Today we’re defining full cycle recruiting and giving some tips around two different stages of full cycle recruiting.
The intention here is also to give some insight for those of you who are full cycle recruiters on how to increase your effectiveness.
Being a strong full cycle recruiter is something that is a never-ending game of becoming better.
Whether you’re an external recruiter working for an agency or an internal recruiter working for a brand, your goal is to become the best recruiter possible.
If you’re a business owner or a hiring manager overseeing a team, you want your recruiters to be constantly learning and growing.
You want to make sure that you’re learning and partnering with them as much as possible as your part is critical in being able to hire the right talent.
If all parties are engaged in the recruiting process you’re going to have a major competitive edge in being able to hire and retain the best talent in the market.
It is not your product or your service that makes your company.
Your talent makes the money and the difference in who your business is in the market.
WHAT IS FULL CYCLE RECRUITING?
Full cycle recruiting is just a fancy way of talking about the entire recruiting process.
The recruiting process begins with identifying and prepping the need for a role.
This could be a new role due to growth and expansion, restructuring, or an open role that is required to be filled, also known as a backfill.
The fully cycle recruiting process starts with preparation for the role and ends with onboarding the new employee.
Onboarding is bringing somebody in on their first day and ensuring that they are set up to win.
A recruiter manages all the pieces in between this beginning and end of the process.
A full cycle recruiter doesn’t do all of these things alone.
There’s a lot of influence from owners, team leaders, peers and other team members and it’s important to keep this in mind.
A good full cycle recruiter knows how to partner and engage and leverage the other internal resources mentioned above.
PREPARATION: THE FIRST STAGE IN THE FULL CYCLE RECRUITING PROCESS
The first stage is often the stage that most recruiters make mistakes.
Like anything, if you don’t begin with a solid foundation you’re going to have issues along the way.
That first step in your preparation is critical for any role, whether you’re a recruiter, a hiring manager, a business owner or anybody else looking to hire.
Often times the proper prepping starts with identifying what your need is and making sure the details get flushed out as much as possible.
You want to be clear on what you need in that open seat, both from a hard skills perspective and from a soft skills perspective.
It’s in this initial preparation stage that you want to get really clear so that there is minimal calibration as you start interviewing.
There’s always going to be some level of calibration as you learn things along the way.
As you talk to candidates and see what’s on the market, this can’t be avoided.
You want to do as much legwork initially to avoid major recalibrations.
This will avoid slowing down the process and avoid having to start over from the beginning.
MINIMIZING THE TIMING OF OPEN ROLES
You want to be able to minimize the amount of time you have an open seat.
Open seats are money drainers and morale drainers on your company and your team.
With your initial prep work, it’s critical to get clear about the hard and soft skills needed for the position.
You want to see how the position fits in with the organization, as well as the ideal profile of what that person is going to be like holistically.
You also want to see if there are certain companies that you do and don’t want to potentially hire people from.
It’s important at this point too, that your interview process is flushed out and settled.
You don’t want to be inventing the wheel as you go.
Your company may have an interview process, but you’ll want to see if there’s anything unique or special that needs to happen with each role.
SOURCING: THE SECOND STAGE IN THE FULL CYCLE RECRUITING PROCESS
Once you move on from the prep stage, you move into what’s known as sourcing.
Sourcing can have different steps, but this is the place where a lot of recruiting rubber meets the road.
This is where a recruiter earns their keep as sourcing is an art.
A good recruiter knows that they will constantly be evolving in this area.
The key to effective sourcing is truly understanding what the role is.
This is why the initial prep is so important.
When you understand the need for the role and what the ideal candidate looks like, you’ll be able to effectively source for the position.
You will be way more effective than somebody who has a foggy picture of what the archetype for the role is.
The key to sourcing is in the right balance of quality and quantity.
You’ve got to be able to get the right volume of people, but they also have to be the right quality.
It’s important to cast a wide net and be able to reach out to a lot of people in a short period of time.
It also can’t be too wide of a net as you’ll be wasting time talking to too many people that aren’t good fits.
So your sourcing should be proactive and using resources like LinkedIn or other places where your specific type of talent lives.
The most important thing with sourcing is that you cannot rely on job boards.
Job boards and inbound submissions can be a supplement to your search, but you don’t want to rely on just collecting resumes.
SCREENING: THE THIRD STAGE IN THE FULL CYCLE RECRUITING PROCESS
After sourcing, you move onto what’s sometimes called the screening or selection process.
This is moving candidates through your interview process and every company works different for every position.
At the end of the day you want to make sure you have a streamlined process that is a good experience for your candidates.
You also want to screen candidates in a way that includes testing their hard and even their soft skills.
You want to get an actual idea of how they would do the job once they’re in the seat.
Too many companies rely on candidates telling them whether they can or can’t do the job, but you’ve got to actually test them.
KEEPING YOUR SCREENING PROCESS STREAMLINED
We recommend that the screening and selection process be as efficient and quick as possible.
Ideally your screening and selection process should not be longer than three weeks.
The market is too much of a candidate driven market right now for you to be spending too much time moving people through your process.
This can be challenging with people’s schedules, but 2 to 3 weeks is a good amount of time to move people through.
Once you move out of the screening stage, you move into what is called the hiring stage, the negotiation stage or the offer stage.
After you’ve moved several candidates through your screening process then you can narrow it down to the best one or two.
THE OFFER STAGE
Making offers to candidates is an art and we have written other blog posts about this that we recommend you check out.
The important thing in the offer stage is making sure candidates’ salary expectations are within the ballpark of your budget.
Some companies think it is a good idea to make lowball offers in the beginning because it allows the back-and-forth.
Making lowball offers is not a good idea as the last thing you want is to take all the steam out of their sales.
Most people will not admit that this happens but in fact this happens all the time and will actually sour the negotiation process.
The last thing that you want to do is make a competitive offer but not leave room for a little bit of negotiation.
Everybody wants to feel like they got a better deal and everybody wants to feel valued.
The offer and the negotiation stage has many psychological components to it.
It is critical that you have people coming on to your team are happy, excited and feeling valued before they even start.
THE FINAL STAGE: ONBOARDING
You want to make sure your onboarding process is organized so that candidates continue to have a good experience.
This is their first experience as an employee and it needs to be solid.
They need to be taken care of and feel informed and have clarity around what the expectations for them are.
Weak on boarding is a mistake that leads to a lot of people leaving roles earlier and has a lot to do with talent retention.
IN CONCLUSION
This is a very high-level look at full cycle recruiting and some tips about how you can increase your effectiveness and efficiency. Now that you know what full cycle recruiting is, you’ll be able to better implement the process the next time you’re looking at hiring new talent.
Hope this helps and best of luck!
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