That is unless your definition of perfect recruitment is finding expensive, low performing candidates, spending a fortune in securing them and getting massively stressed out at the same time…
…we thought not!
How is it achieved?
As our definition of perfection continues to change and develop, it becomes clear that you cannot really ever reach it, but instead constantly strive and work towards it.
“Perfection is not a destination; it is a continuous journey that never ends. It is a journey with many elements, with constant adjustment” Brian Tracy
There will always be ways to find more and better candidates, cheaper ways to do it and new tools that will make the whole process substantially less stressful. It is the constant journey towards these that finds you developing the best recruitment system possible for your business.
Below we give some of the top ways to work towards recruitment perfection.
Employer branding
Employer branding is how a business differentiates itself in the labour market. It is how potential and current employees view the brand as an employer.
It is easy to see then that having a good employer brand is going to help you to achieve all elements of recruitment perfection.
The first and most important act in employer branding is finding and concisely communicating what value your business brings to employees. This may include competitive pay, generous benefits, unparalleled pensions, awesome working conditions and how interesting the physical work is.
Good employer branding helps you achieve recruitment perfection in a number of ways. Firstly, it lets you highlight exactly what you are trying to achieve as a business, this means you attract those interested in achieving the same – these are better candidates.
It also increases brand awareness, attracting people towards applying for the roles you advertise. This in turn means you develop a bigger pool to choose from and creates incoming applications, making your life easier.
Flat fee recruitment
Traditional agency recruitment can negatively impact your journey to recruitment perfection. It is both high cost and often provides you with just the candidates that bring the most benefit to the agent (the most expensive) rather than those best for the business.
Using a different approach, flat fee recruitment, can nullify these negative effects. The first major benefit is the low cost. Working with eRecruitSmart, flat fee recruitment can cost as little as £299 to fill job vacancies.
By leveraging their excellent relationship with the major job boards, your expertly written job advert will potentially be seen by millions of talented job seekers. This provides a large pool of relevant candidates applying for your vacancies.
So, we have ticked off low cost and a high number of suitable candidates. It may seem like this approach kicks ‘easy and low stress’ out of the window with a potentially high number of applications coming in. But this is where our next tip comes into play…
Smart recruitment software
A huge element of stress associated with recruitment is the stacks of CV’s, covering letters and other admin which needs to correctly organised to ensure nothing gets missed. But in the search for recruitment perfection we are looking to eliminate this type of stress.
That is where smart recruitment software comes into play. Here at eRecruitSmart we offer award winning recruitment software as part of our flat fee. This tool lets you easily organise all submissions for job vacancies as well as tag each so you know when and from where the application came from.
Ultimately this also allows you to search and find relevant CV’s much quicker, making your job easier and less stressful.
Trim the fat
When was the last time you went through your recruitment process and worked out what is and isn’t working?
Along with trying new techniques such as flat feet recruitment, you should cut out the parts of your recruitment process that aren’t helping you to achieve recruitment perfection. That may be cutting connections with expensive recruitment agencies through to limiting initial calls with candidates down to a specific time.
This may also include outsourcing aspect which could be done better and quicker externally, for example the writing of your job ads. It may seem simple, but doing this can save you money and cut out needless daily effort that can be spent on more beneficial actions.
Perfect recruitment may not be a destination, but it should be a goal we are all working towards. By changing up the way we look at recruitment we can do our job better, save money and ultimately make things easier for ourselves and our colleagues.