It makes no difference if you're a massive Healthcare Communications agency or a small consultancy, maintaining your current headcount or planning for a trajectory of growth, It's important to know how your business plans to grow or maintain your headcount over time. That’s why developing a strategic recruitment plan will help streamline your hiring processes and give you access to the talent you need when you need it.
A strategic recruitment plan is more than just thinking about filling job vacancies, Poor recruitment decisions waste time and money. By taking a proactive approach and building a plan for your recruiting, you'll save, both time and money and help ensure your organisation doesn’t find themselves short-handed and unable to deliver on their clients work later in the year, due to poor headcount planning.
You might be sat there thinking how can I develop a recruitment plan that reflects the complex industry I work in, when the market is constantly changing and candidate short, and how can I anticipate future staffing needs and proactively plan? Then add busy hiring managers who believe every role is business-critical, often forgetting to tell you that someone is leaving until they're pretty much out the door and who are so busy with clients, will forget that they have a recruitment and HR team function unless they want something? That’s why a plan is important.
What is a recruitment plan?
A good recruitment plan is more than just knowing what roles need to be filled now and, in the future, — It’s an opportunity to align company goals, individual business units growth plans and skills gaps with your hiring efforts in order to strategically plan for the year ahead.
Creating a successful recruitment plan
Building a recruitment strategy is a great way to rethink and improve your hiring practices— many companies fail to plan, often living in the moment, with the mindset of "I don't have any current recruitment needs" and will de-prioritise recruitment planning to focus on client work and the current team, it's your job to challenge this mindset and plan against for their business growth plan.
To help you navigate the planning process, here are my steps to creating a successful recruitment plan.
Understand your Business
Start by reviewing your businesses, learn about your stakeholders and their business management styles, are they self-promoters, planners or business leaders that just wing it, this is will impact how you engage with them, you should also find out...
How do they currently interview, what’s the feedback from previous interviewees,
How well connected are they, do they have a network you can tap into?,
What are the numbers like, interviews to offer ratios etc
How many pitches do they need to do to get a win, this needs to be taken into account in your plan.
What is their current staff retention
Does the business plan to grow? if so what are the growth areas that take priority?
What type of candidates would they like to see outside of planned hires?
Review budget packs and forecasts (budget packs are regularly updated so look at these each quarter so you can adjust your plan)
Recruitment needs vs skill gaps
The first step to creating a recruitment plan is to identify your hiring needs and the skill gaps your existing talent can’t fill. Start by reviewing the planned growth of your organisation, taking into consideration important factors like employee retention for your business vs industry average and anticipated promotions, as they will impact your hiring needs. If at this point you identify a retention issue, it's time to sit down with your HR team and share your finding, they'll investigate and work with the hiring managers to find the reason and plan for improvement, ask your HR team if an accelerated training plan can be put in place to fill the skills gap and fill future needs.
Identify which departments and roles will need strengthening, Is a key member of the team leaving, having a baby or taking a sabbatical? Will a new project be kicking off and mark these in your calendar as they will have an impact your plan, find out which roles the hiring managers have put in their budget packs or forecasts. By identifying the skills and roles your team will need you’ll be able to take a proactive approach that better aligns hiring with staffing needs and your stakeholders business plans, which might be different to those that were submitted to finance or the board, It’s good practice to create more than one recruitment plan to focus on different parts of your organisation. It is also a good idea to track new starters, and when their probation ends, does it look like they will pass or should you start pipe-lining for their replacement and ask your HR team and hiring managers if any of the current team are a flight risk and include these in your plan.
Create a plan and create a recruitment calendar
Next, put your findings into practice, estimate how many people each department will need and when they’ll be needed. This will help you plan and anticipate future needs in time to prepare for them. (For example, if you need to fill a role in Q3, you might need to start your preparations in Q2 or even in Q1 if they are hard to find and have a 3 months’ notice period to make sure you fill the position in time.)
Now you can plan a recruitment calendar for the year. This should include the positions you’ll need to hire per quarter, and a go live date for when you'll begin working the role, take into account your retention patterns, do more people leave in H2 vs H1 as this will create additional needs and needs to be planned for.
Bringing your plan to life
Now you have a recruitment calendar and a hiring plan, you can identify the tools you’ll need to execute your plan. Think about what job boards are best suited for each role, do you need pre-interview assessments and create screening sheets if needed, and what branding can you use to start promoting that area of the business in the run up to the role going live.
What are the requirements for each position
Now you know which roles you have planned for the year ahead, you can begin looking at the requirements for each job opening. What are the skills and experiences you want the candidates to have, where will you find these candidates and what competitors can you headhunt from? start building your network around the future need. To make sure everyone is on the same page and decrease time to hire, meet with hiring managers and talk through this step together. This will help you develop a thorough understanding of each role and what the needs are to fill it effectively.
What'ss the budget for recruitment
Your recruitment plan will have an impact on the business units profit and loss report, so it's important to ask if the hiring manager is happy to open the role up to recruitment agencies or only have the in-house recruitment team work on the role, you have a big part to play in the business units EBITDA so it's important to ask. Based on your previous cost per hire, you can estimate how much your recruitment costs are going to be for the year ahead. Bear in mind various costs involved in the recruitment process that you’ll need to account for in your budget. Some of the common recruiting costs include:
Advertising on job boards and social media,
Job fairs and campus recruiting costs
Recruiting technology costs, ATS, LinkedIn
Employer branding expenses
In-house recruitment team salaries
Recruitment travel expenses
Possible agency spend (weighted against the likelihood to fill direct)
Candidate selection process
Next, think about how you will manage the candidate selection process. how will the overall process work by, how many interview rounds are needed and will there be any test required and who will be tasked with interviewing and selecting candidates and check if there is any change to the salary on offer.
Review, Learn and Optimise
Lastly, you should leverage new hire feedback and analytics to adapt your recruitment plan and optimise it accordingly. Send out an anonymous survey to collect feedback from new hires or use a product like Glassdoor which also acts as a great branding platform for selling life at your organisation, this is also a great time to ask your new hire if they would like to refer anyone to join your organisation. It’s also helpful to ask your stakeholders on the interview and selection process? What part of the process was worked well and what part could have been better? You should also look at your company hiring analytics by reviewing recruitment metrics including time to hire, quality of hire, early turnover rates, and cost per hire. Then find ways you can improve your recruitment process based on those insights. Our businesses are always evolving, your recruitment plan should do the same.
Last thought
A recruitment plan is an important guide for your recruitment efforts and goals. It'll take time and effort to create one and it’s never a finished process. You'll need to constantly review, adapt and optimise your plan based on the business’ need and feedback. It's vital you have buy-in from your stakeholders for it's success, they might not see the value at first, but when they see the results that a good recruitment plan brings to their business' success the'll thank you for people planning their business and playing your part in their business unit success.
It's important to future proof your plan, what if your Healthcare Communications Agency gains new acquisitions or starts a process of rapid growth you'll need to hire more people? Continue working on your recruitment plan, measuring key metrics and enhancing it as you go to achieve the best possible results, your plan needs to be based on agile project management approach for the best results.
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Daniel Laghaney - Healthcare Communications Recruitment Agency
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