How To Make A Recruitment Plan

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When it comes to hiring employees, you need to have a plan in place to make the most of your efforts. In this article, we’ll explain what a recruitment plan is, why you need one, and how to make one.

Key Takeaways:

• A recruitment plan helps you find the right candidates quickly and gets everyone on the same page.

• A good recruitment plan has an accurate and detailed job description, a marketing strategy, and screening and interview strategies.

• Your recruitment plan should also include your recruitment budget.

What Is a Recruitment Plan?

A recruitment plan is a strategy for how you’re going to fill an open position at your company, whether it’s a new or recently vacated role. Some companies create unique recruitment plans for each position they’re filling, while others create an overarching recruitment plan for hiring managers across the company to use.

Recruitment plans usually include the following elements:

• A job description.

• What type of employee you need to fill that job description.

• Your recruitment budget.

• The hiring timeline.

• Your target recruitment audience.

• How you’re going to reach that audience.

• What methods and criteria you’ll use to evaluate the candidates.

• What perks and benefits you can put in the job offer.

• What the job offer process will look like.

• How you’re going to onboard your new employee.

Why You Should Have a Recruitment Plan

Creating a recruitment plan may sound like an unnecessary step that will just delay your finding someone to hire, but having a strategy in place before you start looking for candidates helps make the hiring process more efficient and more effective.

1. It gets everyone on the same page. Without a recruitment plan, you run the risk of hiring managers and HR reps looking for two very different types of employees or providing candidates with conflicting information.

   Taking the time to create a recruitment plan allows you to make sure everyone is working together and not against each other – even accidentally.

2. It saves time. Hiring new employees can be a time-consuming process. Having a clear recruitment plan in place helps you streamline your efforts by giving you a clear plan of action and specific criteria that candidates have to meet to be considered.

   In addition, sitting down to make all of the decisions regarding the job posting, applicant criteria, and evaluation methods at once makes this process go faster than it would if you just addressed these concerns as they arose.

3. It focuses your efforts. When you don’t have a plan for researching candidates or evaluating their qualifications, you’re far more likely to go down rabbit trails or get confused about which candidates actually have what you’re looking for.

   A recruitment plan helps you stay on track, making better use of your time and energy, which you, your colleagues, and your company will all appreciate.

4. It helps you narrow down your candidate list more easily. A recruitment plan usually includes a job description and a list of qualifications that candidates need to have. As a result, it’s easier to quickly see whose resumes meet what you’re looking for, making the decision-making process at least a little easier.

How to Make a Recruitment Plan

1. Write or revise your job description. Make sure it accurately covers the position’s responsibilities and how they differ from other team members’ responsibilities. Getting this job description right is important because it will help you decide what key skills and experiences candidates need to have.

   It can be a good idea to have employees working in similar positions review the job description to make sure it’s accurate and doesn’t encroach on their roles or leave any gaps.

2. Establish your recruitment budget. Recruiting and hiring new employees is expensive. Before you move forward in the recruitment process, you need to establish how much you’re willing to spend to advertise your job to your target market. You also need to decide what salary range and benefits you can afford to offer them.

   In addition, if you want to have candidates come to interview in person, you’ll probably need to fly a few of them out to your offices, so you’ll need to budget for that as well.

3. Decide your marketing strategy. Unfortunately, most of the time, the perfect candidates aren’t just going to show up at your company and ask what jobs you have available. You have to go out and find them.

   Posting the job on your website is an excellent way to start, but you may need to push a little harder to reach your target audience. You could use any of these methods to market your job opening:

   • Social media. Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn can all be great ways to reach potential job candidates with information about your company and job openings. You can use both organic (unpaid) posts and paid ads to do this.

   • Other advertising. Classic TV and newspaper ads could be effective, but advertising in an industry publication is likely to be most useful in reaching your ideal candidates.

   • Job fairs. These are especially helpful if you’re working to fill entry-level roles, as job fairs often target college students and recent graduates. At these events, you can meet a variety of potential candidates and grow your pool of applicants.

   • Online job boards. These are the first place many job seekers go, so it’s a good idea to post your job description on one or two of the job boards. There are even specified boards for remote and industry-specific positions, so consider looking into those as well.

   • Employee referrals. Your current employees likely have connections with highly qualified candidates, and their being able to vouch for these candidates could help you lower your chances of making a bad hire.

     Consider offering bonuses to employees who refer someone to a position – just make sure you don’t actually give them the money until you’ve confirmed their referral has been hired and is doing well in the role.

   • Recruitment agencies. This can be an expensive option, but if you don’t have the time to run and monitor your own advertising, it may be worth it to outsource the recruitment process entirely.

4. Create an initial screening process. This has a number of facets, starting with resumes. Are you going to run them through an ATS or have someone lay eyes on every resume that comes in?

   An ATS will save time, but they’re known for missing highly qualified candidates just because they couldn’t read their resumes correctly, so a human will allow you to see all your options.

   In addition, are you going to conduct phone interviews to further narrow down your pool of applicants? If so, who will make the phone calls, and what questions do you want them to ask?

   All of these questions are vital to establishing your initial screening process.

5. Establish an interview strategy. This strategy needs to address these questions:

   • How many candidates are you willing to interview?

   • Who will conduct the interviews?

   • Where will you conduct the interviews, or will they be over the phone or via video chat?

   • What questions will you ask in the interview?

   • Will you interview candidates individually or in a group?

   • How many interview stages will you have?

   • Will you administer a skills test?

   • Are you going to ask to see their portfolios?

   Taking the time to answer these questions will help you go into the interview stage with confidence and avoid wasting you and the candidates’ time.

6. Create a job offer plan. Have a general salary range and benefits package ready to go, leaving room for negotiation and adjustment – you might find a candidate who is more qualified than you were expecting and have to make a more generous offer than you initially planned.

   Beyond salary and benefits, talk to HR to figure out when candidates could start and what screenings (such as background checks and drug tests) they need to pass before they can be hired.

   You can’t iron out every detail before it comes up, but having a general idea of what the job offer process will look like beforehand is immensely helpful.

7. Set up your onboarding plan. The first step of this process is to talk to HR and the new employee’s manager to find out which trainings and certifications they’ll need and when they need to have them. Then, you’ll need to move into other strategies for making the employee feel welcome, such as:

   • A facilities tour.

   • Getting their computer and other equipment and supplies.

   • Ordering business cards, stationery, uniforms, and safety gear.

   • Connecting them with a mentor.

   • Setting up any network accesses.

Recruitment Plan FAQ

1. What are the seven steps of the recruitment process?

   The seven steps of the recruitment process are:

   • Writing or revising your job description.

   • Establishing your recruitment budget.

   • Marketing the position.

   • Conducting initial candidate screenings.

   • Interviewing candidates.

   • Offering the job.

   • Onboarding the employees.

2. What is included in a recruitment plan?

   Recruitment plans usually include:

   • A job description.

   • What type of employee you need to fill that job description.

   • Your recruitment budget.

   • The hiring timeline.

   • Your target recruitment audience.

   • How you’re going to reach that audience.

   • What methods and criteria you’ll use to evaluate the candidates.

   • What perks and benefits you can put in the job offer.

   • How you’re going to onboard your new employee.

3. What should you not do during recruitment?

   During recruitment, you should not discriminate against candidates, interview candidates without screening them first, or rush to fill a position.

   There are a lot of legal pitfalls in the recruitment process, and one of the biggest is discriminating – intentionally or unintentionally – against candidates for their race, gender, religion, age, etc. To avoid this and other legal problems, check with your HR department about what you can and can’t do during the hiring process.

   In addition, you shouldn’t interview candidates without conducting initial screenings over the phone. This will help you avoid wasting too much time on clearly unqualified or poorly motivated employees.

   You also shouldn’t rush to fill an open position just to fill it. While you don’t want to be shorthanded for too long, it’s better to take your time and find the right employee that will stick around for the long haul than make a bad hire. Not only will a bad hire cost lots of money, but it will also damage the morale of your current employees.

Final Thoughts

Hiring a new employee may sound daunting, but it doesn’t have to be. Take the time to create a good recruitment plan so you can move through the process with purpose and make sure everyone involved is on the same page.

And, if you need to tweak your plan along the way, don’t stress – it’s meant to be a guide, not a law. In addition, the more you practice making recruitment plans, the more effective they’ll become.

References

1. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services – Developing a Search Strategy: Your Roadmap for Hiring

Author

Caitlin Mazur

Caitlin Mazur is a freelance writer at Zippia where she has written 140+ articles that have reached over 1 mil viewers as of June 2023. Caitlin is passionate about helping Zippia’s readers land the jobs of their dreams by offering content that discusses job-seeking advice based on experience and extensive research.