The start of a new year is always a great time to hit the refresh button, both personally and professionally.
For businesses, January might seem staler than a leftover mince pie but the relative peace and quiet can provide a golden opportunity to plan recruitment for the year ahead.
If you’re an HR or recruitment specialist, our guide to enlisting the best and brightest talent will make sure the new ‘roaring twenties’ get off to a flying start!
First things first: take stock of your current business situation. In simple terms, this means conducting a skills gap analysis.
This enables businesses to identify the talents currently offered by their workforce and project those needed to meet future business objectives.
Once you pinpoint where your organisation is lacking, you can begin planning on how best to hire the necessary people to ensure your business reaches its maximum potential and achieves its objectives.
The next step is to create a budget. This should be a realistic reflection of exactly how much your business can afford to spend on recruitment for the whole year. As well as factoring in the salaries of new employees, there are several additional expenditures to consider – including advertising, assessment fees (such as candidate aptitude tests), use of recruitment agencies or headhunters and even the cost of candidate background checks. Once you’ve formulated a realistic and useable budget, you can decide how and when to hire.
When formulating your recruitment strategy, bear in mind that what worked last year may not work this year. Each new year brings its challenges and rewards.
Remember, too, that successful recruitment isn’t just about asking who you need. A watertight plan should include exactly how many you need, how many you can afford, a calendar that delineates when you need them to begin, precisely what you need them for, and how they can best fit into your organisation.
It’s also beneficial to streamline your hiring processes by conducting more efficient candidate screening and interview procedures.
For example, many companies now bypass the traditional ‘send us your CV’ process, in favour of online aptitude tests that digitally whittle down the competition.
Integral to your new plan, above all else, should be the promotion of a well-developed company brand that attracts the best candidates, the use of targeted postings of vacancies and the creation of attractive-but-accurate job descriptions.
In other words, it should harness the knowledge, experience and immense pulling power of [site_name]!
Finally, always seek feedback. If you’ve implemented a recruitment review process in the past, you already have plenty of candidate data to work through to optimise your hiring process this year.
If you haven’t, now’s the perfect time to establish a system in the form of an anonymous survey or a simple yes/no question form.
Learning through experience this way is incredibly effective and can help make your recruitment process smarter and smoother every new year.
If you’d like to learn more about how to get the best for your business, take a look at the world of first-class recruitment opportunities on [site_name].