How to Build a Recruiting Plan: A Step-by-Step Guide to Creating a Unified Hiring Strategy

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Table of Contents


    Structuring a Recruiting Plan to Meet Headcount Demand

    In a recent blog on capacity/demand vs hiring quotas recruiting strategies we covered the two most popular recruiting strategies used to meet headcount demand. Today, we’ll dive into building a structured recruiting plan so that you walk away with two things:

    • A deep understanding of the components that make up a recruiting plan

    • A step-by-step guide to building your own recruiting plan.

    Following these steps will help you secure the budget & executive buy-in needed to meet dynamic hiring needs.

    What is a Recruitment Plan?

    In a perfect world, recruiting demand is linear, attrition is predictable, and you can implement every project without interruption. Unfortunately, that’s not the world we live in. Backfills are unpredictable. Reforecasts are frequent.  Locations Open & close. You get the point. So, What is a Recruiting Plan?

    • What it is:

      • An approach that can be agreed upon by executives so you have their buy-in

      • Ratios that help you scale production & impact IN BOTH DIRECTIONS

      • A cost model, endorsed by finance to help predict & scale cost per hire

      • Frameworks for how hiring teams interact with the service of recruiting

      • Structured like a model, with inputs & outputs, to make scenario planning

    • What it is NOT

      • A static list of recruiting commitments

      • A plan that only highlights recruiting teamwork or behavior

      • Owned only by the recruiting leaders

      • A point-in-time report of recruiting capability

    Recruiting plans are as dynamic as your business. Recruiting Leaders get buy-in from Finance & other execs by building trust in how they handle changes vs trying to prepare for everything in a silo. 

    Recruitment Plan Format: Essential Components

    • Recruiting Commitments: Hires per month, Projects, Service Levels, Experience commitments, Brand, etc. Commitments are best expressed as a relationship between the recruiting capacity to meet these commitments and the stability of the demand for the service of recruiting.

    • Production Ratios: Hires per month. Project per Talent Ops. Schedules per coordinator. Applicants per sources. Applications to hire. Offer to accept rates. There are many others, but having ratios to express the relationship between resources and output, will not only help you scale your team in times of need, but it will help justify agency spend, or missed goals, should the plan change outside these parameters.

    • Cost Model: Staff, Software, & Agency spend are the top 3 costs associated with recruiting production. Costs 

    • Hiring Manager Service Levels. Hiring Managers should expect different levels of service as a function of capacity/demand. A model for involving hiring managers in coordination, application review, and scheduling will help guide leaders on how to manage their team's relationship with Recruiting

    • Guidelines for High Priority Utilization (P0): If everything is a priority, nothing is. 

    • Previous headcount plan data This is more 

      • Historic attrition & backfill data

      • Historic plan change rate

      • Historic recruiting production 

      • Historic Agency Usage:

    Step-by-Step Guide to Creating a Recruiting Plan

    Step 1: Analyze historical data

    Historical data analysis helps justify input assumptions as a baseline for future plans. 

    • Capacity/Demand Actuals: What was asked of your team last year? How did changes impact it? And what did you product

    • Company Goals: What is the context of last year's performance, and how will that differ from this year?

    • Costs: What is the cost of your recruiting inputs, and how does the current market impact?


    Step 2: Define your ratios

    Ratios are key inputs to modeling the recruiting plan against different hiring scenarios. Some key ratios are:

    • People Ratios: Hires per recruiter and other IC metrics. Managers: ICs for all areas.

    • Funnel Ratios: Interviews & interview time per job. Offer to accept. Inbound to total hires.

    • Agency Parameters: When to engage agencies. How does role type, priority, and recruiting capacity factor into the decision to use agencies

    • Prioritization Guidelines: What qualifies a req as P0. What commitments does recruiting make? How many total P0s are allowed at once


    Step 3: Build Recruiting Funnel Analysis

    A good funnel analysis will support your production & cost models. Here are key calculations that help build an accurate production model

    • Historic Funnel Conversion Rates: How efficient is the funnel, and should you invest resources in driving efficiency to improve capacity instead of adding more recruiters?

    • Recruiting hours per hire: How many hours per hire are expended by the recruiting & non-recruiting teams?

    • Workload Burden: How difficult is the work being asked of the recruiting team

    • Inbound Hire ratio: How much sourcing effort is required to meet the demand


    Step 4: Establish Recruiting Service Levels

    There is a direct correlation between the level of service and recruiting production. Agreeing on the service commitments ensures buy-in for recruiting team investments. 

    • Candidate Experience: Debrief calls for every interview? First Round AI Screens? What do you want your candidates to have?

    • Hiring Manager Experience: Candidate walk-ins? AI interview notes? How much effort are you expecting from your hiring managers?

    • Talent Brand & Marketing: What hiring campaigns will you run?

    • Reporting Experience: What data do you want from recruiting, and in what intervals? Hint: Ad-hoc reporting is time consuming & expensive


    Step 5: Build your Recruiting Production Model

    What is the size and structure of the recruiting team? How many hires per month? What hiring volume can they flex up to? Check out our article on building recruiting capacity like a pro here.

    • Production team size & structure

    • A map of capacity against demand– where will you need to fill the gaps

    • Scenario models of projected backfill volume: How can executives leverage you scaling ratios to forecast whether or not their future expansion plans are possible


    Step 6: Build your Recruiting Cost Model

    How much will the service of recruiting cost, and what are the key levers teams can pull to model cost against future demand?

    • Cost per candidate acquisition: What does it cost to full the top of funnel with candidates?

    • Cost per interview: What is the cost of every interview. This could be a projection of interview cost in hiring manager hours, and/or the cost of tools & staff needed to run interview processes.

    • Cost per hire:  There are many ways to calculate cost per hire, but consistency in tracking over time will tell the best story

    • Cost to scale recruiting team to meet demand: How do recruiting costs scale with demand? What are projections for scaling team capacity with alternatives like agencies or RPS

    headcount365 gives our Talent Acquisition Leader users the data & tools needed to produce a structured recruiting plan

    Before headcount365, the key data needed to create a structured recruiting plan was either lost in spreadsheets, or stored in disparate systems requiring time, BI tools, and data engineering support to extract requisite information. 

    With headcount365, all data from every plan year is stored in one system. Lost data from spreadsheet-based headcount activity is not tracked, with new insights specifically built for talent leaders. Headcount365 uses this enriched, historical data to layer predictive insights into a pre-built recruiting plan. Recruiting leaders can walk way with a unified plan to meet headcount demand, with buy-in from executives and finance. Any user can model this data to project future headcount scenarios, so that everyone is on the same page.

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