3 Tips for Developing a Long-Term Recruitment Strategy

Despite headlines reporting layoffs and recession rumors, the jobs market tells a different story. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, unemployment is sitting at just 3.4%, the lowest it’s been in more than five decades, and we saw both GDP and real wage growth. Top talent is still in high demand, too. One report found that job postings in tech were up 25% year-over-year in December 2022, and 90% of small business owners reported receiving few or no qualified applicants for their open positions.

All of this comes on the heels of record unemployment in 2020 and later, the Great Resignation (which hasn’t let up — 77% of employees are job searching or are open to it). It’s safe to say that the talent landscape is as unpredictable as ever.

How have your recruiting processes adapted as demands and conditions changed over the past few years? Is your team agile enough to keep meeting its recruitment goals if similar unpredictability continues? A long-term employee recruitment strategy can help your team stay on target no matter what the labor market throws your way.

Short-term vs. Long-term Recruiting

Do you know if your team has a long-term recruiting strategy? Ask yourself a few questions to find out:

• Has your team designed a cohesive candidate experience?
• When a role opens up at your organization, is there a plan for what happens next?
• Are hiring and interview processes standardized for every role?
• Does your HR team have an idea of how teams might grow in the coming years?

If you answered yes to these questions, congratulations! You’re planning for the future needs of the business. But if you answered no to one — or all — of them, your long-term recruiting strategy needs some attention.

Long-term recruitment means you’re taking the business’s big-picture goals into consideration, preparing for the unexpected, and looking ahead to make a plan for the future. It’s not about just hiring an employee — it’s about hiring, engaging, and retaining that employee, helping them reach their full potential so they can help your business reach its full potential, too.

Developing recruiting strategies with long-term goals in mind is essential if you want to attract and retain the best candidates for every role. The benefits of long-term recruiting include:

• A workforce of motivated employees who aren’t searching for a new job
• A pipeline of engaged, qualified candidates
• Cost and time savings for HR
• Fewer skills gaps and the addition of new skills
• Less productivity lost to staffing issues
• More goals met across the company

Keep long-term recruiting strategies compliant with ClearCompany’s recruiting compliance checklist.

1. Define Your Employer Brand

Your employer brand tells potential candidates all about company culture and values and helps your organization stand out to job seekers who identify with those attributes. It shapes your company’s reputation, giving applicants an idea of what it’s like to be an employee, and presents your employee value proposition (EVP), which is often what inspires them to apply in the first place.

An undefined or inconsistent employer brand can do the opposite, discouraging job seekers from applying, attracting candidates who aren’t a good fit or even harming the company’s reputation. Employer brands are strengthened by:

• Clearly defined EVP that sets you apart from other companies
• Policies and procedures that align with company values
• Consistency of experience from candidacy to employment
• Standardized job descriptions, interview processes, and other measures to reduce bias

2. Implement Top-of-the-line Recruiting Software

Technology takes just about anything to the next level, including your recruitment strategy. Recruiting software increases your team’s capabilities and makes tedious tasks more manageable, often automating them altogether. It helps you build a more seamless application and hiring process and establish your employer brand with tools like branded career sites and candidate texting.

Recruiting software also gathers valuable data about the kinds of applicants you get and the candidates you hire and turns it into insights via recruiting reports. From there, you can learn a lot about your hiring processes, candidates, and employees:

• Spot bottlenecks in recruiting where you may be losing valuable candidates
• Track and improve hiring metrics, like time-to-hire and quality of hire
• Identify patterns among hiring managers to ensure fair hiring practices
• Discover common traits of successful hires to learn what makes a great employee for every role

3. Leverage Workforce Planning

Workforce planning is arguably the most impactful step you can take to create an effective long-term recruitment strategy. It’s the practice of making predictions about who your company will need to hire in the future. If you make informed predictions, you can create recruiting strategies that safeguard the business against unexpected turnover, both voluntary and involuntary, and scale the growth of your workforce alongside business growth.

Workforce planning is no easy task, with lots of variables and data sets, and it’s usually done in spreadsheets. The sheer amount of information makes it difficult to simulate different scenarios or to be flexible as business needs change, and plans can quickly become obsolete. But without a staffing plan and an understanding of hiring needs, your team is stuck in a reactive state.

Intelligent workforce planning based on your own company data is possible if you follow tip #2 and choose recruitment software that’s part of a full-spectrum talent management platform. Workforce planning software enables you to:

• Change assumptions and variables in seconds
• Identify hiring needs by visualizing what happens when employees move roles
• Simulate staffing and budget scenarios to see the impact on timing and costs
• Share your results virtually for easy, real-time collaboration across departments

Long-term recruiting strategies are the key to enabling your HR team to make better hiring decisions and keep departments staffed so they can meet their goals and drive business success well into the future.

A long-term strategy calls for a long-term solution: recruiting software. Software is key for boosting recruiting strategies and creating agile processes that you can measure, improve, and refine as the talent landscape and business needs shift. ClearCompany Recruiting gives you the tools you need to put these tips into action and create a strategy that’s informed by the past and focused on the future.

Get a demo of ClearCompany Recruiting and see how you can use it to set up a long-term recruiting strategy of your own. Sign up to speak to an expert today.