Increasing Headcount in 2015? Build Your Talent Acquisition Strategy First.

For small to growing companies, there becomes a stage during your company’s growth when management needs to make a decision about whether or not to hire a recruiter to manage talent acquisition initiatives. All too often, growing companies are unable to manage the disparate administrative and manual processes associated with recruiting, so it can quickly fall to the bottom of the priority list or get thrown on to someone’s lap with little to no experience in recruiting. When recruiting isn’t made a priority early on, it can have a direct impact on your company’s bottom line and determine the future success of your company.

1. Start By Hiring a Recruiter.

Recruiting is so much more than sourcing, selecting, hiring and onboarding a candidate, says Josh Bersin, Founder and Principal at Deloitte and Contributor to Forbes. The term “talent acquisition” requires a breadth of expertise in several areas from marketing and branding to technology and social media. Whether in-house or outsourced, recruiters are equipped to manage all the elements that contribute to a talent acquisition strategy.

2. Implement an Applicant Tracking System Designed for Small to Medium Sized Business

There are many solutions on the market that offer an “out of the box” type of solution to kick start your talent acquisition strategy. Make sure you do your research though, because you don’t just want a quick fix, you want something that can properly scale with your business and a team who can guide you along the way. Many pre-configured systems offer things like sample candidate workflow steps, email templates and a standard career page, and this can usually be set-up in less than 2 weeks. This is a great start.

3. Refine Your Process and Grow Into the Solution Over Time

Once you’ve implemented your system, you’ll start to see the other pieces of your talent acquisition strategy come to light.

• For example, you might need to start creating job requisitions and tracking the lifecycle of your job approvals.
• You’ll need to find an efficient way to get your hiring managers’ feedback on candidates.
• Perhaps the candidates that you are attracting are not qualified enough, so you need to find a way to evaluate candidates based off certain skills or experience through prescreening questions.
• Then, you need to find a place to put your qualified candidates who you just couldn’t’ hire this go round for other reasons like budget or a downswing in company sales.

As these areas for improvement come to light, you will should be able to utilize available functionality within your ATS platform to automate, refine, and make your process more efficient.

4. Maximize your ATS Investment

As you grow into the system, you get can even more entrenched in rich functionality that can serve up more benefits than just recruitment automation.

• A mobile career page can help your candidate conversion rate and enhance your employer brand.
• Integrated job boards and social sites can give your jobs maximum exposure and engage passive candidates.
• Interview guides can help your managers stay consistent with ranking criteria.
• An integrated Background Check or Skill Assessment company can improve your candidate experience from the beginning and help you see real results on hires.
• Smarter data mining can help your sourcing efforts and lead to shorter time-to-fill metrics.
• An integrated Onboarding Portal can reduce attrition and embed a candidate into your company culture before they even show up for work on Day 1.
• Reporting and metrics can help you make smarter more informed decisions about recruiting.

5. Find a Partner that can Help You Realize These Benefits

Selecting an ATS partner is an impactful business decision that brings with it many ancillary benefits outside of recruitment automation. If you don’t have the right partner to help you realize this investment, you could lose more than just recruiting dollars; you could damage your employer brand and lose valuable employees. ATS OnDemand understands the value that recruiting professionals bring to a company, which is why we go to great lengths to support the implementation, launch and ongoing consultation with our clients. Recruiters cannot be everything to everyone: a marketer, brand strategist, a career page developer or IT manager, but they can choose a partner who can help them turn their turn their talent acquisition strategy into a well-oiled machine.