By developing strategic recruiting plans, human resources professionals will make significant contributions to the bottom-line profit goals of their employers.
Surely, as an HR professional you want to be recognized for stellar accomplishments – doing your part by recruiting the best talent to accelerate organizational growth.
So it’s imperative to innovate in your recruiting processes and market your strategies to senior management and hiring managers.
To earn maximum respect, HR recruiting must put into practice these strategies:
1. Understand the need to quantify your efforts
The three A’s of problem solving are awareness, acceptance and action. Senior management is insisting HR meet corporate goals. So you must accept the fact you must innovate and take action.
However, CEOs often think their HR professionals agree to modify their efforts to achieve business goals but don’t fully accept the challenge. Nor do many CEOs feel HR professionals speak their language.
Therefore, you must create measurable goals that will impact profits.
2. Improve your corporate image by collaborating with your chief financial officer to develop strategic plans
CFOs have credibility for crunching numbers. They’re skilled in quantifying goals and results. Their work is defensible.
If you want to be taken seriously, you must develop financial instincts by partnering with your CFO. Work with your CEO to judiciously to develop metrics.
Connect the dots. Establish the statistical link between strong recruiting and revenue, and ultimately profits.
Only then will CFOs will recognize and support you in the C-suite. You must understand that CFOs are centers of influence – they can influence CEOs to look at your role more favorably.
3. Establish objectives
With an eye on the corporate goals, identify new objectives. Get a meeting with your chief executive officer. Ask questions.
Read the CEOs blogs and speeches. Study the annual report. Thoroughly digest the company’s strategic plan.
Write a checklist of the goals, which probably include market share, revenue, profit, or new products. Public companies most certainly want a higher stock price.
Prioritize the most likely goals that will lead to strong results.
4. Realize the No. 1 corporate goals are profit and cash flow
Revenue is important. But profit and cash flow are a lot more important. So your recruiting strategy must focus on how to increase profit and cash flow.
Start by targeting high impact marketing and sales talent. You don’t want people who can merely advertise products and services, you need strategic-thinking marketers. In sales, you don’t want mere order-takers. You want people who can sell consultatively.
Such strong talent will increase revenue; moreover they’ll increase profit by effectively marketing and selling price-points.
Your CFO can help you create a method to quantify the sales results from the recruitment of higher-performing talent.
Not to over-simplify, but use a before-and-after approach.
Document the status now for each employee. Then, use data including percentages that prove the new hires perform better than the other employees. For more impact, determine the annual additional value to the company.
If you excel at retaining such employees, you can also include the value your retention rates provide for the company.
5. Prioritize other job classifications
Work with all managers to develop recruiting priorities for your company. Aside, from profit-generating needs, you need to identify other needs. Learn which jobs can create the biggest financial return.
In addition to recruiting the best marketing and sales talent, you need to recruit the right people who will support their efforts.
Other jobs must be mission-critical — from executives to product innovation.
You must also be a diplomat. Don’t tout these job to the extent that managers and employees feel embarrassed.
6. Determine your recruiting tactics
Once you know the goals and which are the most salient type of employees to target, identify the right recruiting tools. Learn which branding, targeting and evaluation methods will work to recruit the best talent.
You must also make certain that you have the right recruiters in place – recruiters who grasp your objectives and who have enough emotional intelligence to make the right decisions.
7. Identify methods that will enhance and exemplify your success in helping the company to grow
For instance, CEOs are often focused on product-innovation and expansion into new markets. So position yourself to recruit those skill sets and demonstrate the outcomes of your recruiting.
Naturally, you must act with a sense of urgency by recruiting the needed employees expeditiously.
Next, again by working with the CFO, produce data that will illustrate the value of your results.
8. Cultivate a procedure to verify your prowess that gives your company a competitive edge in recruiting
Competitive CEOs appreciate a competitive staff. You can further enhance your reputation by using advanced methods in competitive recruitment.
There are two ways:
— Prevent competitors from besting you in the quest for talent.
— Recruit the best talent from your firm’s competitors.
Then document and tout the results of your success.
9. Focus on relating to CEOs’ metrics and jargon
You can enhance your role and image by demonstrating that you’re on the same page with senior management.
Accomplish it by using the same verbiage, including all the buzzwords, as the CEO and with input from your CFO.
Next, market your ideas to your CEO.
10. Because you share responsibility for recruiting with hiring managers, become more persuasive with them.
Borrow a page from top marketers and salespeople. Strategize how you can best lead your hiring managers into adopting best practices in recruiting and hiring.
Further, the managers must understand how your approach works well in recruiting top applicants so their departments morph into proven profit centers.
From the Coach’s Corner, here are related recruiting strategies:
Human Resources — Strategies and Metrics for Business Profits — Professionals in human resources could use more respect in the C-suite. To silence critics and to garner praise for helping their companies to profits, obviously, it’s in the best interest of HR professionals to use the right strategies and metrics.
9 Image-Building Steps that Will Attract the Best Workers — Seattle business-performance consultant Terry Corbell explains why it’s hard to get great workers and he gives you 9 quick fixes to attract the best workers.
HR Management: Think Like a Sales Pro to Recruit the Best Talent — One-size-fits-all approach to recruiting employees is not a strategy. You and your peers in human resources might be enamored with technology, but job candidates want more focus on the personal touch. That necessitates thinking like a sales professional.
Write Better Job Descriptions to Attract Best Talent – 16 Tips — To inspire the best candidates to apply for your opening, there are at least 16 strategies to incorporate in your job description.
Check Your Motives before Hiring Sales Employees – 11 Tips — With many companies desperately in the hunt for sales revenue, it might surprise you to learn that their predicaments are often self-imposed. Why? They hire the wrong sales employees. Such hiring insights are confirmed in an academic study. Whether intentional or not, companies are settling for mediocrity or they’re using the wrong metrics in hiring.
“Recruiting talent is no different than any other challenge a startup faces. It’s all about selling.”
-Vivek Wadhwa
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