This is the second article about the recruitment framework. In a nutshell, a recruitment framework is a set of recommendations on how to build an efficient recruitment function.

 Like in software development, our framework includes three layers: front-end, business layer, and back-end. Today we’re going to talk about the last two.

Business layer. Processes

Let's unpack the processes behind everything that recruiters do.

• Recruiting flow. How we are moving candidates from stage to stage, which stages they pass and on which conditions, which specialists are involved. It’s best to visualize as a diagram: simple, connected, and easy to understand.

• Rules of hiring and onboarding: how we are making offers, setting up interviews, preparing people for interviews, collecting and giving feedback.

• Commissions: how recruitment team is rewarded for hires.

• Work prioritization: how we are assigning vacancies, who handles which positions and why.

• Recruiting methodology: how recruitment team operates on a daily basis, which rituals are followed.

• Internal and external referrals processing.

• Automation: which parts of recruitment process are automated with specific tools.

• Integration with other functions: accounting, HR, marketing, sales, delivery.

• Strategic planning and forecasting, budgeting.

 Let’s discuss selected elements in more detail.

Automation

What can be automated?

• Searching and contacting

• Job posting from ATS to career website and/or Job Boards

• Auto-responses. It’s not always possible to answer all candidates personally, especially when the market is so agitated and heated. So it’s important to have a standard auto-response: “We got your CV and will contact you if we find a match”. This way the candidate doesn’t feel ignored, but also we don’t promise that we will definitely respond.

• Skill matching in ATS. ATS is our source, the first place we start exploring when there’s a new opening. If our ATS can suggest candidates for a new vacancy, it also saves time and money.

• Interview scheduling

• Feedback collection

• Offer generation

Recruitment methodology

Practices we can implement:

• Kanban board for vacancy assignment. A separate column for each recruiter and a separate ticket for each vacancy. Each ticket contains priorities, deadlines, statuses, etc.

• Backlog grooming. All vacancies that we are not actively working on right now, should be prioritized. So that it’s clear which vacancy we need to take next.

• Daily stand-ups

• Monthly recruiting sprint goals 

• Monthly retrospectives

• Sourcing iterations. It is a rare chance to find the perfect candidate and meet all requirements at once. That is why we need iterations: find a number of people, check if they fit the requirements, make adjustments, repeat.

• Rapid recruitment approach. The modern market is so fast—you snooze, you lose. There are bureaucratic aspects that can slow the process down, like multiple stages of offer approval, heavy time-consuming test tasks and multiple duplicating interview steps. The faster we make decisions and move candidates along the pipeline, the higher are our chances to hire them before our competitors do. Rapid recruitment solves the problem: estimate how much time you spend on each stage, look at the bottlenecks, find the problems, and try to fix them. 

• KISS principle: keep it stupid simple. Simplify everything that can be simplified.

Budgeting

Once a year, in December or January, we analyze how much we spent during the past business year and plan for the next one. The main two things that need to be taken into account are hiring plans and required recruitment team size. 

There are statutory expenses: recruiters’ salaries, insurance, LinkedIn Premium payments, open sourcing tools, ATS, job boards subscriptions. These costs are +/- the same during the whole year. There are also changing costs: for example, payments to agencies, freelancers, costs of the conferences, business trips, advertising, team buildings. And don’t forget about the reserve. We can’t foresee everything, that’s why we need to count on fallback and approve it with top management. 

And last, but not least, is the CPH metric (cost per hire). It can only be calculated based on real expenses. We track all expenses for a year, then divide it by the number of hires per month and see how much one person is costing us. Same can be done monthly and quarterly. Based on the cost of hire we can understand when the employee will start to make a profit for the company and how effective the overall recruitment function is operating.

Interaction with stakeholders

Our stakeholders are the people who open the vacancies: sales, top management, delivery, project managers, account managers, external clients. They want full visibility: to understand what is going on with the vacancy, when they can expect their hire, and if there are any difficulties. Information is everything, and the stakeholder should feel in control. 

 Practices we can implement to achieve that:

• Intake meetings

• Hiring projections

• Weekly syncs

• Progress reports

• Hiring brainstorming sessions—if there are any complications. The team sits down together and discusses options: additional investments, more recruiters, more money, etc.

Back-end. Tools

ATS, or Applicant Tracking System

Usually, the companies have one of three setups:

• No ATS, just excel sheets 

• Purchased subscription for an external product

• Custom written system

What’s better? It’s hard to say. Of course, the custom software is tailor-made for your needs and requests. Commercial products can be difficult to customize. In simple words, you choose either to fit your processes into a product OR create a product which will fit into your processes, whatever is easier and more cost effective.

If you’re choosing the commercial ATS, pay attention to these aspects:

• Search. Should be convenient

• Data migration to the system and vice versa. Should be easy

• Flexible customization. Easier when your in-house team is developing it

• Integration with external services: accounting tools, HR, systems and Job Boards..

• Automation of manual routine tasks

• Modern UI, good usability

• Mobile version

• Analytics

• Responsive customer support

• Adequate value for the price 

Tools and technologies. Starting with basic email clients to more complicated sourcing tools, job boards, performance enhancement instruments.

Metrics & analytics

It’s impossible not to measure anything because we have to answer to stakeholders about our performance. We can’t understand why something isn’t working and what needs to be improved without analytics.

What to measure:

• Speed

• Times to close/hire/fill, time in stage

• Quantity

• Recruiting funnel conversion rates, Team and individual performance (Sourced, Contacted, Submissions, Offers, Hires)

• Quality

• Offer acceptance rate, Quality of Hire, Channel quality

• Segment

• By recruiter, project, manager, technology, location, seniority

• Budget: Cost per hire

How to measure:

• Collect and analyze historic recruitment data 

• Establish benchmarks and compare to the market

• Set up the desired metrics

• Run regular analytics

• Compare actual to target

• Come up with improvements

What next?

Congratulations, mission accomplished: we’ve built a recruitment framework!

But there’s always room for improvement. Besides, the market, tech, and processes are constantly changing and moving forward. Also, this is just a sample framework, it is and it should be customized specifically to your company processes to be efficient.

You can always continue:

• Automating routine manual processes

• Mentoring and training your team

• Working on HR/Recruitment brand and company’s reputation

• Testing new recruiting tools, adapting the ones that are helpful and efficient

• Improving the metrics and candidate experience

Good luck, fellows!