Have you ever scrambled around to fill unexpected vacancies, broke your back-sourcing candidates, but still ended up with a bad hire? The reason can be poor planning in your recruitment strategies. 

A data-driven set of effective recruiting plans can: 

• Source top candidates quickly
• Optimize candidate experience 
• Reduce time-to-hire and hiring expenses
• Elevate your employer brand

But with so many moving pieces in talent acquisition, how do you create a plan that optimizes recruitment, aligns with your business goals, and grows with your company? Let’s find out. 

What is a recruiting plan?

A recruitment plan is a strategy that maps out processes and timelines for hiring employees. It details the steps your recruiting team should take to create and market job postings and find and hire qualified candidates quickly so the company doesn’t suffer any downtime due to vacant positions. 

The primary elements an effective recruitment plan should cover include: 

• Job descriptions
• Hiring timeline 
• Budget 
• Channels for job distribution
• Candidate evaluation criteria
• Interview process
• Onboarding 
• Initial L&D for new hires

Benefits of a recruiting plan

Why should you put effort into outlining a recruitment plan when you can share job posts and interview candidates whenever needed? 

Effective recruiting plans standardize the entire hiring process and ensure strategic alignment with your short and long-term business goals. 

A well-mapped-out recruitment plan also: 

• Brings efficiency in resource allocation
• Enhances candidate experience with a cohesive and easy process, right from application to onboarding
• Reduces time-to-hire by streamlining operations and minimizing delays 
• Helps maintain alignment with your DE&I goals
• Improves quality of hire with structured job posting, passive candidate sourcing, and screening process
• Lets you track recruiting metrics and improve strategies over time

10 steps to develop a solid recruiting plan

From saving time and cost to ensuring a consistent candidate experience, a recruitment plan packs several perks. But how do you develop one offering all these advantages? Here are the key steps:

1. Assess current and future needs

For starters, review your existing recruitment process, skill gaps, and future hiring needs. Subsequently,

• Meet with department heads to understand current skill requirements and the ideal qualities an employee should possess. 
• Analyze your company’s growth, expected attrition, promotions, and additional skill needs for scaling. 
• You can also monitor team performances to see which departments need strengthening. 
• Outline business goals and compare the current competency of your workforce. 
• Identify the type of projects your company plans to take up and the expertise required for them. 

Next, clarify your talent acquisition goals. Some common ones include: 

• Scaling the workforce
• Reduce hire cost and time-to-hire
• DE&I prioritization

These insights will tell you what your workforce needs and set a proper direction for your recruitment plan. 

2. Define job roles, responsibilities, and hiring criteria

One of the priorities in recruitment planning is to help candidates make informed decisions before applying. This will save you time by attracting the most competent people and shortening your screening process. 

For that, you must outline roles, responsibilities, and hiring benchmarks in your recruitment plan. 

List key positions in your company and their associated responsibilities. This should be detailed to give candidates an idea about their daily workload. Refer to your company’s skill requirement evaluation to rank the positions based on urgency. Then, understand what qualities a person needs to handle that role’s responsibilities.

This way, you can create accurate references for job posts and source and screen candidates.

3. Craft compelling job descriptions

To attract the best talent, job descriptions must communicate what your company can offer and how employees can grow. Treat it as a marketing copy for your job while still conveying the important bits about the role, such as: 

• Responsibilities 
• Work mode (remote, hybrid, or on-site)
• Salary range 
• Qualifications and experience

To save time, create job descriptions for every role on the list. They should start with a clear and concise title reflecting the role accurately without using jargon. Add the required experience, too. 

Write descriptions reflecting your company’s culture. Communicate who you are, what you do, and why candidates should consider your company as their next employer. Describe your employee value proposition, including compensation perks and developmental opportunities. 

If you have existing job descriptions for certain roles, revise them to ensure they align with your company’s objectives. You may also employ paraphrasing techniques to make them more appealing and concise.

4. Identify the target candidate pool

Use the skill gap assessment and defined job responsibilities and hiring criteria to build an ideal candidate profile for each. This creates a vision of your target candidate pool and keeps your outreach goal-focused. 

Your candidate persona should include: 

• Candidate demographics
• Interests, preferences, and motivations
• Educational qualification 
• Experience
• Current job title
• Career goals

Design guidelines for internal recruiting in your recruitment plan, too. Assess the high-performing employees and set standards to evaluate their role competency. 

Leverage your industry networks. Attend relevant workshops and events to identify and engage with professionals in the field to target potential candidates. If you have the budget, partner with recruiting agencies and external acquisition partners active in your niche. This may help you identify talent pools that may not be accessible through traditional channels. 

Collaborate with your marketing team and amplify inbound candidate sourcing through employer brand marketing, events, referrals, and content. 

Kula’s Circles lets you create simple referral programs and build an exclusive inbound talent pool for your company. 

5. Choose recruiting channels

Optimize your recruitment strategy plan by selecting the right recruiting channels. This way, your job posts would reach the right candidate pool and drive the relevant talents to your hiring pipeline. 

Find out where your target talent pool looks for jobs and shortlist their favorite platforms and mediums to reach them. Assess your competitors to see which channels they use to reach candidates. 

Audit your existing recruiting channels, measure the volume and quality of leads they drive to your pipeline, and eliminate the underperforming ones. It will save you time and resources and keep your efforts focused on the most effective candidate-sourcing platforms. 

Wondering how to monitor multiple sourcing channels to rank their efficacy? 

Use Kula’s recruitment analytics to track your top funnel sourcing activities and their impact on your pipeline to get comprehensive reports on flow health and identify your best recruitment channels easily. 

6. Choose the right tools

An effective recruitment plan should encompass your current and long-term hiring requirements. So, even if you currently have limited recruitment needs where manual processes look sufficient, they won’t be feasible as your business scales. 

So, choose the right recruitment tools for your recruitment planning. They keep your recruitment process bias-free and data-driven so that you select the most capable candidates in every cycle.

Here are some important hiring solutions you should invest in:

• An applicant tracking system
• Candidate screening tool
• Recruitment analytics software 
• Onboarding platform

This software will streamline your recruitment process by automating repetitive tasks. This way, instead of stressing with grunt work, your TA team can focus on the recruitment strategies.

Ensure your chosen recruitment tool fits your budget while offering all the necessary features. It should be customizable and scalable to fit your hiring needs in the long run and integrate with your existing systems. 

However, most recruitment solutions don’t offer end-to-end services, forcing companies to buy several tools, which can be high-cost and inefficient. 

With Kula, you won’t have that problem. We offer the above-mentioned tools and automation under one easy-to-use, affordable platform. 

7. Develop employer branding

To attract the best talent, your employer branding is the most valuable asset in your recruitment plan. You must reflect an image that goes beyond a profit-driven company. It should portray you care about your employees, their professional growth, and your impact on society. 

Ensure a cohesive presence across every candidate outreach platform, including job boards and social media. You can take your employer branding up a notch with your job portal. This way, you will have greater freedom to communicate your mission, vision, values, and culture. 

Post behind-the-scenes content on social media. Encourage your employees to post about their experiences.

Sounds complicated? It doesn’t have to be. 

Kula offers ATS features like an out-of-the-box career site builder where you can create a branded job board in a few easy steps. 

8. Create a candidate experience strategy

A long and complicated hiring process may make your best talent drop out of the funnel. So, optimizing the candidate experience is the next focus in the recruitment plan. 

Reports show that applications taking too long to fill out are one of the top frustrations for 35% of candidates. So, start with simplifying your application process. Set up a one-click application submission and invest in an ATS that integrates with all your sourcing channels. Run user tests to identify areas that could be simplified or eliminated and ensure the process is mobile-friendly.

Communicate the expected timeline and estimated wait time and give feedback after every round. You can use Kula’s AI-powered notes for Interview feedback for efficiency. 

Limit your interview process to three to four rounds. You must also define parameters for each round to keep the screening data-driven and fair for every applicant.

9. Train hiring managers and teams

Regularly train your hiring managers and teams on the current best practices for recruitment. Coach them on the importance of an inclusive interview process to keep the hiring as neutral as possible.

They should get training sessions on relevant employment laws, equal employment opportunities, and other legal requirements to ensure non-discrimination. Create a DE&I guidebook to keep everyone on the same page on your diversity goals. 

10. Measure and optimize performance

Make it a routine to analyze your hiring funnel and measure metrics like: 

• Time to hire 
• Source of hire 
• Quality of hire
• First-year attrition  
• Candidate satisfaction
• Hiring expenditure

Seek feedback from candidates to gauge their experience with your recruitment process. Based on these insights, identify and eliminate roadblocks proactively to optimize performance. 

Conclusion

Designing the perfect recruitment plan takes time and multiple iterations. But with the right tools, you can reduce trial and error through data-driven decisions and maximize your recruitment ROI.

That’s where Kula can help you. 

Here, you can build a candidate repository and fill urgent vacancies quickly. Our automated resume parsing and AI-powered candidate matching examine thousands of inbound leads and dig out the best in seconds. You can even automate interview scheduling and set up reminder triggers so candidates don’t miss their opportunity to join your company.

So what are you waiting for? Try Kula for free to unleash the full potential of your recruitment plan today!