Internal talent acquisition teams are often the fuel for the success of any business by being the source who brings the strongest employee talent to the organization. Employers must know how to support and manage an internal recruiting team by optimizing their abilities and leveraging their strengths. This is called the recruiter experience and it should be an ongoing focus of talent leaders.
Full-time recruiting day in and day out can be a tough job. Recruiters are often faced with last-minute rejection, no-shows, pressure to fill many roles at a time, and the stresses of a tight labor market. There are several ways employers can strategically support their talent acquisition team.
Provide the Necessary Tools
Recruiters must have access to the best technology the industry has to offer to match competitors. To effectively capture the attention of both seeking and passive candidates, recruiters need to be utilizing many forms of technology. Companies should provide them with access to some or all of the following; social media platform visibility, a well-run applicant tracking system preferably with integrated AI technology, mobile reaching software, video operated pre-screening tools, talent pool marketing via Candidate Relationship Management, and analytic tools to verify success factors.
Being equipped with state-of-the-art technology aids recruiting teams by increasing their effectiveness and benefits the organization by ultimately reducing the cost of being short-staffed and decreasing time-to-fill.
Recruiter Experience Means Ongoing Training
Internal recruiting teams need ongoing training to be well educated in current trends and industry standards. It may be valuable to provide recruiters with marketing training. They could advance their skills in creating eye-catching job descriptions, high-quality employer branding materials, and wide-reaching job advertisements.
Additionally, talent acquisition teams are the first touchpoint for candidates to the organization. They may require training on how to remain unbiased, recognize valuable transferable skills, and create a diverse candidate pool. Maintaining and growing these skills will aid the organization when the recruiter can bring the top of the market and diverse applicants to the hiring team.
Empower Your Recruiters
Being able to source for a wide range of job requisitions and have a consistent candidate pipeline to pull from often largely stems from access to a broad network of connections. Providing a recruiter with networking opportunities within the industry could be beneficial in creating those crucial connections. Companies could sponsor talent acquisition teams to attend a local chapter meeting of professionals, travel to industry conferences, or even host a regional networking event.
Realistic Workload
Every company has unique needs and varying requirements for its job requisitions. Keeping a realistic number of jobs to fill per recruiter is an important factor in maintaining job satisfaction for the talent acquisition team. There are many metrics that companies can use to analyze the number of requisitions an individual recruiter can efficiently carry at a time.
An organization needs to assess outside factors such as the current labor market, industry competition, and candidate availability. Internal metrics such as average time-to-fill, number of members on the team, acceptance rate, hiring urgency, responsiveness by hiring managers, and cost per hire can all help decipher the appropriate number of job requisitions per recruiter for specific departments.
Connecting to Business Objectives
To retain an engaged talent acquisition workforce, all employees of the recruiting team must understand how their job works to achieve the goals and objectives of the organization. Recruiters with business acumen can effectively communicate how both their position and the positions they are working to fill help the organization succeed and contribute to the bottom-line revenue.
Talent acquisition teams should be familiar with employer branding. Communicating the company culture, CSR initiatives, long-term goals, benefits packages, and overall business tone is critical to successful hiring and onboarding. Providing opportunities for recruiters to be involved in understanding marketing strategies would be beneficial.
Team Building
Lastly, talent acquisition team leadership must cultivate a culture of team mindset amidst their recruiters. To be the most effective possible, internal recruiters should be able to work together effectively and step into each other’s roles to fill the gap if necessary. The best teams are consistently led by servant leaders who understand the value of everyone as well as the importance of a collaborative work environment. The workload for talent acquisition teams can often be variable throughout seasons of market difficulty or high turnover, but preserving a united group effort can go a long way in taking the team to the next level.
Your recruiter experience can be an attraction tool for top recruiting talent. Recruiters gossip a lot in their inner circles and if you aren’t prepared to empower their work, they will look elsewhere.
Stephanie Mauney is a freelance writer and content curator specializing in Human Resources.
