1000+ open roles at a tech company, another 800 open positions at a food delivery brand, and several hundred roles to fill at an ed-tech company— these are just some of the many companies inviting applications right now.

Despite the forthcoming economic challenges expected worldwide this year, companies are continuing to hire. That has always been the case— hiring never comes to a standstill altogether. Someone is always hiring.

Whether your organisation has recruiting strategies in place already, or you're just beginning to set the base, you need to have strategies that help you roll with the punches.

What is a recruitment strategy? 

A recruitment strategy is simply a hiring plan that your organisation uses to attract, engage, and hire talent for the roles it plans to fill. Think timelines and geographies of those job opportunities, the evaluation process, budgets, and the tools you plan to use.  

As a founder or a recruiter, you must have a straightforward recruitment strategy in place. Of course, you can always mould it when the need arises, but having a clearly defined plan helps keep things in order. 

Importance of having a recruitment strategy in place

Onboarding top talent

Recruiting in an ad-hoc manner cannot help you rope top talent. Having set strategies can help you save incredible time and cost, so you can focus on putting the best team together.

Setting the right expectations

You as a recruiter can know what to expect, and communicate that to the management. You can also engage and set the right goals for hiring managers. This will set you up for success, and you can log in to work with a peace of mind. 

Forming long-term goals

Establishing goals for this annual year will also set the foundation for where you want your organisation to be ten years from now. Do you want to keep your team lean? Or do you want to create 100s of employment opportunities? The recruitment strategy for one particular year is just the first stepping stone to the organisation’s future needs.

How to develop a recruitment strategy?

To start off, you have to spend some time to understand the needs of the organisation for that particular FY. Answering questions like how many employees the organisation will need to meet the annual goals and grow the business, whether the growth is sustainable or hiring needs to be done stringently, and more, is essential. Read on to understand the 12 must-haves in a recruitment strategy. 

Top 12 recruiting strategies to hire top talent

As a recruiter, there's a host of tasks that you work on a daily/weekly basis and it's easy to get lost in mayhem. Before delving into each recruiting strategy in detail, we've listed here for you a snapshot of everything you must think of in the beginning of every quarter. Make sure to cross of everything in this checklist before getting caught up in the details:

1. Define your recruitment goals
2. Set aside a hiring budget
3. Embed inclusivity (DEI) into your yearly vision board
4. Categorise the roles based on the efforts required
5. Focus on employer branding
6. Factor in industry trends
7. Implement an employee referral program
8. Invest in tools that actually help save time and hire faster
9. Define your high-level hiring process from the get-go
10. Set up regular check-ins at different levels
11. Induce a practice of leading with empathy
12. Stay agile, always

Let’s deep dive into the top 12 recruiting strategies to hire top talent

1. Define your recruitment goals  

The ‘SMART’ (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, Time-based) goal setting has worked for ages and still continues to. In fact, having SMART goals during such times helps even more. 

What should you include in your SMART goals? 

• A close estimate of all the positions and their numbers to be filled in a year 
• Recruitment KPIs that matter 
• Timeline for the goal(s) to be accomplished 
• Resources required for achieving the hiring goals 

Think of this as a vision board for your recruiting teams. All of you will have a single, focused picture that you’ll be chasing leaving minimal space for surprises or chaos. 

2. Set aside a hiring  budget 

Recruiting, like all other functions of an organisation, requires several things to keep it running. A well-thought-out recruitment budget simply covers five major recruiting expenses:

• Salary allocation for personnel
• Events & marketing
• Employee referral bonuses
• Tool spends
• Other minor miscellaneous expenses
  

3. Embed inclusivity (DEI) into your yearly vision board

A company’s culture is the sum total of the people who make the company. A diverse workforce brings a range of perspectives and experiences to the organisation. This leads to more innovative and creative solutions to business challenges. 

Companies that prioritise diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) tend to perform better financially and have better business outcomes. Companies in the top quartile for racial and ethnic diversity are 35% more likely to have financial returns above their respective national industry medians.

Depending on the stage of your company, DEI recruiting can also help you in legal compliance. Ensuring DEI in the recruitment process can help you comply with equal employment opportunity laws and regulations that prohibit discrimination in hiring.

And the employer brand boost is a huge obvious plus. When you prioritise DEI in recruitment you’re perceived as more attractive to job candidates, particularly those from underrepresented groups.

4. Categorise the roles based on the efforts required

Hiring for a role in a particular department is seldom similar to hiring for another. So when you set out to define your yearly recruiting plans, a proven way to make sure your plans turn out successful is to categorise the projected open roles based on the efforts required to close them. 

Factors/categories you can define for the roles: 

• Easy-to-fill 
• Hard-to-fill 
• First-time hiring 
• Regular hiring 
• Global vs Domestic
• Remote vs Hybrid vs Onsite 

This will help you adopt the relevant approaches required to close every type of role.

5. Focus on employer branding

The founders and the vision they have for their company speaks volumes. To hire the best of the best, your organisation must have powerful employee messaging and evangelism. Top talent will first read up about the kind of movements your founder/org supports, the initiatives that they’re a part of, the founder’s social posts on LinkedIn and Twitter, and more.

Identifying and communicating with the top management the importance of employer branding is key. If they’re silent on social media, encourage them to be more vocal. If they have the right intention to support social causes but haven’t prioritised them, urge them to do so. And more of the same.

6. Factor in industry trends

To move with the changing conditions in the job market, you must be aware of the latest market trends. Or this can negatively impact your recruitment goals for the year. Few things to do while your yearly recruiting planning:  

• Estimate the impact that economic conditions can have on the job market 
• Keep up with geography-wise trends if you are hiring in multiple countries 
• Study salary benchmarks for each industry
  

7. Implement an employee referral program

Mining the internal employee network can help speed up hiring with an assured better quality of candidates. Etch out the budgets for your referral program, go ahead and formulate a plan where both the org and the employees can make the most of your referral program. 

BONUS! Learn how you can access all your employees’ referral networks in one tap here.

8. Invest in tools that actually help save time and hire faster 

Unlike a few decades ago, as recruiters, we now have several tools at our disposal. However, it can be tempting to include multiple tools. Knowing exactly what kind of tool(s) will help you with your goals helps keep your recruiting tech stack neat and your data organised. 

There are a few things you must know in order to clear off the common notions about recruiting tools: 

• An ATS doesn’t solve all your recruiting requirements. The best candidates don't apply to jobs anymore, we need to find them, hunt them, cajole them into the hiring process, and we all know an ATS isn’t built for that. 
• A Talent CRM is different from an ATS. Data in the talent CRM is more nuanced than just capturing resume-level data as in ATS. While the ATS might automate a few steps in the application process, it works only for inbound applicants. On the other hand, the talent CRM can also work on outbound engagements hence works with both active-inbound and passive candidates.
• Everything that you do as a recruiter cannot be automated. But a lot can definitely be. For example, the outbound emails or LinkedIn emails that you send out to passive candidates can easily be automated.
• The days of manually maintaining records are long gone. While it still seems comforting to operate on good old excel sheets and spread sheets, recruiters must invest in the right tech tools to rope in top talent.
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BONUS! Get a free trial best recruiting automation tool that will help you hire 50% more candidates. Book Demo

Related Read: How AI in Recruiting Transforms Talent Acquisition Processes

9. Define your high-level hiring process from the get-go 

A high-level hiring process sets the tone for all your recruiting approaches. It must include:  

• Your format of intake meetings 
• Org-level stages of interviews 
• Values that must be carried throughout the hiring process
• The kind of messaging you’ll embrace for candidate engagement 

Keeping the high-level process as the foundation, you can then expand it further for category-wise recruiting needs. 

10. Set up regular check-ins at different levels 

Don’t let your goals, plans and processes rot in documents, make sure to set up disciplined check-ins. 

Within your recruiting team

• How frequently will you run a status check-in?
• In what intervals will you analyse your recruiting data and KPIs?  

With hiring managers and leaders in your organisation

• Share quarterly updates on recruiting statuses, highlights and blockages 

With the interviewees 

• Set up a feedback mechanism to find out if your interviewing and engagement efforts are working as planned
  

11. Induce a practice of leading with empathy

The next few years are likely to be challenging for organisations and candidates, and nothing beats a recruiting approach better than leading with empathy and operating as an ally. Read more about how you can engage and hire people who have been laid off here.

12. Stay agile, always

Remember that a lot of what you plan cannot be set in stone. The key to effective and faster hiring is to quickly adapt to changing job market conditions. Utilise the above strategies as your guide, tweak them as per your goals and needs, and create a playbook that works best for you. 

Recruitment strategy use cases & Examples

Let’s say your current recruitment is made up of four employees, and your organisation is looking to scale and grow the company by 200+ candidates in the next year. 

Without a recruitment strategy in place, your focus would shift to focusing on scaling the recruitment team to 10+ members. But, with a recruitment strategy in place, you will decide to hire just 2 more members and invest in the right tech stack to meet the target of hiring 200+ candidates. 

Another example, if your focus is on building a more diverse employee base, and your organisation wants you to bridge the age ratio.

With a set recruitment strategy to meet your hiring needs, you will have enough time and mindspace to focus on setting up internship programs for retired professionals, or upskilling courses for the existing senior employees, and more.

Related Read: How ChronicleHQ closed roles 80% faster using Kula

How Kula helps to seamless your Hiring Process

Having 10 years of experience in hiring for core teams at Stripe, Uber and Freshworks, our founder has tried and tested all the above 12 recruitment strategies. But to truly make your daily lives easy, he set out to create Kula, a tool that can allow recruiters to hire at a 50% faster rate. With Kula,

• All candidates are in one place.
• Your communication is automated. 
• You have reports ready for every opening. 
• You feel confident.

If you’d like to know more, we would be happy to take you through the product. Get a demo here.

BONUS! If you’d like to hire passive talent 2X faster, download a copy of our Outbound Recruiting Playbook. It comes with outbound recruiting tips from recruiting experts, free and ready-to-use templates for email and LinkedIn Inmails, and so much more. Access your free copy here.

Leave a comment on our blog if you have anything to add: tips, upvotes or disagreements!

Here’s to thoughtful recruiting.