Top 10 Tips For Corporate Recruitment Management

In today's competitive business environment, strategic recruitment management is more critical than ever before. Recruiters in all industries are challenged with quickly finding and hiring top talent before competitors sweep them up.

All the while, recruiters must work to position their companies for future success with fewer staff, smaller budgets and leaner processes.

The key to success now and into the future is the ability to optimize recruiting processes. Start hiring more effectively with these 10 tips for corporate recruitment management.

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1.  Automate Recruiting Management
One of the biggest pain points in many recruiting processes is having no way to track applicants electronically. Complete integration between recruitment management software and strategic human resources software is paramount because it is the basis for ensuring a consistent and positive job seeker experience, and follows through the entire hiring process. From web-based applicant tracking software  to recruiting, talent management solutions need to make it easy to find and manage human capital.

Recruitment management software should give the ability to see how a candidate fits with the specific job for which they have applied, have the ability to extract data to make decisions or support improving recruitment process, and provide the metrics needed to measure productivity of recruiters. It should enable corporations of any size to streamline recruitment processes and save costs. Organizations should leverage a system that includes features like an online application portal; applicant tracking tools; search facility; job board export; on boarding; Outlook integration; agency portal; reports, multi-lingual as well as multi-character capabilities, and above all configurable flexibility.

2.  Align Recruitment Management With Business Goals
In today's economic climate, efforts that do not tie back to corporate goals – and hence the bottom line – are unlikely to find support from the top down. Recruiting efforts are more successful when they deliver against the organization's business goals. Recruiters must learn to speak to the organization's most pressing recruitment challenges, and become experts in one or two key areas of the hiring process to help resolve those bottlenecks and streamline the process.

3.  Allow For Communication Throughout the Organization
A big factor in the success of corporate recruitment management is how well hiring managers from different departments engage with the recruiting department to fill a role. Corporate recruiters must work with internal clients through effective communication, being proactive when searching for and presenting candidates, and being aware of the skill set needs of each hiring manager and their departments. Recruiters should leverage a talent management solution with software for reassigning existing employees, including talent searching, tracking career progression, basic succession planning, appraisal management and internal mobility.

4.  Build Relationships
To optimize recruiting efforts, corporate recruiters must make it easy for recruiters and hiring managers to communicate throughout the recruiting process and build relationships with candidates.  Recruiters can ensure consistent communication with candidates by leveraging software that provides an online application portal with intelligent screening to notify the applicant when they meet job criteria. Recruitment management software can also send email or text alerts to candidates when a new vacancy becomes available.

5.  Collaborate With The Leadership Team
When optimizing recruiting processes, it is important for corporate recruiters to collaborate with the organization's leadership team to create attainable goals for success. Recruiters must understand the leadership team's expectations for the HR department and how their efforts tie back to the goals of the organization.

6.  Keep Evolving Recruiting Efforts
It's important for corporate recruiters to stay on top of trends in their industry, policies, procedures and other important factors. Because in the corporate recruiting world, policies and procedures change quickly, recruiters must understand and have experience with the latest trends in interviewing techniques and social networking. This in turn helps organizations stay current in the HR world. Whether it's formal training or merely taking time to surf the Web, corporate recruiters must find ways to build knowledge and their candidate pool. Corporate learning and talent development are equally important.

7.  Streamline Functions
When optimizing recruiting efforts, it's critical to identify tools or processes that can save valuable time without sacrificing results. For example, organizations can leverage recruitment management software that provides the ability to post vacancies to multiple websites, intranets, job boards, agencies, and advertising media simultaneously. Or, organizations can save time by setting up job templates for default data, screening questions and custom approval rules – another function of some recruiting software solutions.

8.  Don't Dwell In The Past. Are you Social Media Savvy?
Facebook and Twitter are no longer just for personal lives. More and more businesses are finding it's not only lucrative to advertise on social media sites to build brand awareness, but they are great tools for recruiting. HR departments are not relying on resumes any longer. Recruiters will scour LinkedIn, Facebook and other sites in addition to leveraging search engines to see what kind of information can be found to help get a better understanding of the candidate. The subject is as controversial as testing products on animals, but there is information in the public domain that, for good or bad, can let employers know how well potential employees will fit into the corporate image of their brand. At the very least, good recruiters must know how to utilize their resources to help make the best hiring decision.

9.  Maximize the Use of Agencies
Hiring agencies should enhance the recruiting process, rather than add additional workload for corporate recruiters. Organizations can leverage recruitment management software that provides the ability for selected staffing agencies to submit candidates for vacancies. Rather than spending time communicating with staffing agencies every time they have a new candidate to submit, recruiters can focus on the more strategic areas of talent management.

10.  Measure Success
It's been estimated that 38% of organizations produce no reports on recruitment activity whatsoever and are therefore unaccountable for the time and spend involved. Metrics are crucial at every step of the recruitment process. Recruiters must prove to hiring managers that they can improve the hiring decision of the candidate based on all factors in the interview process and not just by assessment results alone. Organizations should leverage software that tracks cost to hire, speed to hire, as well as quality to hire. Organizations must also put processes in place to measure customer satisfaction from the internal customers supported.

Summary
The competitive business landscape of today will only become more complex and competitive with time. By developing a strategic recruitment plan, businesses can more efficiently and effectively attract and hire top-quality candidates - and gain a significant competitive advantage.