What is Full Life Cycle Recruiting? Everything You Need to Know

Kathleen O’Donnell

The way that companies source, evaluate, and hire talent has changed significantly in the past decade. With the shift to a more competitive talent environment, a demand for a better candidate experience, and faster recruiting cycles, companies must change the way they handle the recruiting process to keep up. A staggering 65% of candidates have halted the application process because they found something unattractive about the company or the role after applying, indicating that how companies recruit must change to be more effective on both sides.

Full life cycle recruiting is a constructive response to these changes and has become increasingly popular, particularly with small-to-mid-sized companies that are well-suited to it. But what exactly is it, and how can your HR team incorporate it into your recruiting practices? This guide will cover everything you need to know.

What is Full Life Cycle Recruiting?

Full life cycle recruiting is a holistic approach to recruiting the best people for your organization. It offers an end-to-end strategy for the recruiting process, with one person handling all six steps in the recruiting cycle: creating and advertising job descriptions, assessing applicants, checking their background and skills, all the way through to onboarding.

In traditional recruiting, different teams or people handle different steps in the process, which can lead to a disjointed candidate experience. Full-cycle recruiting gives end-to-end ownership of the process to one person, ensuring that each step of the recruiting cycle is prioritized equally, giving a smooth and consistent flow to the whole cycle for candidates.

In small to medium-sized companies, there is often only one person handling recruiting anyway, so using full life cycle recruiting is a natural fit. It’s also used at many larger organizations as well, with hiring teams having at least one dedicated full-cycle recruiter who works with specialists for each phase of the cycle.

The Stages of Full Life Cycle Recruiting

So what exactly does full life cycle recruiting look like in practice? It consists of six stages, each of which is equally vital.

1. Preparation

Before you begin talking to any potential applicants, it’s essential to prepare carefully and strategically for the search ahead. Define what you need from the ideal person in the open role, what your company culture is, and any skills gaps you need to fill to strengthen your company as a whole.

Then, it’s time to write the perfect job description to attract that ideal candidate. Using Cangrade’s Job Description Decoder makes this task easier. By answering a few quick questions about your open role, you’ll get the soft skills you need to look for in your hiring process to fill it, and the language to use in your job ads to attract the right people.

2. Sourcing

Next, take that carefully crafted job description and post it on your company’s career page, LinkedIn, and relevant job boards to ensure the right candidates can find it. However, don’t simply post it passively and expect the top people to find it — you should also actively promote it on your company’s social media channels. Employee referrals can also be a great way of sourcing great talent and don’t forget to actively search for and reach out to highly qualified people.

3. Screening

Once your job posting has received a good amount of applicants, it’s time to start narrowing the talent pool by screening those candidates. This stage includes reviewing resumes and cover letters, conducting skills assessments, and holding phone and video interviews to determine who your top candidates are.

This stage is time-consuming, but with Cangrade’s Pre-Hire Assessments, you can speed it up while increasing your hiring accuracy. They allow you to determine who truly possesses the needed hard and soft skills in just 14 minutes, and candidates who are a good fit are automatically invited to complete an asynchronous video interview.

4. Selection

When the pool has been narrowed to a few top candidates, it’s time for some potentially difficult decisions but also exciting ones. This phase may include in-person interviews, follow-up video interviews, a final skills assessment, and checking references to be sure that you know exactly who you want to hire.

Cangrade’s Reference Checking feature makes ensuring you have the right person lined up for your open role easy and effective. With automated reference requesting and checking, your full cycle recruiter will have all the information they need to make the right choice without spending hours on the phone.

5. Hiring

When the best person for the job has been identified and agreed upon by the full-cycle recruiter and the hiring manager, it’s time to extend an offer. Be sure to clearly communicate essential things like the salary, benefits, working hours, paid time off, and any other critical details of the position to the candidate.

Of course, it’s not unusual to receive some negotiation back from the candidate before you come to an agreement. This stage is exciting, but it’s also an easy place to let a great employee slip through your fingers if you’re not sensitive to their needs and requests, so it’s essential to approach it with the needs of both sides in mind.

6. Onboarding

Full cycle recruiting doesn’t end once the offer letter is signed — onboarding is just as important as the previous five steps in ensuring your new employee that you just worked so hard to hire is set up for success. Introduce them to the team, schedule them for orientations and trainings, get all of their paperwork signed, and warmly welcome them as a full member of the organization.

The Benefits of Full Cycle Recruiting

Full life cycle recruiting has many benefits for both employers and candidates.

Since one person is responsible for all of the aspects of the recruiting process, turnaround time is faster and easier — there’s no handoff or missed steps because of miscommunication, and there’s greater accountability for the quality of the candidate experience.

Also, the end-to-end nature of the full-cycle process means there’s more consistency in the hiring process, which makes it fairer and more equitable for candidates and produces a better quality of hire as well.

Since the same recruiter works with each candidate from first contact to final offer through to the first 90 days on the job, they can build a stronger relationship based on trust. That offers candidates a better experience, and it gives the recruiter a deeper knowledge of what makes a successful hire from start to finish as well.
Full life cycle recruiting is not only highly effective, but it’s also easier than ever before with recruiting platforms that help recruiters source, assess, evaluate, and hire candidates in one place. Cangrade’s all-in-one hiring and talent management solutions help you through every stage of full-cycle recruiting, leaving you with the time to build those critical relationships and focus on hiring the top talent for your team. It’s quick and easy to request a demo and see if it’s a right fit for your organization.