I received an email recently asking for articles on recruiting best practices within immature companies. It’s a solid request but broad in scope because, depending on who you ask, “recruiting best practices” will vary with the number of people you ask. What I feel are best practices may differ significantly from someone else’s. I say this because it was the lack of quality recruiting practices I experienced that ultimately drove me out of recruiting and into what I do now. There is a school of thought that small companies need to approach recruiting best practices differently from large companies.
At a high level I disagree. I believe that a company, regardless of size or maturity, needs quality, effective recruiting practices and has the ability to implement them. In determining what these best practices are for your company, a number of questions need to be asked and evaluated. That said, there are some issues early stage companies deal with that large companies don’t, and vice versa.
I suspect that if I asked 100 recruiters what they consider to be best practices in recruiting I’d get similar responses at a high level and different responses at a granular level. For example, if I asked recruiters whether or not candidates should receive a response to job inquiries, I believe they’d all say “yes” (high level). Where many people would differ is in answering the (granular level) question, “How should I respond and in what timeframe?” Elaine Orler wrote a post recently telling a story of an individual at a large company who asked each of his recruiting departments around the world a question with a negative consequence to get ideas on how to make the candidate experience better. It was a very interesting approach to get his recruiters to look at issues in a new way. The bottom line is that overall there are practices that we can probably agree are positive for our organizations. How they’re implemented is where we may differ in our approaches.
Regardless of the practices you implement and the way you choose to implement them, they need to align with your answers to the questions I pose below. There are some questions that will be more appropriate given the size and maturity of your company, but in general there are certain questions you need to be asking to begin the process. This list is not comprehensive, but will give you a good jumping-off point.
The questions I’ve posed are imperative to begin to determine not only your recruitment strategy but also the best practices that follow and align with this strategy. Remember that your talent strategy (which includes recruiting best practices) needs to align with your business strategy. Without this alignment you won’t truly have “recruiting best practices.”
