Recruitment Goals for 2021: A Guide to This Year Strategy

Businesses must take the necessary time to set recruitment goals. If a business isn’t already looking at its past achievements and making plans for future accomplishments, it’s time to step back and survey the work.

Successful recruitment strategies are dependent on establishing goals, metrics, and objectives. Businesses with hiring practices that don’t adapt and change with time and trends risk falling short of their goals and failing.

It can be understandably difficult to set the right goals and objectives for a good recruitment strategy, especially because it means cutting time for other business tasks. This guide is designed to help businesses set recruitment goals that will help them succeed and adapt to the trends for 2021.

The steps of the recruitment process start with sourcing the right top talent for a specific need, screening all of the applicants, offering them the position, and then placing the candidate in the company. There are a lot of different goals that a company can set to improve any or all stages of the process.

It’s important to take this endeavour one step at a time to avoid becoming overwhelmed. Here are three tips to think about when setting recruitment goals for 2021:

Effectively host a virtual event
Reduce failure rates for new recruits starting from the beginning to the end of the recruitment process;
Set concrete goals that follow the SMART method (more on this below);
Optimize your process where you can increase your speed-to-hire.

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Effectively Host a Virtual Event

With virtual events becoming an integral part of recruiting, no doubt many talent acquisition leaders have put forward the question of how to maximize the return of interest of virtual event recruiting. To make the most out of a virtual event, consider following these best practices:

First, pick the right virtual event solution. It is tough to find a single virtual event solution that can satisfy different recruiting teams’ needs. There are many things to consider when picking an event solution. Will the solution’s design benefit your team? Is my team comfortable with using the solution? What functions are available to you? Answering these questions can help any leader pick the right solution for the job.

Next up, design the visitor experience. All elements within your virtual event should serve the ultimate purpose of attracting and retaining visitors. Put yourself in the position of an applicant and begin to design their in-person experience.

The landing page is the first element an attendee will experience. Therefore your landing page should be attractive enough to draw in visitors with just a glance. Avoid positioning a wall of text on the landing page as it might deter younger audiences from going further.

The human’s mind has a high affinity for imagery information, so pick a visually vibrant design. Look at these landing page designs, for example. This innovative virtual event solution can design attractive landing pages tailored specifically to your needs.

Finally, one should consider implementing ‘quality of life’ improvements such as having a live job board for those that like to check all employment options rather than discovering individual booths.

Increase Speed-to-Hires

Lengthy hiring processes are bad for candidate retention and recruitment practices. It’s key to keep the placement process, or speed-to-hire, as short as possible to reduce the risk that candidates will reject the job offer. Hiring processes should stay focused and on track so that acceptance rates go up.

By maintaining strong organizational habits and adapting to the right industry’s trends, it’s easier to prevent lag. Studying all candidates insight reports can help recruiters to drill down on Millennials and Gen Z desire, goals, wants and needs.

For example, do you know that up to 72% of the UK Gen Z population said they have become more interested in activism and social activities since the start of the Covid 19 Pandemic? Then, job descriptions should be developed based on those industry benchmarks so the right talent comes knocking.

Another reason that recruiters can have a slower process is due to receiving too many resumes and getting overwhelmed. By investing in recruitment software, it becomes easier to track every CV, appointment and interview with a candidate, and then source them from that database. Time spent at any in-person career fair should be spent forging strong connections with your candidates. Any recruiter should know to leverage the physical interactions at in-person events. With mobile recruiting applications such as Rakuna Recruit, collecting resume information and your evaluation of candidates mid-event can be as simple as snapping a picture. Recruiters can use the extra time to focus on creating strong connections with their candidates. Open communication with candidates from start to finish and good software can keep the speed-to-hire momentum.

Reduce Failure Rates

All recruiters want to succeed with the most placements possible. However, placing a candidate at your company and having them on board doesn’t mark the end of the placement process. “It’s a candidate-driven market!” has become the new mantra. Employees’ retention rate is also a significant part of the placement process and ensures that you create an engaging experience for your candidates right at the beginning of the hiring process.

A staggering statistic that recruiters may not know about is that roughly 46% of new hires will either quit or be fired from a business within the first 18 months of being onboard. That’s why one of the recruitment goals in 2021 should be Lower Failure Rates. The question posed here is: How can businesses reduce their failure rates for new hires? This is a bit of a complicated question, but it’s important to be proactive at the core of the answer.

From the beginning of the process, focus on each candidate’s screening and interviewing process to learn more about their career goals and what they’re looking for in an employer. Make sure the candidates got hooked by adopting different approaches, which can be summarized in these 02 key points:

1) Make the application process a breeze for candidates: All the enthusiasm and goodwill you built up can be gone in the second your candidates get caught in the lengthy and jumbled process. One way to fast-track your recruiting process is to get rid of the paperwork and adopt a streamlined, integrated recruiting platform. For example, Rakuna’s ATS solution is ideal to tackle manual tasks such as scheduling and tracking interviews.

You can have a look to see how our solution can help to increase the retention rate. Another approach is to give candidates options to be more proactive such as Self-Schedule for interviews. We will go over more tips on increasing speed-to-hires in the next section.

2) Create transparency in the application process: Prompt communication is part of the door to a candidate’s heart. As the lack of communication on recruiters’ part is seen by many candidates as the norm, rather than the exception, recruiters easily get candidates excited by going the extra mile: Send your candidates personalized emails to get them updated on where they are in the recruiting process, make they feel valued and taken care of - so that even if they are not fit for your open positions, you are still strengthening your talent pools and create a strong referral pipeline.

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Adopt the SMART Method

Recruiters should focus on the SMART strategy so that all the goals they set are strategic. The SMART method is as follows:

Specific: What is the goal to accomplish and why is it important?
Measurable: Quantify the goal.
Achievable: Can the goal be accomplished?
Reasonable: Is the goal worthy of the time and effort?
Time-based: What is the timeline for reaching the objective?

Using the SMART method can be integrated with recruitment software, by inputting each goal, its deadline, and progress report. This helps recruiters manage their time and resources and keep the hiring process short. You can also automate each task that doesn’t need to be manually done and cut down on a long recruitment process.

SMART recruitment goals also reduce spending on recruitment, although this one is understandably trickier. Eliminating paperwork and automating many tasks is a good first step. Software that can automate job advertisements also cuts down on costs for manual advertisements.

This software also keeps potential candidates in the loop along the way even while juggling multiple candidates. High-quality candidates that are interested in staying on at a company becomes quicker and easier with software, and recruiters will have fewer failure rates and turnovers, thus improving their employer brand.

There are many recruitment goals that can improve a recruitment strategy, but there’s no point in setting a goal without having a plan for achieving that goal. By following the SMART method, the plan will be specific and relevant to each case, have a fixed start and endpoint, and a strategy for reaching the goal. If the goal isn’t measurable, recruiters will have no way of knowing if they’ve reached it.

Optimize the Process

Recruiters need to manage their time so they’re spending most of their time interviewing candidates, and not at the screening stage. Applicant tracking systems can do most of the screening work through smart filter intelligence, cutting down the process to just minutes. Recruiters can receive relevant profiles in seconds, thereby allowing more time for communication and relationship building with potential candidates.

Work and deadlines must be prioritized. More time should also be spent on socializing and networking to meet as many high-quality candidates and top talent as possible. By automating the screening of candidates, more recruiters’ time is freed up to attend career fairs and meet candidates in relevant industries.

In fact, Jean Hopkins, a recruiter at Paper Fellows and Boom Essays, says that “paid job boards are still important, though, because they have a much bigger reach than in-person networking, so make sure the software will do that work instead of putting it aside completely. Integrate an applicant tracking tool into the overall strategy to stay on top of actions.”

Candidates have to be closed against the targets previously assigned. If there are a certain number of vacancies that must be filled to meet hiring targets, include them in the organizational plan. This helps recruiters find out how they’re performing and how productive they are. Look for bottlenecks in real-time and find out if you’re accountable for your goals and performance targets.

Recruitment is important to every business because the right candidates can make or break an organization by either improving the business or breaking the organization’s productivity, reputation, and operations.

The Importance of Setting Goals

Good recruiters know that their process and strategy can always be improved, no matter what. Even if their business is successful, and all the other success criteria are met, they still need to challenge themselves and find ways to improve. Setting goals allows them to do that. Recruiters should think about how their recruitment goals will help candidates and their companies accomplish their objectives, and how goals can improve recruitment strategies, even little goals every day.

The process of setting goals can take a bit of time out of the day, the week, or even the quarter, but it encourages recruiters to think of their current recruitment process and how they can improve itTherefore, if you haven’t already done so, take some time out of your day and set some goals for your 2021 recruitment strategy now.

Contributor Aimee Laurence, a manager with Research paper writing service and Dissertation help service, focuses her writing on human resources practices and personal and professional development. She enjoys finding ways to connect businesses with talent and improve their hiring practices. In her free time, she works as a freelance editor for Assignment help Brisbane.