When an organisation wants to hire an employee, they either undertake the recruiting process themselves or hire an external recruiter to find ideal candidates for them. The choice of doing recruitment in-house versus hiring a professional recruitment agency depends on numerous factors:

• The company’s experience in recruitment.
• The agency’s reputation.
• The number and type of employees that the firm needs to hire.
• The cost of recruitment.
• The time restrictions for hiring.
• The extensiveness of the recruitment process, that is, how many recruiting processes can be done by the organisation/agency.

This last consideration is what organisations need to pay close attention to.

There’s no point in partnering with an agency that can only perform some recruiting activities and not others. It will just add unwanted costs to your recruitment budget and make the entire process sloppy and inefficient. In such a scenario, it would be better to do the recruiting yourself.

If this is the case, you will need to train yourself in full cycle recruiting.

What is full cycle recruiting?

Full cycle recruitment is a process where a company can handle the entire recruitment cycle end-to-end, start-to-finish.

In full life cycle recruiting, every stage of the employee recruitment cycle, starting from the workforce planning stage and right up to the employee onboarding stage, is done by the organisation. No external help is sought for the recruitment process.

Full cycle recruiting: Process and stages

Following are the process and stages involved in full cycle recruiting:

1. Understand the hiring needs of the firm

An organisation initiates the hiring process to fill-in gaps in their workforce. These could be the ‘skills gap’ or ‘people gap.’ For the recruitment cycle to be impactful, full cycle recruiters must understand the exact workforce needs of the firm. This will help determine how the process should be set-up and what tools and assessments can be used to find the right people for the job.

2. Create a detailed job description

Once you know why you’re hiring and what posts you’re hiring for, it’s time to create the job descriptions.

Job descriptions act as compelling advertisements for prospective applicants. They attract the best people and bring to your doors the most superior talent. From the firm’s perspective, the job description helps recruiters understand the role better and screen candidates easily.

When writing a job description, include:

• The company bio
• Benefits of working with the company
• The responsibilities associated with the role
• Expectations from the employee
• Qualifications needed to apply for the role

3. Publish the job advert

Once the job description is prepared, it needs to be seen by the right pool of prospective candidates. Organisations should publish their job descriptions and company bio in different places. This could include job sites like Monster.com or job boards like Glassdoor. They can even publish the adverts on professional social media channels like LinkedIn. This type of multi-channel approach will help firms source quality candidates.

4. Screen job candidates for company-applicant fit

Companies get hundreds of responses after they advertise a job. But you don’t have the time or resources to interview each candidate. This is where screening comes in. When you screen applicants, you separate the wheat from the chaff.

Some of the best ways to screen candidates are:

• Reject applicants whose cover letters and resumes have very poor language.
• Check social media accounts to get a better sense of the applicants and check for temperament-fit with the job.
• Administer a knowledge test to eliminate employees who lack fundamental subject knowledge.
• Conduct a phone interview and screen-out applicants who don’t meet the mark.
• Implement selection tests & interviews.

Once you screen the applicants for the first time, it’s time to do another round of screening. At this stage, you should be testing for job-related skills.

Selection tests help you further narrow down the best candidates for the job. When administering selection tests, be sure to check for:

• General knowledge
• Job skills
• Psychometric-fit
• Situational responsiveness/stress reaction

Video-based or face-to-face interviews will be the final selection test before you make your decision. The best practice for interviews is to structure the questions in advance. This way, you will subject each candidate to the same set of questions and get comparable responses.

5. Roll out the offer to the ideal candidate

The offer starts with compensation and benefits negotiation. Establish salary ranges in advance. You can use platforms like Glassdoor to identify what these ranges are. They collect real data from employees to provide these estimates.

The important thing to remember here is to collaborate with your new hire to reach a mutually satisfactory agreement. A well-paid employee is content and productive.

6. Onboard the new joiner

When full cycle recruiting, you end the recruitment process with the onboarding. Provide your new joiners with all the information and dockets they need to learn about the firm. Organise a buddy program to help them ease into their teams and roles.

Conduct onboarding training to familiarise the new joiners with your company policy and the department rules.

Best practices for full cycle recruiting

Next, let’s consider how you can get the most out of your end-to-end cycle recruiting?

1. Create a recruitment system to make the process more efficient

Most recruiting errors occur because full cycle recruiters use different processes during each recruitment cycle. To get positive hiring results, standardise the process. Review the processes you used in the past and the ones you’re using now. Select the best features/steps and create a standardised process that every recruiter and hiring manager in your firm has to follow.

2. Get clarity about the job being hired for before you start the process

Speak to different departments, managers and team members to understand the job being hired for. If recruiters don’t understand the job, they will have a difficult time vetting the applications they receive. You may end up missing out on a good candidate because of poor role knowledge.

3. Become a human resource investor

Full cycle recruiters need to look at job applicants as stocks/shares. To get the most profitable results, you need to put your money in the right stock that suits your investment goals. Similarly, for the organisation to truly benefit from the hiring, you need to pick the right person whose attitudes and skills suit the organisational goals.

So, think like an investor when hiring.

4. Make technology an integral part of your recruitment strategy

Technology is integral to making full cycle recruitment a success. Here are some ways in which you can use technology during the hiring process:

• Implement a resume reader that discards applications that don’t have keywords related to your advertised job.
• Use an applicant tracking system to check whether an applicant has applied for a role and has been rejected in the past. You can always keep them on hold while you consider other candidates.
• Use state-of-the-art talent management systems, like TalenX.io, to match the right applicants to the right job and to screen them for best-fit.
• Use HR CRM system to segregate applicants into relevant pools based on the role applied for and skills required, and to manage their journey.
• Keep an excel sheet to track candidates’ journey through the recruitment stages.
• Choose the advert space depending on the position and the employee to be hired.

The websites a college graduate frequents are different from those used by a person who’s looking for a mid-career change. Be mindful of these differences when advertising your openings.

You can use Instagram and Facebook to target young applicants, while job boards, newspapers and LinkedIn work better for older and more experienced applicants.

5. Document every step of the process for posterity

For your full cycle recruitment strategy to yield results, it’s important to document everything that occurs during the recruiting process. You can then revisit these learnings and improve your process for the future.

6. Include all hiring managers in the decision-making process

The hiring managers are the ones who need to finally work with the candidates who are chosen. But although they make the final cuts, a poorly-designed recruitment process will yield only bad candidates.

So, involve all hiring managers when you’re making any decision regarding the hiring process. Send regular emails about any updates to the hiring system.

How to benefit from full cycle recruiting?

Here are some ways in which you can benefit from implementing full cycle recruitment:

1. The entire recruitment process is more streamlined

Since you take care of every single stage of the hiring, you have fewer hiccups during the recruitment process. The stages are customised to meet your exact needs and are highly efficient.

2. Each participant in the process is more accountable

Since you don’t involve an external vendor to take care of hiring, the entire responsibility of a bad hire falls on your recruitment staff. This makes all the participants in the process more responsible and accountable.

3. The recruitment process becomes much faster

Research shows that the average time to hire in most organisations is 3+ weeks. This is too long.

With full life cycle recruiting, the data is centralised, and you are in charge of all processes. You don’t have to wait for an external agency to finish their processes before you start yours.

4. Candidates have a better experience during the recruitment cycle

If you hire another agency to lay the groundwork for hiring, it adds numerous steps to the recruitment process. Candidates may be inconvenienced with numerous tests, interviews and company visits. All of these issues will be non-existent if the company itself does full cycle recruiting.

5. The quality of people hired is exceptionally good

For many firms, recruitment is siloed. This can take away from the quality of hires that the organisation gets.

When recruiting full cycle, you have complete control over the type of candidates who get chosen. You can ensure that only the superior candidate gets selected.

6. The organisation can become more profitable

The lower the time to hire, the lower the cost to hire. This means that by implementing full cycle recruiting, you can reduce the costs of hiring tremendously.

Also, because you don’t spend ages on recruitment, you have the time to train your new hires and get them better prepared for their roles. This can improve organisational productivity, making your firm more profitable.

TalenX – The full cycle recruiter you’ve been waiting for

At TalenX, our cutting-edge talent acquisition and talent management software is designed to help firms implement full cycle recruitment. Our algorithms can help you identify the most suitable job candidates who have the technical and behavioural competencies needed for the role.

Choose our predictive hiring technology when recruiting full cycle this 2020. Contact us for more information.