HR Basics is a series of short lessons designed to highlight what you need to know about a particular human resource management topic. In today's HR Basics, we explore recruitment, and the process and methods behind finding the best possible candidates for jobs. Recruiting, or recruitment, is the process of generating a pool of qualified candidates for a job.
To best understand recruitment, it's critical that human resource professionals understand three essential concepts, employment brand, recruitment process, and recruitment methods. An employment brand is the way your organization's prospective applicants, candidates, and current employees perceive you as an employer. A strong employment brand is one that clearly communicates the culture of an organization, its mission, and its values, giving people a compelling reason to want to work for and stay with the organization. All companies have an employment brand.
Not every organization, however, realizes just how critical a role their employment brand plays in both attracting and retaining talent. A recent study found that companies with a strong employment brand attract at least 3.5 times more applicants per job posting than do companies in the same industry. An Employer Branding Institute study showed that nearly half, 49% of employees, cited an employer's reputation as a major influencer in deciding where to work. Your employment brand strategy is a long-term effort that permeates every aspect of talent management.
So, invest in rigorous, ongoing process to build your employment brand that includes First, assessing your employment brand. This is done through passive and active research that involves employees and outsiders. Second, defining your message. Clearly communicating your value proposition requires you to define it and find that something meaningful about your organization that you'll communicate through your brand.
Third, Communicating your brand. You need to disseminate your message loud and clear both internally and externally. And fourth and finally, evaluating your message.
Looking at the effectiveness by measuring the effects of your employment branding efforts through your talent management process. Now let's turn to the recruitment process. This includes three primary elements.
First, planning. Understanding why you're recruiting, your objective, and how to attract the type of employees you need. Second, the job posting. Creating and distributing a notice of a current job opportunity to allow for application of recruitment methods.
And third, communication. The information shared between the employer and a candidate throughout the recruitment process itself. When planning recruitment, consider these four elements. How much money is available?
How quickly must the opening be filled? What's the size of your audience or the level of reach? And finally, what's the level of the available position?
Meaning, what level in the organizational structure does the position fall? Then we apply a job posting, which is the most frequently used technique for communicating job openings. A job posting is built directly from your job description. Job postings apply employment branding and contain information about the job, including a summary, essential functions, specifications, and so on. The goal of a job posting is straightforward, to get the word out to as many people as possible about the position.
Finally, candidate communication in the recruitment process is critical to success. All too often people apply for jobs and wait a long time to hear back from organizations or never hear at all. Remember that the recruitment process is concerned with generating interest in the company. Maintaining communication with prospective employees i.e. your applicants, is an effective way to signal that you and your organization value them. You may not have a job for an applicant right now, but they may be just the right person for a future job or might become a customer in the future.
With great communication, the applicant will be more likely to consider the organization as an employer and will speak positively about the organization to others. In other words, it's important to always leave the applicant with a good impression of your organization. You never know when you're going to need this person to come work for you in the future.
Recruitment methods are the means used to source candidates. Successful organizations recognize that it's important to use both internal, within the organization, and external, outside the organization, recruitment methods. Knowing these advantages and disadvantages will give you the opportunity to make informed decision when you're recruiting employees.
Let's take a look at internal and external recruitment methods. Internal recruitment includes job boards and posting systems, recruitment databases, internal advertisement, and promotions and transfers from within. Let's take a look at the advantages and disadvantages of these internal methods. Advantages include the cost-effective nature, the fact that existing employees know the operation and organizational culture, that advancement opportunities motivate current employees and that performance data is available for our applicants.
Disadvantages are primarily it creates a new vacancy within the organization that may need to be filled, employees that are entrenched may not make the necessary changes of a new position, and employees not selected might become problematic or leave, and finally existing employees may not have the needed skills for the current position. That's why we take advantage of external recruitment methods through our planning process. This could include advertising, print media or web, direct mail, campus recruiting, job fairs, professional associations, employment and search agencies, internships, temporary employees, employee referrals, and formal applicants to name a few. These external methods have advantages and disadvantages like internal methods.
The advantages of external recruiting include bringing in new ideas or change agents to jobs, bringing in needed skills that might not currently exist, and the opportunity to enhance your organization's diversity profile. Disadvantages include the more expensive nature of external advertisement, new hires requiring a significant learning curve, a lack of performance data on those applicants, and the fact that existing employees may be resentful. Using this information go create a great process to source and recruit your next candidate