A full-cycle recruiting strategy that involves talent acquisition, human resources, interview panelists and executive decision-makers is how leading orgs increasingly boost their candidate conversion rates and outcompete other employers for top talent.
In other words? Hiring teams that have a coordinated approach to preparing, sourcing, screening, selecting, hiring, and onboarding talent can execute each of these stages of the full-cycle recruiting process — and fill open positions — quickly and efficiently.
You and your talent team undoubtedly know the benefits of a full-cycle recruiting approach:
- Collective decision-making on what the ideal candidate persona looks like
- A joint effort to generate applicants, sourced prospects, and employee referrals
- Greater internal communication and collaboration regarding pipeline progress
- A holistic view of recruiters’ and candidates’ real-time funnel-related activities
- The ability to carry out hiring cycle tasks (e.g., background checks) with ease
- A systematic onboarding process that leads to great experiences for new hires
But, do you know if your current TA tech and processes enable (or deter) a streamlined, well-oiled, end-to-end recruiting machine? If not, it’s worth auditing your current recruitment model to determine where improvements can be made to better achieve your growth goals.
3 steps you must take to build a successful (and scalable) full-cycle recruiting process
The talent shortage is real. Post-pandemic (and following The Great Resignation), many employers are still struggling to fill (and even backfill) open roles across their business.
“Today’s war for talent is not only impacting all talent segments, but there is unprecedented demand and turnover happening at the same time,” said Gartner Director, Research Jamie Kohn regarding the current state of hiring and retention.
Due to these tough hiring conditions, it’s more crucial than ever to have a repeatable and scalable full-cycle recruiting process that attracts top talent and retains them in the long run.
Here’s how you can put a high-converting TA approach in place, ensure you perfect each part of the full life cycle recruiting process, and regularly hire high-quality candidates today.
1) Ensure your TA and HR teams have the requisite full-cycle recruiting tech
Your TA and HR tech stacks live separately. However, some of these solutions — notably, your applicant tracking system (ATS) and HRIS/HCM software — must sync and share data with one another. (That is to say, “blend” their candidate and employee data sets.)
Why? Because you need to ensure both talent acquisition and human resources can work closely to collectively tackle the six aforementioned stages of full life cycle recruiting:
- Prepare: Think convos with hiring managers and writing impact job descriptions.
- Source: Recruiters publish listings to job boards and proactively engage talent.
- Screen: Seemingly strong-fit prospects hop on a call to discuss the role/company.
- Select: Structured interviewing and feedback collection lead to offer extensions.
- Hire: Hiring managers and recruiters work hard to “close” candidates of interest.
- Onboard: If hiring is a relay race, this is the baton hand-off phase (from TA to HR).
Only when the solutions and tools used by talent acquisition and human resources “speak” with one another can your business build a high-functioning full-cycle recruiting program.
Complete integration among TA and HR tech “makes [recruiters’] jobs easier [and provides] a much better, easier experience for them,” Aptitude Research Founder Madeline Laurano said.
2) Continually refine your candidate sourcing and nurturing activities
Where you source and publish job postings and how you engage qualified candidates with nurture messaging: The steps your talent team takes to regularly optimize both these critical, day-to-day tactics determines the success of your full-cycle recruiting.
Regarding sourcing, evaluate your efforts to date in terms of trying to find top talent on social media sites like LinkedIn and niche career communities like Wellfound:
- Are you using the right search criteria when sourcing via LinkedIn Recruiter?
- Do your job ads hit the mark in terms of generating clicks and applications?
- What about the conversions of your other recruitment marketing collateral?
These channels and other job boards like them are obviously proven mediums to identify the best talent. Just don’t forget that successful sourcing also entails reexamining leads in your existing recruiting database ecosystem.
“One thing you should definitely be doing … is mining the [recruiting] database for candidates who already told you they want to work for you in the past,” HRU Technical Resources President Tim Sackett relayed to SHRM.
Aside from assessing and, as needed, refreshing your candidate sourcing approach every now and then, it’s equally essential to pay close attention to your talent nurturing efforts through personalized, well-timed emails.
Does your existing TA tech deter such targeted and timely nurturing? Then it’s time to invest in a more advanced ATS + CRM that offers built-in, easy-to-use nurture functionality.
“The most strategic leaders invest in solutions that empower recruiting teams to automate tasks and focus on nurturing candidates,” per Employ’s Q3 2022 Quarterly Insights Report.
3) Routinely optimize interview, job offer approval and onboarding processes
Lets’ tackle each of these respective full-cycle recruiting “phases” separately:
- Interviewing. Whether you’ve returned to conducting mostly face-to-face interviews post-pandemic or prefer recruiters, hiring managers and interview panelists speak with prospects over the phone or Zoom about open roles, you still need to routinely refine your interview approach.
- Offer extension. When you get to the offer extension phase of your full-cycle recruiting process, you must collect feedback from each of hiring team member and loop in hiring decision-makers to get the green light to send an offer to preferred prospect (and quickly to avoid losing out on them).
- Onboarding. Ensuring new hires hit the ground running. Orienting new employees to the company culture. Answering new staff members’ questions. These are all tasks TA and HR must tackle together amid an employee’s onboarding process to help them start their jobs on the right foot.
Your hiring process — from your candidate experience approach to your efforts to build a diverse workforce — is clearly not handled by single recruiter. It’s a true team effort.
Hiring managers, TA specialists, interviewers: All these individuals need to have a say about which leads seem like the ideal fit for open roles across your org.
When you and your hiring team work closely together in the entire full-cycle recruiting process, you can streamline candidate engagement and analysis. And this collective work, in turn, helps you realize your desired growth goals and fill critical headcount company-wide.
What enables this type of congruent recruiting strategy across the talent relationship management lifecycle, though? Advanced, intuitive TA tech. Notably, an ATS.
“In a positive recruiter experience, technology is an enabler, a predictive tool that allows the recruiter to be more successful in decision-making,” Cielo Talent Managing Director, Consulting Elaine Orler shared with SHRM.
“In a negative experience, technology only serves as a transaction engine or is a set of disconnected systems that requires duplicative data entry.”
Translation? Full-cycle recruiting is about candidate relationship management. From the moment you identify a top-tier prospect and HR initiates onboarding, to when people managers take the reins to train and oversee the work of new hires.
Find out how 5,000+ Lever customers implement full-cycle recruiting strategies and enhance every part of their recruiting process with LeverTRM. Chat with our team today.
