By Miranda Nash
For most HR professionals, hiring is primarily a reactionary effort: a position opens up, and it’s time to get to work filling it. If you’re lucky, you have the luxury of a 2-week notice, a month-long notice in advance of retirement, or preplanning ahead of new department expansions or other new hiring needs.
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But, in most cases, many HR teams can only dream of having time to plan ahead for hiring. They’re simply too pre-occupied with other responsibilities, like benefits administration, compliance training, tracking personnel time off, payroll coordination, and other duties.
Unfortunately, this quite often puts the organization behind the eight ball, with no way to be strategic in their hiring efforts. This means the company could be at a severe disadvantage when it comes to finding the best talent at the right times to fill critical positions.
In order to prioritize and plan ahead, recruiters instead must take a more strategic, forward-thinking approach to hiring. By looking beyond immediate vacancies to longer-term staffing needs, HR pros can anticipate needs, maintain a full pipeline of candidates, and give their organization a more strategic and agile competitive advantage for recruiting new employees.
Here’s how:
1) Assess each position based on its strategic vs. tactical value.
Most organizations make the mistake of treating every job as though each is of equal importance to the organization. Certainly, we all know intuitively that this is not the case, but from an HR perspective, this is how they’re handled: an opening emerges and we seek to fill it with the best qualified candidate that we can afford.
But, this focused approach ignores the importance the role plays within the larger organization. Instead, start by examining every position within the organization, from the C-suite to entry-level, and determine whether each job is strategic or tactical—whether the role is to lead the organization with vision, creativity and insight, or to implement and execute those strategies. Identifying this distinction will help build a foundation for a more strategic approach to staffing prioritization.
2) Identify the ideal candidate.
Of course, each job will have specific qualifications and skills requirements that any worthy candidate must possess. But, beyond these qualitative factors, finding the right fit for the job is only half the battle.
You must also find candidates who fit with the company culture, values, and principles. Candidates who “look good on paper” and are otherwise equal in skills and qualifications may be very different in their “soft skills” that determine whether they’re truly a good fit for the organization.
Just as sales professionals know they have to go beyond demographics to the qualitative details that are the hallmark of their ideal customers, HR teams should also identify the personality characteristics and nuances that the ideal candidate for any job role should possess, both for the entire organization—but most importantly—for those strategic positions.
3) Conduct supply and demand research.
Here again, intuition often guides HR pros in knowing what types of jobs will be most in demand and how this will impact their hiring efforts. But, it’s critical to conduct formal, early-stage research on the supply and demand, especially in the most highly competitive industries.
Each year, the strategic HR team should identify in-demand positions and the competitors who are also looking to fill them, and plot these on a competitive matrix. Visualizing the challenge can help you see more clearly how difficult or easy it may be too fill those positions. Tools and research are one way to gain access to this real-time labor market intelligence.
4) Build a pipeline.
Taking another page from the sales professional’s playbook, strategic HR teams know that building a pipeline of qualified ideal candidates is critical to meeting long-term staffing needs. Don’t make the mistake of waiting for vacancies to occur before starting the process of filling them.
It’s flat-out impossible to cram 4 to 6 months’ worth of work into just 4 to 6 weeks. By building relationships with potential candidates now, you can establish yourself as the employer of choice, promoting your superior company culture and value proposition. This makes your organization attractive even to passive candidates who may not actively be looking for a job right now, but could be lured away from their current employer by the right opportunity.
5) Plan for Millennials.
The majority of this newest generation of job seekers have never lived in a time without the Internet, cell phones, and 24/7 access to media—social and otherwise. They search for jobs in new ways, want different things from their careers and employers, and are more concerned about having a purpose versus just a job than their predecessors.
Long-term strategic HR planning requires that you meet their needs, regardless of how you or your organization may feel about them. Engage them over social media, as a real person and not just a corporate identity, and offer a motivating atmosphere with a career path that both challenges and helps them feel as though they’re making a difference.
The Bottom Line
In modern business, it isn’t just the IT, sales and product departments that need to be agile and strategic. In order to compete for the best talent in a tight marketplace that favors the job seeker, HR must also adopt this new approach to recruiting.
When the day-to-day responsibilities prevent the internal HR team from developing and adopting this strategic approach, it may be a great time to consider partnering with a staffing firm to provide added support.
This added assistance can enable the internal team to either outsource the tactical aspects of recruiting and hiring or provide expertise to develop and execute a solid strategy, freeing up internal resources for the tactical work. Either way, the additional support will give the company a strong advantage in a tight job market.
From this solid foundation, the next step is to build an ideal candidate profile, especially for strategic positions, and build a solid pipeline of prospects that captures even the passive candidate. This comprehensive approach allows savvy HR pros to be proactive—rather than reactive—and attract the best talent faster and more cost effectively, giving them a much higher strategic value for the entire organization.
About Miranda Nash
Miranda Nash is the president of Jobscience, which takes modern technologies and front office techniques and delivers them via SaaS to help forward-looking staffing agencies and companies recruit top talent. She has been a hiring manager, a candidate, an entrepreneur and C-suite executive that has developed a deep appreciation for the art of recruiting.