Recruitment campaigns: How to run one

Recruitment is one of the biggest single costs for HR professionals. The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) calculates the direct cost of recruitment at somewhere between 4,000 and 6,000 for managers and professionals.

However, if you factor in indirect costs, such as cover for the vacant position (it takes an average of seven weeks to fill a vacancy), the drop-off in productivity as other employees fill in and jobs are not properly done, plus the additional training and development required once an appointment is made, and the total cost soon climbs far higher. Many bad recruitment decisions are made in business and it is hard to reverse them. Your ability to attract and secure the top talent is likely to rest on a well-executed recruitment plan that sells your organisation every bit as much as you would expect candidates to sell themselves.

Where do I start?

To find the right people, you must be absolutely clear about what you are looking for. So, identify the key talents and skills your organisation requires. If it is a major campaign involving multiple positions, carry out a skills assessment and create profiles for each role. Seek input from the relevant function managers if necessary. Narrow the search by including greater detail on the person specification. Decide whether you are going to assign a specialist in-house team to handle the entire process or use a recruitment consultancy. A major campaign can be time-consuming, so if taking the in-house route, staff will need to be relieved of day-to-day duties.

"The best recruitment campaigns are no different from the best marketing campaigns. It is about matching a product (in this case, a job) with a consumer (a potential candidate)," says Helen Rosethorn, chief executive of Bernard Hodes Group. "Like most things in life, detailed effort in the planning stages pays you back in spades."

Make first impressions count

How well you communicate the organisation's brand, vacancy and corporate culture will be a decisive factor in the recruitment process.

The survey First Impressions Cost, by recruitment specialist Brooklands Executives, found that more than one-third of candidates have declined an offer of a position because the recruitment process had left them an unfavourable impression of the organisation.

From the moment your advertise-ment is scanned, prospective candidates will be swayed by how they are treated at each stage of the exercise - from the length of time you take to respond to their application, to how fairly they are dealt with during interview. So always think of the candidate's experience.

Be clear about your organisation's value proposition from the outset, and be ready to sell the culture and benefits of working for the company. If you have attained 'employer of choice' or 'best company to work for' status, use this as a selling point.

Communicating to the job market

Decide on the medium you want to use to advertise the positions: national, regional or specialist press, online job boards, corporate sites or interactive TV. Match the media to the market at which you're aiming. Do you want to direct applicants to your corporate site, where they can learn more about the company culture and values, or respond to postal or e-mail addresses? Make sure you are geared up for the response, and will be able to manage the volume of applications.

Integrated technology systems

Your organisation may already have an end-to-end online recruitment system that will do everything from managing and sifting through applications to contacting candidates for interview. Such systems can dramatically reduce administration, so if you don't have one in place and are embarking on a major recruitment campaign, it may be time to review processes.

Alternatively, consider introducing other online elements that will help streamline the process, such as online psychometric testing.

Evaluating processes and candidate tracking

Measure your processes, including your candidate source, to improve your methods. Find out how the candidate felt about the process and, if they turned you down, the reasons why. If you want to try to recruit them at a later stage, make sure you can. "If recruiters in general took [measurement] more seriously, then determining the best method and sources would be so much easier," says Rosethorn.

Where can I get more info?

Related articles

How to...use a recruitment consultancy
www.personneltoday.com/21575.article

How to...conduct an interview
www.personneltoday.com/28858.article

Report

First Impressions Cost
www.brooklandsexecutives.com

If you only do five things...

1 Be clear about what you are looking for

2 Prepare a detailed person specification

3 Sell the job

4 Always think of the candidate experience

5 Measure your processes

Expert's view: Helen Rosethorn on running a recruitment campaign

Helen Rosethorn is chief executive of Bernard Hodes Group.

What formal steps should always be followed?

There are five key steps. First, build an intimate picture of the target audience - who they are, where they are, how best to reach them, and how to speak to them in their language. Second, ensure you have defined the clear 'selling proposition' for the role(s). Third, design a process that matches the 'promise', and offers a consistent and positive candidate experience. Fourth, manage the expectations of all internal stakeholders in the process. Finally, commit to measurement - in a perfect world, this gives candidates and line managers the chance to score the recruitment process experience.

What is likely to be the hardest part of planning the campaign?

The toughest aspect varies depending on the brief. For sought-after and scarce skills, you might know where they are, but how to reach them and persuade them to act on your offer is another matter. For example, many employers are chasing certain categories of engineering talent on a global scale.

The investment in and complexity of the associated recruitment campaigns in this category should not be underestimated. This ranges from major research identifying particular talent pools, such as undergraduate communities in the US, to online job fairs, allowing those with an interest to have direct access to line specialists.

What additional measures would you recommend?

One of the biggest problems recruiters face is that recruitment tends to be a distress purchase and, therefore, often carries pressured timelines that threaten the planning phase. Ongoing research into understanding labour market dynamics within your employee groups is therefore wise. Ironically, exit interview analysis is often a great source of this but is rarely well used in organisations.