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The Recruitment Best Practices Marathon
By Andrew Hammer
While it may not always feel like it, recruiting and staffing for most companies is a marathon not a sprint. Sure there are times when hiring reaches a frenzied pace and it feels like you can’t find and hire enough people fast enough. And, it seems like there are never enough hours in the day to complete all the tasks associated with recruiting and hiring, but when you look at the practice of recruiting to find the best employees to fit your company’s needs, it truly is a marathon process.
The same can be said for researching, implementing, and maintaining recruiting best practices. Every Human Resources professional aspires to utilizing the best recruiting, hiring, and retention practices known, to better their own organization. In our conversations with hundreds of local employers, the recurring roadblock to implementing best practices for most companies and HR departments is not money as most people intuitively think, but TIME. There are a myriad of tasks to be performed every day just to keep up, let alone get a little bit ahead or try something new, which often leads to the pursuit of best practices being shelved for a rainy day.
As the ‘war for talent’ continues to escalate, those companies that recruit, hire, and retain the best will have a tremendous competitive advantage. To be one of those companies, you must be utilizing the best methods available to find and attract star employees. But knowing that time is often a constraint, exactly how do you get the best practices implemented within your company?
The answer, in my mind, is to implement best practices like you are running a marathon. Take your time, pace yourself, and keep moving forward every day towards the finish line. There are really just a few steps to take to implement any HR best practice as outlined below.
Steps to Implementing Best Practices
1. Identify the best practices that will benefit your company – When it comes to HR best practices there are far too many for most companies to understand and implement. Some of these include:
| • Workforce Planning |
• Constant Recruiting |
| • Writing Better Job Ads |
• Referral Programs |
| • College Recruiting |
• Building Employer Brand |
| • Corporate Recruiting Web Sites |
• Situational Interviewing |
| • Assessment |
• Pre-employment Testing |
| • On Boarding |
• Retention Programs |
| • Exit Interviews |
• Boomerang Recruiting |
In order to make any progress towards improving your processes you must first narrow the list of best practices to implement to those that will have the best results and most positive net gains for your organization.
2. Prioritize your list of best practices – Once you have identified the best practice you need to implement for your company, prioritize them based on your budget, time, complexity, etc., so you have a list of which practices to implement and in what order. You may choose to implement a less important practice first to learn how the process will work within your organization. At other times, you may choose to implement a less complex practice improvement due to time constraints. Plan your work then work your plan.
3. Schedule the implementation of each new practice carefully – It is important to schedule best practice implementation carefully because this is where you gain and maintain control of the process, and employees’ attitudes towards the changes. It is never good to make a change a week before you leave for vacation. Similarly it would be a mistake to change your time keeping or payroll process in January when you have tax deadlines to comply with. Your schedule should include time to fully research the practice you have identified, to seek the advice and counsel of people within your company, to seek advice from outsiders who have experience with the practice you are changing, to educate management, your staff, and all employees about the coming changes, to perform trial runs, and finally to implement the improved practice. How well you schedule changes will determine how well you implement your projects and how much resistance to change you receive.
4. Follow through on every change you make with accurately reported results – To maximize the positive effects of implementing HR best practices, you must track and report the results. These results should be reported to everyone, not just to your boss or the management team. Sharing the results of the improvement in terms of cost savings, improved hiring, or better retention illustrates to the entire company the importance of the HR function and will contribute to future commitment from your entire organization.
Best practices are important in every company’s efforts to hire and retain the best talent. As the ‘war for talent’ continues to escalate, it will be important to your organization to be using the best available methods to find, recruit, hire, and retain. However, if you try to implement all the best practices too quickly, you will burn yourself out, make mistakes, and suffer from internal resistance to change because change is stressful to most people. If, however you identify the practices you want to implement, prioritize them so you gain maximum results within your company, schedule the implementation of each practice carefully, and follow through on every change you make, you will finish the marathon and have new processes that will greatly improve your effectiveness. And, you will have created a competitive advantage for your company.
Andrew Hammer is President of CareerMarketplace, Inc., a leading network of geographic and profession-specific employment Web sites focused on engineering, sales, information technology, and healthcare. Mr. Hammer has over 10 years of experience with Internet recruiting as a former Director of Internet Strategy and Vice President of Top Echelon Network, the world’s largest Network of independent recruiters. In his current role he works with employers from across the United States to create candidate sourcing opportunities that allow his clients to compete in the global “war for talent.” |
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