Whether you run a small business or a big enterprise with hundreds of employees, it is crucial to know how your team has grown over time. Depending on the requirements, you need to decide what kind of talent you want and when. While doing so, you should keep in mind certain things, like:
- When no plan is in writing, recruiting is haphazard.
- Full buy-in and coordination among top management is necessary for efficient hiring.
- A bad hire can cost up to 30% of the employee’s earnings in the first year, says the U.S. Department of Labor.
This is where you need a strategic hiring plan to streamline the recruitment process followed in your organization. A well-developed recruitment plan not only helps fill job vacancies with the right talent but also avoids bad hiring decisions that may turn costly.
What is a Hiring Plan?
A hiring plan refers to the pre-arranged strategy to hire talented individuals in an organization. It also acts as a timeline to hire qualified candidates without causing any downtime.
A strategic hiring plan includes the job positions you need to hire for, a full-cycle recruiting calendar, budget information, and other important details to support the hiring decisions. It is much more than knowing which positions need to be filled in the near future. Rather, it is an opportunity to align the organizational goals and skill gaps with the hiring efforts.
In general, a hiring plan involves the following aspects:
- Identifying the need for a job opening
- Deciding how to fill that need
- Identifying the target applicants
- Communicating to the target group
- Discussing the job opportunity with the right candidates
Defining a proactive recruitment strategy using these steps is the best way to improve hiring practices. Let’s move to the actionable part to understand how to make things happen.
7 Steps to Creating a Successful Hiring Plan
1. Assess your current hiring needs
One of the most important hiring process steps is to first identify the business needs and skill gaps that cannot be filled by the existing talent. You can start this by analyzing the company’s growth while also considering factors like employee turnover.
Get an estimate of which departments and types of roles need to be strengthened. This can be based on specific projects coming up, the exit of existing team members, or the growth of certain operations. This way, you will be in a better position to decide which skills are missing from the team and how to tackle the future workload with the right hiring decisions.
2. Determine the hiring goals
Since recruitment is expensive, the time you choose to spend upfront to set clear goals pays off versus a costly trial-and-error-based process. Setting hiring goals allows your team to define an effective hiring plan, saving you time, money, and energy. Furthermore, the goals should be based on the quantitative analysis, covering aspects like:
- What is the average turnover rate?
- How many members do you want to add to each department?
- By when do you need to hire the candidates?
Using this information, you can create a full life cycle recruiting calendar for the next few quarters.
3. Set a timeline
The timeline or time to hire is one of the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for hiring teams. You might be surprised to know that only 30% of companies can fill a vacant role in 30 days, while the rest of them take around one to four months to process the hiring of a new candidate.
To set the timeline, you need to measure the current time to hire first. Look at the data specific to your organization to find:
- How long does it currently take to fill an open job position?
- How long does it take for the candidates to move between the stages of the full cycle recruiting process?
- What is the standard time to hire in your industry?
Accordingly, you can focus on the areas to be improved and proceed with succeeding in your hiring decisions.
4. Plan and track your budget
A detailed recruitment budget is a driving force behind an effective recruitment process. Before you start looking for potential candidates to proceed with your hiring plan, you must have a clear idea of the approved budget, which should include:
- The expected number of hires in a quarter or year in specific departments
- Basic recruitment costs, including advertising on job boards, campus recruiting, in-house salaries, and other benefits given to the employees
- Fixed hiring costs related to funding events or partnerships with different institutions
- Cost of background verification
These details will point you towards hiring potential candidates as per the budget approved by the organization.
5. Plan for recruiter’s workload
Once you have the information related to the hiring goals, timelines, and budget handy, the next important thing is to execute the hiring plan with the HR team. You must know how the team is going to handle the recruitment process based on the given timelines. Also, you need to further break down the process to be followed in terms of the number of interview rounds and assign different tasks to the team members.
Keep in mind that a one-size-fits-all candidate selection process does not work well for every organization. Hence, you need to prepare the hiring team with the right tools and methods to scan candidate profiles and hire right.
6. Formalize it with a job requisition
While thinking through the steps to create a hiring plan, writing a compelling job description should be one of the top priorities. While the majority of hiring managers think they provide clear job descriptions, only a small proportion of the target audience finds the description informative and catchy.
Attracting the best candidates requires you to bring a strong job description to the table to make the first impression. Your job description should be informative and arouse excitement in the minds of potential job seekers. As you contemplate creating the right hiring plan, also think of your job description as a brand marketing tool and include information that will make the prospects tick.
7. Hire a staffing agency
Staffing agencies are known to prove their worth to the clients they work for. Using their broad network of connections and candidates, they can help you obtain a steady pipeline of qualified candidates to be interviewed for final selection. In other words, they will do the hard work for you and save you the time you would otherwise spend checking hundreds of resumes and carrying out interview rounds for the initial hiring phases.
Conclusion
A hiring plan will serve as the ultimate guide for all your recruitment efforts. While it may take some time to create one, it will streamline the entire recruitment process to reduce the time to hire while also improving the quality of hired candidates. Another crucial aspect of creating a hiring plan is to keep on adapting and optimizing it based on business needs.
For example, your company may grow faster than expected, thus requiring you to hire more candidates in less time. You can reset the timelines and goals accordingly to succeed in hiring the candidates you need. Learn More about Hiring During A Recession.
Find the Best Talent for Your Organization with Connect Tech+Talent
Creating a hiring plan specific to your business needs is half the job done. Its execution, whether internal or external, will ultimately lead to successful hiring. Simplify your hiring process further by joining hands with Connect Tech+Talent – an Austin-based staffing agency having 27+ years of expertise. With a deep understanding of mobile, cloud, data science, and other fields, Connect Tech+Talent can find you the right tech professionals to ensure the success of your business. To learn more, talk to a Connect Tech+Talent hiring consultant today.
