What is Recruiting? Recruitment Tips, Strategies, and More

Kathleen O’Donnell

Every organization needs to bring in new talent, fresh eyes, and enthusiastic new hires. But these necessary additions to your team don’t just appear by magic — that’s where recruiting comes in. Recruiting helps you grow your organization, revitalize teams, and build your leadership for the future: here’s everything you need to know about what recruiting is, including an overview of the recruitment process, recruiting tips and strategies, and resources.

What is Recruiting? An Introduction

So, what is recruiting? Recruiting is the first stage in the employee lifecycle, where companies seek out, source, evaluate, and ultimately decide about hiring new employees to fill open positions. Recruiters take a close look at candidates throughout the recruiting lifecycle to determine if they’re a good fit in many dimensions for the role:

Do they have the hard skills needed to excel?
Are their qualifications and experience aligned with the role’s needs?
Are they a good cultural fit for the team and the organization?
Do they align with the organization’s values?

Every company approaches recruiting a little bit differently based on the needs of their candidates, recruiters, organization, and industry and has different recruiting strategies and tips they follow. However, there are some steps in common in the recruiting process of most organizations that are helpful in understanding what recruiting is.

What is Recruiting? An Overview of the Recruitment Process

Sourcing

The recruiting process begins with sourcing a pool of candidates who might be a good fit for the open role. This step requires writing a thoughtful, detailed, and accurate job description so potential candidates know if they’re a good fit, posting the open position on job sites to spread awareness, and might also involve reaching out to potential applicants individually as well.

Screening

Once you have a pool of applicants, it’s time to begin the screening process of recruiting. This step narrows your candidate pool down into a more select group of potentially successful applicants. It might involve one or more elements including a phone call with a recruiter, pre-hire assessments like a a soft skills test and/or a hard skills test, and resume screening.

Assessing

With the smaller group of the most suitable applicants, you move on to the final assessment phase of the recruitment process. This involves interviews with the hiring managers and possibly members of the team the candidate will be joining, any further evaluations like more advanced tests, and even meetings with relevant leaders in the organization.

Offering

The final step in the recruitment process is selecting your top candidate and extending the job offer to them. The offer isn’t a one-way street but a conversation between both parties. It’s important to make a compelling offer and give the candidate all of the information they need to make a decision such as compensation, benefits, perks, and performance-based bonuses or stock options.

3 Recruitment Tips and Strategies

Recruiting Tip 1: Use Both Active and Passive Sourcing

There are many ways to source applicants for your open roles, and you should be sure to use as many of them as you can to expand your potential talent pool. The goal isn’t to be overwhelmed with applicants but to ensure that the right people are seeing your job openings so you can attract your ideal employees.

Passive sourcing is when you post open roles on platforms like LinkedIn, Monster, Indeed, and of course your own website. You might even post about the open role on your company’s social media platforms to get broader exposure.

But, to make the most of this recruiting tip, you should use active sourcing in addition to passive, which is where you proactively reach out to potential applicants via LinkedIn, networking platforms, in-person recruiting events, or through employee referrals. Active sourcing is especially important for higher-level or specialized jobs where the applicant pool is already narrow.

Recruiting Tip 2: Consistently Develop a Talent Pipeline

It’s much harder to recruit for an open role when you’re developing a candidate pool from scratch. Recruiting isn’t a one-off event —- you should be continually building deep talent pools, developing a strong employer brand, and considering what kind of talent your organization will need in the near future. That way, you’re always a few steps ahead in the recruiting game and can fill open positions quickly and easily.

Recruiting Tip 3: Incorporate Recruiting Automation

Recruiting for just one open role has a lot of small but time-consuming steps, between posting a job opening and having a candidate accept an offer. But recruiters these days need to move fast or you risk losing top candidates to other offers. Automation and AI can help here, as they can make those menial tasks like scoring assessments, grading candidate responses, and even scheduling interviews and calling references much faster.

Recruiting automation doesn’t, and shouldn’t, replace the key role recruiters play in assessing candidates and making final hiring decisions. They simply help recruiters gather more information, analyze that data, and make communications faster so decision-making is faster and more accurate (and still in the hands of a human).

15 Recruiting Resources and Tools

Excelling at recruiting requires knowledge, empathy, and experience — plus the right resources and tools. Here are the best resources to help you understand what is recruiting and the basic principles, and dive deeper into recruiting tips and everything you need to know to succeed in the recruitment process.

Learning more about what is recruiting and understanding the basics of recruiting will help you make better, faster hiring decisions.

Building a better talent pipeline and recruiting talent pools makes finding and hiring the right people easier.

Creating a better candidate experience is a recruiting tip that will help your company hire the top talent in your industry.

Thoughtful use of AI in the recruiting process offers many benefits to both employers and potential employees.

The best hiring processes are designed to eliminate bias and proactively advance your company’s DE&I goals.

Looking for more ways to enhance how you recruit and hire new employees? Cangrade’s hiring and talent management solutions are bias-free, help improve your candidate experience, and make your hiring process more effective and efficient.

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