Strategic Recruitment: Definition, Importance & How to Create a Strategy

Strategic recruitment is all about hiring the best candidates with dedicated recruitment strategies. Many companies refrain from investing in strategic recruitment as it seems irrelevant. However, research reveals the opposite.

As per a survey conducted by Harris Poll, one wrong hire costs about $14900 to the hiring company. That is why companies need to be strategic with their recruitment strategies to save themselves from making a bad hiring decision.

Once a company finds a candidate who matches its requirements, it helps companies meet its goals and set new objectives for the future.

Strategic recruitment is all about finding the right talent with the help of three components, including skilled selling, employer branding, and recruitment marketing. It is a recruitment focusing marketing strategy for sourcing the best talent for a company to compete in dynamic market conditions.

The recruitment process is a time-consuming and costly affair. It is important to ensure the success of the recruitment process by adopting strategic recruitment practices. With strategic recruitment, you can find the best fit for your company.

It aims to find the best talent for your company depending on three elements. These strategic recruitment elements are employer branding, targeted selling, and recruitment-driven marketing.

Strategic recruitment also aligns the hiring process with business goals. In addition, it helps organizations maintain their standards of offering equal job opportunities to all employees.

Many companies spend a lot of time hiring the right candidate. After hiring, companies invest resources in training the recruits to work efficiently with the company.

This entire process is costly, so strategic recruitment is crucial to ensure such expenses are worthwhile. Here is the list of detailed benefits that make strategic recruitment necessary:

As we already know, hiring the right candidate can save you money. That makes it important to source, vet, and onboard the right talent for your company. Choosing the right employee not just saves additional costs but also helps to reduce your employee turnover ratio.

Also, you will save time training a new hire as a qualified candidate will require less training and can settle as per the workflow in no time. So, when you make the final hiring decision, choose the one who possesses all the essential skills for the job role.

Strategic recruitment facilitates various steps in the recruitment process. One of those important steps is writing a targeted job description. Strategic recruitment allows employers and hiring managers to write compelling and well-targeted job descriptions.

A targeted job description must include the skills you seek and the ideal experience level and communicate a company’s offering to the candidate perfectly.

To qualify for the job, a well-targeted job description should include all the primary, secondary, and tertiary characteristics. With strategic recruitment, you can list your job requirements in advance and ensure that only suitable candidates apply.

Strategic recruitment helps you set a process for recruiting, and this process makes it easy for candidates to navigate through the recruitment process. It improves candidate satisfaction which makes them interested in working for your company.

With strategic hiring, you can also look into candidates’ expectations and offer them what they want. When you do that, your employees will be more satisfied and contribute to your team better.

Strategic recruitment also helps to build an efficient recruitment process. It significantly reduces the chances of your employees leaving the company to seek better opportunities. Most employees leave a company when they see no effort from the management to help employees to perform better.

With strategic recruitment, organizations dive deep to build a strong team that motivates their existing employees. When the employees feel motivated and satisfied, the employee retention rate of the organization improves.

An organization can hire skilled employees when they have a strategic recruitment process. Strategic recruitment and a targeted job description can help you source a pool of qualified candidates.

Once you have access to this talent pool, you can streamline the hiring process and deeply vet all the applicants to choose the ideal candidate.

Strategic recruitment has its own set of fundamental principles that should always be kept in mind while drafting a strategic recruitment plan:

1. Set the targeted audience
All your hiring efforts will only be worthwhile if you set your targeted audience for your hiring initiatives. Here your targeted audience stands for the group of suitable job candidates. So, when you begin recruiting, make sure to define your targeted audience.

Doing so is also important because each job is different and will require a different set of targeted audiences to fill the job position. For instance, your candidate's search for the position of Chief Revenue Officer will be different from that of the role of Marketing Executive.

That is why it is important to set a specific target audience for every position to have a more targeted talent pool. This way, only the applicants suitable for the job will apply and save you from a pile of irrelevant applicants.

2. Create a strong brand image
Your brand image decides how your potential hires will view your organization. Your brand image can also act as a deciding factor for many top-level candidates. To ensure that the top-level hires show interest in your job offering, you need to have a strong brand image. Your brand image should reflect your company culture and also narrate the value you hold for your employees.

Ensure your targeted applicants can easily find all this information about your company. By making this information available, you can attract many people to work with your organization.

3. Prioritized jobs and targets
There are times when recruiters have various job openings in hand. When there are various job openings to hire for, it becomes difficult to pay attention to all of them. In such a situation it is important to prioritize jobs from all the jobs in hand and set targets to fulfill certain roles per the organization's requirements.

4. Talent pipeline
Creating a talent pipeline is an important step in the strategic recruitment process. The intent of creating a talent pipeline is to create a pipeline of talented individuals for future job requirements in a company. Creating a talent pipeline is an important step in the strategic recruitment process.

The intent of creating a talent pipeline is to create a pipeline of talented individuals for future job requirements in a company. While creating a talent pipeline, ensure that your pipeline goes with your company culture and that all your employees spread the word about your company and attract future candidates.

5. Follow a candidate-centric approach
Most candidates refrain from joining a company solely because they are not treated correctly during the interview. That is why hiring managers focus on offering candidates a positive experience approach. With this approach, hiring managers need to focus on offering a positive experience to candidates.

The recruiters should also emphasize why candidates should apply for a job position. With this, recruiters need to communicate freely and respectfully to every candidate to leave a good impression about the company culture and values. It is also important to have a sound onboarding process for every hire to maintain a desirable employee retention rate.

6. Adopt technology-based processes
Technology helps a great deal in screening and hiring candidates. The internet helps in candidate screening, cutting interviewing costs, and allowing global outreach. The Internet also allows recruiters and companies to perform market research and find targeted candidates. This technology also opens doors for remote work opportunities to bring talented individuals from all over the world in sync with hiring companies. To derive all these benefits, one needs to have a technology-based process.

7. Always make data-driven decisions
Human biases and emotions impact various business decisions, including hiring. It can lead to poor hiring decisions that can damage the company's reputation in the long run.

One way to eliminate this impact is to make decisions based on data. So, pay attention to the employee data and test your skills before making any final decision.

8. Strive to access a global pool of talent
We live in a world of digital innovation, which has made remote work more convenient than ever. Still, companies limit their talent search to restricted geographical locations. So, don’t make that mistake.

If you run a tech business and can hire remote employees, there is no geographical limit for you to search for talent. So, look for options to reach top-level talent from across the globe to hire the perfect fit.

You can also switch to Turing’s talent cloud platform to access a global pool of pre-vetted talent. Turing lists over 3 million pre-vetted experienced developers. Once a company requests pre-vetted candidates for hiring, Turing’s Talent Cloud shortlists the best pre-vetted talent for the company to choose from. This entire process takes 4 days and helps companies to perform swift hiring.

To derive the best results from the strategic recruitment process, you need to be innovative with your strategy. So, here are the steps for strategic recruitment to help you get started:

1. Set clear recruitment goals: The first step to getting started is to set clear recruitment goals. Your recruitment goal can be to increase headcount, reduce hiring time, reduce hiring costs, create a strong talent pipeline, etc. Among all these achievable goals, you need to set goals for strategic recruitment to get started.

2. Understand candidate requirements: The next step is to understand what type of candidates would be suitable for your company. Once you know it, pay attention to the requirements of candidates when you frame a recruitment strategy. These requirements can be a decent salary, good work culture, future scope in the company, etc. Once you know all the major candidate requirements, make sure to highlight your offerings to candidates with your job description and company values.

3. Undertake future hiring requirements: Once you evaluate the candidates’ requirements, make sure to evaluate the hiring requirements of the company. By evaluating the company’s hiring requirements you can decide on the hiring budget. Once you set a hiring budget for the upcoming months, you can easily determine your recruitment plan's return on investment (ROI).

4. Bring in digital automation: Some steps you can take for digital automation are introducing application tracking software, automating interview scheduling, creating candidates' scorecards, and executing employee engagement programs. These digital transformations will accelerate the hiring process and help you to focus on other important areas of the recruitment process.

5. Come with a targeted employee value proposition: The next step is to create a targeted employee value proposition for attracting, hiring, and retaining the ideal employee. To create a value proposition you need to pay attention to candidates’ requirements and the company’s needs. So, pay attention to both to create a targeted value proposition for employees.

6. Assuring smooth onboarding: The final step is to create a smooth onboarding process for recruits to understand the company culture and workflow. Many companies have realized the importance of a smooth onboarding process and make the best effort to ensure smooth onboarding. The onboarding process also plays a major role in developing a sense of belongingness. So, make sure that your team makes the required efforts for smooth onboarding.

Strategic recruitment is important to ensure the overall success of any hiring initiative. It helps you to constantly attract top-level candidates and saves you from choosing the wrong candidates for your team.

Keeping that in mind, strategic recruitment should be your approach to hiring. Still unsure about how to perform strategic recruitment? Look no further and hire top talent from Turing.

Turing saves employers from sourcing, screening, and interviewing candidates with its pre-vetted talent pool. Over 900 companies from Fortune 500 companies in the US have already hired tech talent from Turing. Visit Turing and begin your effortless hiring journey now!