Which will benefit your business, reactive recruitment or planned?

Reactive recruitment is often common practice among most companies. A vacancy becomes available either due to resignation, expansion, a new project, or a skill gap that needs to be filled. Application goes on to job boards and is advertised via marketing channels, applications are received and reviewed by HR, moved to the interview stage and eventually, all being well, you have your new hire!

Sounds pretty straight forward, right? Well there is a huge amount of work that goes into the process. From screening the applicants to identify the best match to skills and cultural fit. Then there is the challenge of identifying the best candidates for the role, making sure to side step any bias, and to really get under the skin of a candidate’s true potential. What if we told you there’s another way? Here’s why you should consider planned recruitment as part of your hiring strategy…

Reactive recruitment and planned recruitment: what’s the difference?

While reactive recruitment aims to fulfil a need and responds to an immediate staff gap in your company, planned recruitment aims to prepare for the future and is always looking for top talent for your company. With planned recruitment, you are not just leaving yourself at the whim of whoever is applying to your current vacancy. Instead, you are actively seeking out talent and identifying potential future needs and skill gaps. So, when a position becomes available, you already have a few people to consider that you have carefully selected over time.

Of course, reactive recruitment has its place and benefits too. You can’t always predict when someone may resign or be made redundant. Or maybe your industry is undergoing rapid change and you need people with specific skill sets to join your company right away.

We do encourage you to incorporate planned recruitment into your process though. It puts you in control of who walks through your door, and you’ll have the time and resources to cherry pick your next applicant once a position becomes available.

The downside of reactive recruitment

As mentioned, both reactive recruitment and planned recruitment have their place in the hiring process. But the problem with reactive recruitment is that it focuses on the here and now. Ideally, you should always be looking towards the future and leaving reactive recruitment for unprecedented situations. Although it may seem counterintuitive, reactive recruitment can cause you to spend more time and money, simply because you are relying on the current jobseeker’s pool which may or may not fit the role.

By incorporating planned recruitment, you will always have a roster of top-quality applicants that you can reach out to, should a position become available. Not to mention, you will have already built a relationship with them, so they are more likely to stay loyal to your company.

How to incorporate planned recruitment into your hire strategy

Planned recruitment is all about building a relationship with potential hires. It is a longer term strategy that will help you to build a talent pool of actively engaged and interested talent in your business. Think of it as marketing – you won’t see instant results, it’s all about raising awareness and establishing yourself within your industry, creating a buzz around your company. With planned recruitment as part of your strategy, you need to start analysing industry trends and identify how you’re looking to grow your company in the near future. This will inform the type of skills and other attributes you’d be looking for in future candidates.

You can look for people within the industry and introduce yourself as a potential option for them. Understand what it is that your prospective employees might need in their career. What sort of support might they require? How can you market your business to be the place that they want to join. How can they experience the workplace, or get a good understanding of what working with your business will be like?

Nurture that relationship and when both of you are ready to take the next step, you’ll be their first choice due to the work you have put in before a position becomes available. This is such a useful strategy if you want to attract top talent to your business, as they will likely have plenty of other options and you want to be at the top of their list.

Recruitment is hard but help is available

Candidates are starting to tire and ignore the outreach tactics of recruiters - preferring to work with contacts that they have worked with before or only choosing to apply for a role when they are ready to look. If you can build a relationship with candidates well before that point and generate interest in your business, you can move towards a planned recruitment strategy.

If you are finding it challenging to find the best candidates for your business, or to attract the right talent to your business, whilst trying to stand out in a competitive market, get in touch. At Auxeris we have a network of talented specialist recruiters who have many years’ recruitment experience. Find out how you can work with us here.