The Entire Recruitment System Explained

The entire recruitment system is made out of several components. All of which are equally critically important layers that help the company in fulfilling its hiring function effectively and efficiently. 

From the people involved down to the various strategies to map out in this interconnected web, we’ll untangle everything you need to know to fully optimize the recruitment system.

We’ll take it step by step for more comprehensive details in each aspect as you keep reading below. For easier access, you can also read more about these topics in our articles found in the shortcut section.

Without further ado, let’s start tackling the subject at hand.

Shortcuts:

• Redefining the organization through your recruitment system
• Benefits of having a strong recruitment system to the organization
• Benefits of social media to the recruitment system
• How to catch purple squirrels
• How to ensure a great candidate experience
• How to integrate candidate assessments
• How to advocate company diversity
• How to place cultural fit in the recruitment system
• How to improve the recruitment system through your career pages
• Analytics best practices to take note of
• Hiring Trends that will impact your recruitment system
• Remote hiring and the recruitment system amidst the COVID-19 Pandemic

General Overview: How the Recruitment System Redefines the Organization

The recruitment system itself might seem like a small factor in the entire corporate chain. However, you’d be surprised to know that everything in the company revolves around it. It plays a big role in redefining the entire organization.

Just from the name itself, it is the section responsible for recruiting the employees in the company. It is these talent acquisition professionals who bring in top talents that helped achieve milestones after milestones.

It’s because of their skills and unending efforts that they were able to source staff that became huge assets to the team. This is precisely why headhunters are paid handsomely. Not to mention, it’s also the reason why LinkedIn is still growing and there is a non-stop competition for top talents.

Components of the Recruitment System

Let’s take a closer look at the components it has first. There are three important ones to take note of are processes, resources, and relationships.

Processes refer to all the stages, routines, and steps taken in the hiring process from strategizing the recruitment plan to searching qualified talents down to the onboarding of new candidates.

When we speak about resources, we’re talking about the people and all the assets like technologies, tools, and more-- everything that is utilized under the process.

The relationship, on the other hand, is how all these interplays for it to be the way it is. The people working together, the way they apply technology into the chain, and others.

To redefine the organization through the recruitment system, it’s a must to understand its core components. Only then can you delve deeper into the finer details, so you can make a positive impact.

Functions of Recruitment

Moving forward, what exactly are the functions of recruitment? More than just getting people on board, it also encompasses a lot of tasks such as:

• Honing and exhibiting excellent organizational and interviewing skills to hire successfully
• Understanding the latest trends on the talent landscape and reading reports & analytics to better and modify hiring practices
• Implementing feasible and impactful hiring strategies
• Integrating modern tools and technology such as recruitment software (e.g. Applicant Tracking System (also known as ATS software) like Manatal) to bolster work productivity
• Developing policies that promote company diversity, culture, and cultural fit
• Strategizes how to continually improve employer branding

5 Types of Recruiters

Lastly, to redefine the organization through your efforts, you have to know the different actors in the system. There are at least 5 types of recruiters-- each varying in priority. Know their differences.

Internal or Corporate Recruiters

These recruiters comprise your very own HR department. They work in-house and process everything from recruitment to screening down to onboarding.

Contingency Recruiters

Much like headhunters, contingency recruiters are people who are paid a fee once a candidate is successfully hired. They have to make sure that they get the best of the best until the client is pleased and decides to onboard the applicant.

Staffing Recruiters

These recruiters (usually an agency) are very much in demand for the hospitality industry. They focus on hiring temporary or contractual employees optimal for short-term projects.

Outplacement Recruiters

Outplacement recruiters are approached by companies as an act of goodwill. They help displaced members find a new job and provide a range of services, too, like career counseling, job hunting, etc.

Retained Recruiters

Usually works in agencies, retained recruiters are often associated with contingency recruiters with a sole difference in payment fees. The former are paid upfront a fixed fee and get the rest of the payment for every successful hire (50% of the projected annual income of the candidate). A retained recruiter or agency continually provides batches of candidates to the client.

Benefits of Having a Strong Recruitment System

There are many benefits to having a strong and dependable recruitment system.

Promotes stability

First of all, there would be protocols and procedures to follow. This is relevant because people will find it easier to innovate and optimize standard norms when they get used to the workflow.

And when they get used to how things are done, it lays down a solid foundation for work. This boosts productivity and employee satisfaction & retention. As “creatures of habit”, this base framework will be good for long-term security for everyone.

Can lead to quality hires better and faster

Of course, this also leads you to better and more candidates. How? By having a hiring software like a recruitment ATS in place.

You’ll be able to post job advertisements automatically across multiple channels like Indeed, LinkedIn, and others with just a few clicks. Afterward, all incoming applications will be funneled into a centralized platform where you can directly interact with them, as well as with involved parties such as the hiring manager and clients. This greatly saves time and effort!

Reduces the costs

In businesses, numbers are everything. A strong recruitment system helps you avoid unnecessary costs like bad hires.

Did you know that having bad hire shells out an expense equating to 30% of the employee’s first-year earnings or around a minimum of $240,000 according to HR agencies? You can read more about it here.

Plus, cost-per-hire will also be greatly decreased when you utilize and maximize channels to attract people. Instead of going all over the place and wasting time and effort, you would be able to know where and how to get top talents.

Improves employer branding

Employer branding is defined as how the market perceives your brand and its likelihood to join your company. This is incredible when it comes to persuading a candidate’s decision. By embracing story-telling and sharing your company culture in a fun and engaging way, you will be able to pique a lot of interests.

You can do this by customizing your website and even career page. Put lots of details about how awesome your company is, mention attracting compensations, and be sure to come off as inclusive and accepting. Put on your marketing hat and “sell” your product to be the best in the market.

Benefits of Social Media to the Recruitment System

More than a means for communication, social media can greatly help the recruitment system in a lot of ways.

It will help if you know the current statistics of social media platform usage.

• Facebook – 2.8 billion
• Instagram – 1.1 billion
• LinkedIn – 740 million
• Tiktok – 689 million
• Twitter – 192 million

With this number, it will give you an idea of how many people you can reach when you put your company brand out there. Thus, the following benefits can be received:

Faster Recruitment

Like with everything else, recruitment can be conducted faster through social media. You just create a job ad, post it on various channels, and boom! Interested applicants will come rushing.

Improves employer branding

Seeing your brand frequently can increase awareness and eventually lead them to be intrigued by what you offer. And, when they cross-check information about your company online, it will establish credibility that can greatly influence their perception of you.

Attracts passive candidates

You’ll never know who might be reading your posts on social media, like passive candidates! If your content is interesting enough and if it’s SEO-friendly, these people will get to know more about your company. They may not be actively looking for a job, but they are open to the idea of it.

Targets different types of talent pool

With the number of people on social media, you can attract a very diverse talent pool. Forbes mentions that people have various faces or personas depending on platforms.

Individuals on Instagram, for example, care more about the visuals than anything else. If it’s appealing to them, they then read captions. The age groups and experience level is vastly different, too. LinkedIn users are specifically professionals looking to connect with fellow professionals.

Understand this, and you will be able to target a wider audience.

Source of more information for candidates

As a recruiter, conducting background checks should be imperative. You can use social media to do this. We recommend that you use tools, so you can conduct this step professionally.

Some recruitment software like Manatal offers dedicated functionalities that can allow you to get to know a candidate better through their social media accounts. The social media enrichment tool is a great way to do so. It takes relevant information from those platforms and gives recruiters more information about the applicant.

With the nitty-gritty out of the way, we have some tips on how you can better your recruitment system in all ways. Be sure to take note!

Tip #1: How to Catch the Purple Squirrel

Catching a “purple squirrel” or being able to hire the perfect candidate in terms of experience, skillset, salary range, and more is extremely hard.

These people are labeled as such because they are difficult to come by. Many candidates are qualified for positions based on their skill sets and experience. However, as mentioned above, it is rare for someone who also matches the criteria that you are looking for in terms of salary expectations, cultural fit, etc.

As challenging as it may be, it’s not impossible to catch your very own purple squirrels. Here are ways how:

Maximize channels to post job ads

The technique here is to maximize where you can post job ads. This can be job boards (both free and premium like Manatal has), career pages, and social media channels.

Optimize career page

By optimizing it, we mean improving your content. Ensure that your company culture is enticing and that you advocate inclusivity and diversity.

To add to that, you should ensure that your career page has great UX/UI. Nobody wants to fill out long forms, or else they’ll lose interest!

Do Candidate Assessments

A talent might seem good on paper, but are they? Give out assessments to properly filter suitable candidates. This way, you can confirm if they are purple squirrels or not. Looking for a top-notch IT professional? Give a coding test to see how well they fare.

Hire remotely

Don’t limit yourself to geographical areas. Purple squirrels can be thousands of miles away, so you should conduct your search far and wide if the need emerges. There may be hidden gems found in unsuspecting regions!

Ensure a smooth candidate experience

An application goes both ways. Imagine that you found the purple squirrel. Without a doubt, it should like you, too. Otherwise, you’ll scare it away and run to your competitors! How can you prevent this from happening? By ensuring an awesome candidate experience through and through.

Learn the difference between ‘Must Have Skills’ and ‘Nice to Have Skills’

Lastly, be realistic and stick to the must-have skills as your criteria. Yes, there are lots of nice skills to have, but not everyone is good at everything. Keep your requirement to only the necessities and you’ll find yourself catching a purple squirrel sooner.

In case you don’t catch one, with these strategies, you’ll still surely get the next best candidate!

Tip #2: How to Ensure Great Candidate Experience

We mentioned ensuring a great candidate experience to catch a purple squirrel. This also applies to interested applicants.

If you don’t give them enough reason to stay or if you put them off because of long procedures or poor communication, they will end up dropping their application. You don’t want that to happen. 

Here are 6 easy steps that you can keep in mind to provide the best experience possible for all your prospects.

1. Only hire to fill an actual need. Avoid posting ghost jobs because this will make them disappointed. When they get discouraged, it will badly hurt your employer branding-- trust us.
2. Ramp up your content by keeping your website and/or career page interesting. Add photos and videos. Flaunt your company culture and the packages that your employees enjoy. This will be good in keeping them hooked.
3. Make the job application as easy as possible. Why? People already put much effort into their resumes. You can do the screening through there. You don’t need to have them answer a 10-page long application!
4. Make your career page accessible whether via mobile or desktop. Some people are always on the go, thus always using their mobile phones. If you give this option, you’re opening more opportunities for more people.
5. Show your enthusiasm in hiring people by follow-up early (and often). By constant communication, it will mostly persuade them to join your company when you prove how invested you are to them.
6. Have a great interview process. Don’t be boring or rude in any way. You need to show prospective employees how fun it is to work for your company right from the start. This way, employee retention will be secured.

Tip #3: How to Integrate Candidate Assessments

There are many benefits to integrating candidate assessments.

• Get better hires by fully understanding their skill level, strengths, weaknesses, etc.
• Make a more objective screening by having a set of criteria
• Save valuable time by screening fewer candidates than usual
• Improve employer branding by showing how serious you are in finding the best fit
• Improve retention rate by employing serious and well-matched candidates

Awesome, right? Here’s how you can do it:

Consult with Hiring Managers

You need to consult with hiring managers and know what they are looking for. Do they want someone who has 5 years of experience? A marketer with an interesting writing style? Or someone who can speak Korean fluently?

Determine this and you’ll know what to add to the assessment test.

Plan hiring process carefully

The entire flow must be stable and organized. You can achieve this by creating concrete steps, set priorities, and delegate tasks to your recruiters well.

When everything knows their role and place, integrating candidate assessments would be easier done and conducted.

Inform applicants about the assessment

Inform them beforehand. This is to be fair to them and they can prepare accordingly. When they yield the most optimal result, you’ll get to gauge how well they perform.

You can even go as far as giving practice tests, too. This will allow them to know what to expect and omit possible mishaps on instructions, network connections, etc.

Evaluate thoroughly

Integrating this involves evaluating thoroughly. You need to make a careful evaluation of the candidates with the hiring managers, and see if they are a fit or not.

Through Manatal, collaboration and communication are a breeze. Invite hiring managers to the portal, and they can leave comments or notes to update you with their decision. Additionally, you can even use it to follow up on them if they haven’t done so yet.

Give feedback to candidates

It doesn't matter if it’s positive or negative. You owe it to them for their effort in trying, so be sure to give feedback to candidates. you have to let them know about your decision. When you do this, you won’t get their hopes up, and it will pinpoint what they are good at and what they need to improve on. 

Who knows? They might be your future employee when the timing is right!

Tip #4: How to Advocate Company Diversity

If you ensure there is company diversity within your recruitment system, you get to tap potentials that your organization might need. You can advocate this by going beyond the borders– beyond the standards that we’re used to confined in a single geographical area.

Here are our tips on advocating company diversity:

1. Reassess branding
2. Source candidates across multiple channels to build diverse teams
3. Implement diversity recruiting strategies
4. Highlight diversity in your career page
5. Training employees to practice inclusion
6. Consider employee benefits properly

Tip #5: How to Place Cultural Fit in the Organization

Okay. You achieved company diversity, but is there synergy among them? Remember that Negative interactions are detrimental to the business and affect the workplace in so many ways. Ensuring culture fit avoids that.

When you onboard people, you must ensure that they are right for the organization to thrive. People would be able to feel welcome and accepted, hence enabling them to communicate freely and collaborate effectively; resulting in a dynamic and progressive working environment.

Bottom line, it’s what links the social aspect of the corporation to the whole recruitment system.

There are many benefits to this sense of belongingness:

• Increased employee satisfaction.
• High-level performance
• Decreased turnover
• Lower stress levels
• Deepen employee loyalty

Here are 6 strategies to emulate:

1. Define your workplace culture
2. Set the tone
3. Get to know applicants well
4. Celebrate diversity
5. Engage Employees
6. Mind the office set-up

Tip #6: How to Improve the Recruitment System Through Career Pages

We’ve already discussed why career pages are important. In a nutshell, it lets you receive more candidates. Especially if properly created and formatted, your job ads will have a boosted visibility on search engines.

Additionally, it helps with employer branding and database build-up and tracking.

You can improve it through these ways:

1. Use appealing graphics
2. Have a compelling copy
3. Show candidates what to expect and more
4. Tell a relatable brand story
5. Make your career page SEO-friendly
6. Ensure a Pleasant UI/UX

We have examples on great career pages to follow. Read it here.

Tip #7: How to Maximize Social Media in Your Recruiting Process

Post content

Whether it’s a job ad, article, or simply a website copy, it will help you recruit faster and better. Do take your branding in mind when you post your content. Is the brand tonality of your product lively? Serious? Once this is defined, post accordingly.

This will help your company in several aspects. It can improve your employer branding, attract more candidates, and more.

Be sure to leverage your platform by posting valuable content, too. In every post or article, it should be something that people would want to read. This can leave a lasting impression on website visitors.

Be creative

Don’t just do posts point-blank. Be as creative as you can. Social media, whether we like it or not, has been a playground for creatives and a fierce arena for businesses. It’s all a matter of executing fascinating content to lure people in.

A good example would be Apple’s subtle way of recruitment. A man shared his discovery when he stumbled upon a “secret link” that led to a post stating that the tech giant is looking for a new engineer.

This is very innovative and, at the same time, ensures that those who manage to find this “secret link” are already experienced enough to land on this treasure chest.

Another way to be creative is to ride the bandwagon. Tiktok is a big trend right now. Your company can create an account and showcase your products with fresh eyes. It can be from “employee takeovers”, mesmerizing product videos, and more.

Tip #8: How to Use Reports & Analytics Properly

You can keep track and manage data that you’ve collected manually, but that just takes too much time and effort. With a great recruitment system, you have a procedure in place to do this efficiently like using recruiting software!

With this said software, there are plenty of ways on how you can utilize your reports & analytics properly. These practices can be useful in your hiring process:

1. Check reports and analytics to identify problems
2. Determine a metric to focus on one at a time
3. Keep things automated
4. Check regularly
5. Don’t forget to track recruiter progress
6. Devise a strategy

Hiring Trends that can Affect the Recruitment System 2021

These tips will all be advantageous to follow as advised. However, as a recruiter, it’s also best to watch out for hiring trends.

These ever-changing trends can make or break your recruiting process. If you don’t keep up to date, you’ll just suffer wasted efforts and little returns. Do your research and devise strategies accordingly:

There will be new in-demand jobs

Why is this necessary to remember? This will inform you what you need to focus on if ever. You’ll be well-prepared when the time comes you need to fill those positions. One, you know that the competition might be fierce. Second, you will be equipped with the right methods to attract such candidates.

The priorities of recruiters have changed

The succeeding priorities of recruiters are as follows:

• Increasing retention rate (24%)
• Improving time-to-hire (23%)
• Growing talent pipeline (22%)
• Diversity hiring (22%)

True enough, diversity hiring is becoming essential, too. The remote hiring set-up can assist you on this to recruit individuals from all over the world-- someone who can bring something fresh to the table.

There would be a growing importance of soft skills

It’s not just about the hard skills anymore. More than ever, soft skills are crucial because it makes all the difference in the workplace.

For instance, if an employee is being hard to deal with, that can affect the way other employees work, too. Therefore, leading to a loss in revenue and productivity. Big yikes!

Technology is the future

Technology is the future and there is no doubt about that. What you’ll need is a solution that can lessen workload and time spent.

An AI-powered engine like Manatal will be a good choice because it boosts efficiency to its finest. Like their AI candidate recommendation system, it automatically gives you a list of candidates that are suited for a position.

Not all recruiting software has this, so go for ones that utilize artificial intelligence.

There will be an emphasis on employer branding

Don’t overlook this hiring trend as it reaps more benefits than you might think. For one, it enables you to attract the best talents. Second, it perpetuates a healthier company culture by ensuring employee satisfaction. And lastly, it is advantageous in advocating long retention.

There are multiple ways to do this, one of which is optimizing your career page. We talked about it above. See how interconnected the recruitment system is?

Remote Hiring & Recruitment System Amidst the Pandemic

The pandemic has made a significant change to how recruiters do their work. From the very process down to the tools used, it created a shift that affected the recruitment system.

To name some, it involves adapting to a work-from-home environment, realigning company goals and objectives, and being open to remote hiring.

To that end (plus a lot more that varies from company to company i.e. hospitality industry), what should recruiters expect now?

There are three major points that we want to point out.

• 70% of talent professionals believe that remote recruiting will become permanent
• Introduction of remote and in-person recruitment methods
• Some industries are considering full remote work

Keep this in mind, and you can modify your strategies to create a better and well-adjusted recruitment system.

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