Successful Recruitment – A Helpful Guide For Business

Pure Human Resources is a leading recruitment and HR consultancy working with SMEs in the Hampshire area.

Recruitment is a high profile area of a business’s activities that can have a huge impact on your public profile, so it is crucial that businesses get it right.
In this recruitment guide, we answer key, topical questions that all businesses need to know the answers to.

What are the current recruitment challenges for SMEs?

Candidates’ high level of expectations is a huge challenge.

And the biggest challenge, by far, is responsiveness on the part of the business who is hiring. Recruitment can be a pretty strategic process for most businesses, which can sometimes slow things down.

In the current climate, the absolute priority is to be responsive to candidates and hire the right person for you before they get snapped up elsewhere.

What is the key to a successful recruitment process?

There are various elements to running a successful recruitment campaign. ‘Campaign’ is a good word to use because a lot of businesses forget that recruitment is actually a marketing exercise, just for job vacancies rather than products.

It may feel like it’s a huge task to manage a lot of candidates but that’s what it’s all about. It’s reaching out to the market, finding the right people with the right skill sets, and attracting the people who are interested in applying to your company; enticing them to be motivated enough to put the time and the effort in to send in their application.

What about timeliness/responsiveness?

In all our decades of experience in HR and recruitment, it has never been more important than it is right now to respond to candidates quickly.

Things are moving so fast that closing dates aren’t even relevant anymore.

You advertise your role online and, when a candidate applies, you need to give them your attention straightaway. Review their application and invite them to a telephone or face to face interview within 48 hours.

Good people are being snapped up in days so, if you’re not quick to respond to them, or you’re waiting to gather a pool of candidates to compare them and see if the elusive ‘someone even better’ will come along, you could find that by the time you do reach out they are probably no longer available.

So, timeliness is absolutely fundamental at the moment.

How do you measure successful recruitment?

We find that a lot of businesses we work with don’t think about the metrics when it comes to recruitment or HR, but we feel that it is just as important to measure the impact of your recruitment process as it is with all other aspects of your business.

You need to think about the cost per hire for each vacancy, including the time you spend working on the process. You should also take into account any lost opportunity, for example the sales you could be losing if you have a gap in your sales team.

We would also advise you to consider ‘time to fill’ as well. We would ideally expect to fill any vacancy within 20 working days, or 30 at the latest. The longer it takes to fill a vacancy, the bigger the knock-on effect it will have on lost revenue opportunities and pressure on other team members.

Once you have worked out your cost per hire and time to fill metrics, you may if it is cost effective to outsource your recruitment to a specialist.  Our Fixed Fee Recruitment package can save you time and money, with our Recruitment Consultant managing an efficient process for a one-off fee – no hidden costs.

I am not finding candidates I want. Why am I unsuccessful?

There can be a lot of reasons why you may not be getting the candidates you would hope for. At the moment, we are finding that there are fewer candidates generally available in the market place than there have been historically.

This is partly because of the challenges of the current cost of living crisis. People can be more nervous of leaving a company they have been with for a while, and walking away from the benefits they have accumulated there, for the potential risk of moving to a new company.

Your recruitment pool will become even smaller if you are not offering hybrid working, or if your list of criteria becomes too excessive.

Also, you need to bear in mind that only a proportion of your potential recruitment pool will be looking at any one time.

Quick and easy ways to increase the number of candidates applying for your role include:

• Stating a salary on your job advert, or at least a salary band if you can’t be specific. We know that people are much less likely to apply for jobs that don’t include a salary.
• Be clear on your job advert about location, hours of work and benefits.
• Experiment with different job titles. We have found this to be very effective, as what can seem like a meaningful job title to you might not resonate with candidates. Think a bit more laterally from an advertising perspective. You can always call the job something else internally.

What are the legislative risks around recruitment?

Many companies and business owners assume that their legal responsibilities start when their employees sign their employment contract. For this reason, they are usually familiar with employment laws like the legislation around unfair dismissal, for example.

What they sometimes don’t realise is that they actually have a legal responsibility to all candidates going through their selection process too. Discrimination legislation applies not just to employees already in your employment, but it also applies to all candidates who apply for a role in your company.

If you’d like further guidance on this topic, avoiding discrimination in the recruitment process is covered in our Equality, Diversity and Inclusion training session.

Contact Pure® Human Resources

We hope you find our recruitment guide helpful, however, if you would like further help with your recruitment process, our friendly and expert team would love to hear from you.  Ask about our Fixed Fee Recruitment service.

You can call us on 01794 329470 or complete our Fixed Fee Recruitment Enquiry Form