Importance and Purpose of Recruitment

Key Takeaways:

1. Introduction:
   • Employees play a pivotal role in organizational success, emphasizing the significance of effective recruitment.
   • Steve Jobs highlighted the impact of hiring the best talent, acknowledging that employees can be either an asset or a liability.
2. What is Recruitment?
   • Recruitment involves identifying, shortlisting, interviewing, and hiring candidates for specific roles, starting with attracting talent and ending with acquiring the right fit for the job.
   • It encompasses a collaborative effort involving hiring agents, HR teams, interviewers, and prospective employees.
3. Importance and Purpose of Recruitment:
   • Prepare Job Descriptions to Get the Right Fit:
     • Job descriptions are crucial in attracting suitable talent, serving as the first communication from the company.
   • Find a Pool of Candidates for Present and Future Roles:
     • Recruitment aids in identifying and reaching out to a diverse talent pool, spread across geographies.
   • Find Talented Individuals to Fill Positions:
     • Amid a competitive job market, recruitment focuses on finding the right fit to ensure higher satisfaction and retention.
   • Optimize Expenditure on Talent Acquisition:
     • Systematic recruitment processes aim to minimize hiring costs and acquire the right talent efficiently.
   • Find Talent on Time:
     • Timely recruitment is crucial to prevent negative impacts on business, ensuring vital positions are filled promptly.
   • Process-Oriented Hiring:
     • Recruitment establishes systematic procedures, leading to a process-driven approach for better candidate experiences, reduced costs, and improved brand value.
   • Measure Knowledge and Skills:
     • The recruitment process evaluates candidates’ qualifications, skills, and knowledge through various stages, ensuring value for the organization.
   • Improve Hiring Success Rate:
     • Well-planned recruitment increases the likelihood of successful hires who can contribute effectively to business growth.
   • Foster a Positive Brand Image:
     • Positive recruitment experiences contribute to a positive brand image, attracting top talent and positively influencing the company’s reputation.
   • Meet Social and Legal Requirements:
     • Recruitment extends beyond hiring, encompassing legal and social requirements such as background checks, reference verification, and documentation.

Introduction

“Hiring the best is your most important task” – Steve Jobs

When Steve Jobs said those lines, he knew the impact that employees create in an organization. 

Whether your employees are an asset or a liability depends on how you have recruited them. The right set of employees helps the business grow by leaps and bounds. But a mismatch in the hired talent and the required skills can adversely impact organizational performance. What is crucial is to understand job descriptions well and hire applicants who can deliver on the KRAs as expected.

Hence, most companies hire specialists to ensure they acquire the right pool of talent at the right place and time. They have massive recruitment budgets and use effective software to ensure that their most valuable assets are carefully shortlisted and selected to bring growth to the company and meet the organizational goals.

What is Recruitment?

Recruitment is the process of identifying candidates fit for the jobs in consideration, shortlisting and interviewing them, and hiring them for the respective role. It starts with a pool of talent interested in the profile and ends with acquiring the right fit for the job. 

Some may even differentiate recruitment from selection, where recruitment restricts only to finding the applicants, and selection is the process of shortlisting them through tests and multiple rounds of interviews. However, we consider selection as a sub-part of the recruitment process in this blog.

This process involves a team of hiring agents, agency, or in-house specialists, an HR team that facilitates tests and interviews, an interviewer or a panel of interviewers, and prospective employees.

Importance and Purpose of Recruitment

As discussed above, the right talent can be a valuable asset to the company and take the company to new heights. They keep contributing to business growth throughout the employee life cycle. 

1. Prepare job descriptions to get the right fit
2. Find a pool of candidates for present and future roles
3. Find talented individuals to fill positions
4. Optimize the expenditure on talent acquisition
5. Find talent on time
6. Process-oriented hiring
7. Measure the knowledge and skills
8. Improve the hiring success rate
9. Foster a positive brand image
10. Meet social and legal requirements

1. Prepare job descriptions to get the right fit

Once the HR team identifies the talent requirement in different verticals of the organization, the recruitment teams prepare the JDs or Job Descriptions. It is the most crucial and first step in recruitment since the talent they attract depends on this. It is the first recruitment communication from the company.

2. Find a pool of candidates for present and future roles

The recruitment process helps in finding the right pool of talent that may be spread across geographies. Identifying and reaching out to them is pretty challenging. The recruitment process helps to share the JDs through the right mediums and channels with potential employees.

3. Find talented individuals to fill positions

According to cnbc.com, 96% of workers are searching for a new job in 2023. It might make you think there is a large pool of resources out there. But the challenge lies in finding a pin in the haystack. Recruitment is about finding the right fit, the perfect match from both the company’s, as well as, an individual’s point of view. Only then there will be better employee satisfaction and higher employee retention.

4. Optimize the expenditure on talent acquisition

According to a survey last year, the average cost per hire was almost $4700. Without a systematic recruitment team and process in place, hiring costs can go higher. Thus, recruitment helps not just to hire the right talent, but hire them at the least possible operation/acquisition costs. The adage, a penny saved is a penny earned is very apt.

5. Find talent on time

Once the vacant positions or to be vacant positions are known, they have to be filled in the timeframe given. Time is crucial, and many designations cannot stay unoccupied for long. After a point of time, it starts negatively impacting the business.

Eg: A regional business development manager’s key responsibility is to generate business. Not having one can result in a direct loss of business and money. 

A good team and set process, combined with proper planning, can help fill these vital positions before they even get vacant.

6. Process-oriented hiring

Organized efforts deliver better results in an optimum manner. Recruitment puts a system in place. It sets an SOP that makes hiring a process-driven task leading to better candidate experience, lesser costs, better hiring, and better brand value for the company.

7. Measure the knowledge and skills

Recruitment helps to measure the knowledge and skills of the employees before hiring them. Right from scanning the qualifications in the resume, to conducting interviews with technical and line managers, the entire process focuses on measuring the skills and knowledge levels to provide value to the organization. 

8. Improve the hiring success rate

The hiring success rate may be defined by the number of successful hires who can perform well and contribute to business growth vs. the number of total hires. Well-planned recruitment results in hiring better talent and thus increases the chances of successful hires.

9. Foster a positive brand image

What candidates experience throughout the recruitment process leaves an impact on them. The same is carried through word of mouth and reflected in their conversations with friends and relatives. Thus, a good recruitment experience helps to develop a positive brand image and indirectly helps to attract good talent. 

Today, many companies are busy building an impressive social media presence with the primary aim of projecting an alluring work culture and a happy place to be.

10. Meet social and legal requirements

Once the candidate is recruited, multiple legal and social requirements are to be taken care of, like background verification, reference checks, KYC documentation, etc. Recruitment helps to set all these in place ensuring a great onboarding experience for the employees and the company.

Conclusion

Recruitment is not a task; it is a business strategy.

One of the biggest reasons for recruitment failures or unsuccessful recruitments is hiring talented individuals that do not fit the job they are hired for. No matter how talented they are, if there are skill gaps that cannot be bridged on the job, they won’t stay long. 

It means the recruitment time, money, and efforts all go in vain, and the same needs to be redone. Hence, it is crucial to have a great recruitment process and team to support your business with this function.