What really counts for success in recruitment?
It should be obvious, shouldn't it? It's all about getting 'bums on seats' and there's nothing more to be said.
Well, that's true up to a point: everybody wants to fill their vacancies successfully, of course. But if you're prepared to put in the required time and effort, there's an awful lot more you can learn from any recruitment campaign that will help you to use your recruitment budget even more effectively.
In practice, a truly effective recruitment campaign can do much more than merely fill vacancies:
- It can raise a company's profile in its market sector and/or local area
- It can open up new sources of talent by stressing the relevance and transferability of skills from other unrelated sectors
- It can turn an organisation previously perceived as run-of-the-mill into an employer of choice
So already, we're seeing that the term 'effective' can cover a lot more than just filling specific jobs. But is it really possible to measure the success rates of these other, more abstract objectives?
Indeed it is. Effective tracking and monitoring processes can be introduced to provide a whole raft of quantitative and qualitative information that can be used to develop and fine-tune future recruitment strategies. And even if the final results for a given campaign don't come through for a couple of months, lots of other information can be fed through and analysed during the course of the process.
For example,
This kind of information can also provide useful feedback on the recruiting process itself:
- Apart from the people we hired, did we lose any others because other organisations reacted faster, or offered a more tempting proposition?
- Regarding the people we did recruit, did the advertisement they responded to (plus any related follow-up material) give them an accurate picture of their role and our organisation? (If it didn't, the chances are they won't stick around for long, so the need to recruit need will quickly recur...)
From these few examples, you can see there's a whole host of information that can be used to good advantage. And the more of this information that you're able to share with us, the better equipped we'll be to help you in terms of devising candidate attraction strategies that really hit the mark, recommending media that will deliver the quantity and quality of talent you require.
What's more, with the rise in online recruitment media, it's already possible to track basic response data automatically to some extent. But if we really understand how much information there is to be derived from a single recruitment exercise, we can ensure that it's put to optimum effect in future campaigns.
We know from experience that clients are very keen to get involved in this kind of information sharing. We also know that, in practice, a whole host of operational issues can conspire to scupper the process. If you can buck this trend, it'll do your organisation a power of good.