The Importance of Continuous Recruitment
If you’re looking for ways to optimize the recruitment process, continuous recruitment is a powerful tool for finding the best candidates and eliminating extended vacancies.
Unfortunately, many companies don’t understand the importance of continuous recruitment, with only around 30% of all companies utilizing this hiring tactic.
The main draw of continuous recruiting is that it’s an effective solution to high corporate turnover rates and extended unfilled vacancies. Proactive recruiting also makes finding the skills, talent, experience, and personality needed to succeed at your company more likely.
In this blog, we discuss the importance of continuous recruitment in more depth. We also offer some top tips for implementing this high-return recruitment strategy.
What Does Continuous Recruitment Mean?
One mistake many companies make is waiting until a position is open to start a search to fill it. Instead, consider using continuous recruitment.
So, what is continuous recruitment? It’s a model under which you implement recruitment tactics at all times, even if a position is not available.
You then have a pool of qualified potential candidates when a position becomes available. If you find a truly outstanding candidate through this process, you may even find it beneficial to create a position for them.
Continuous recruitment is a powerful tool for finding the best candidates and eliminating extended vacancies.
Why Use Continuous Recruitment?
Despite over 20% of companies experiencing losses due to unfilled vacancies, only about 30% of companies understand the importance of continuous recruitment and implement this model.
Taking the time to set up a continuous hiring program can bring big returns in terms of both the quality of candidate you hire and the value they bring (and resulting profits that generates.) You should avoid losses relating to having a vacant position too.
Some negatives of vacancies being open for an extended period include:
Heavier workloads for other employees can reduce productivity, motivation, and success
Lower quality customer service
Lower quality output and hold-ups in some areas of operations
Drops in profits due to a role in your business model not being filled and undertaken
The effect on other employees is something to consider. The stress of taking on more work than they should and effectively doing someone else's job, likely without a pay increase to match, can reduce employee morale drastically.
This situation could cause more employees to leave, creating even more vacancies and worsening the above issues.
The Importance of Continuous Recruitment during Short Turnover Times
As many companies only request two to three weeks' notice for an employee to leave, the time available to replace them is minimal. This panic to do so can result in unsuccessful hiring.
Without continuous recruitment, you’ll also be starting from scratch, effectively with no potential candidates in mind.
Additionally, the sooner you find a great new hire, the sooner you can begin training them. If you have candidates ready to go, you may be able to get them in for training before the old employee leaves, meaning they are 100% ready to go when the former employee finally leaves.
Implementing a continuous hiring program can bring big returns in terms of the quality of candidate you hire and the value they bring.
How to Implement Continuous Recruitment
Now that you understand the importance of continuous recruitment, take a look at the following tips to help you implement this hiring strategy.
Set Up your Applicant Database
Before you begin actively pursuing continuous recruitment, set up a database to store the information of each applicant.
You can find recruitment software that helps you build a database. Alternatively, you can build your tracking system to store candidates' information as you receive it for easy access when a role requiring their skillset opens up.
Encourage Unsolicited Job Applications
Encouraging unsolicited job applications is at the center of continuous recruitment. After all, you’re looking to get applications from candidates even without you promoting a particular job.
Under the continuous recruitment model, you must be encouraging candidates to submit applications at all times. Encouraging applications can be as simple as adding a note on your website or jobs page saying to submit if interested, even if they don’t see an appropriate open position.
To get the best results, mention the type of professionals you're open to, for example, those looking for marketing, IT, accounting, or web design roles.
Recruiting Less Experienced Candidates
Another element of making the most from unsolicited applications is focusing on less experienced candidates that have a lot of promise.
By recruiting them now, when filling a certain position is not crucial, you can help them grow and be ready for future jobs that become available in your company.
Under the continuous recruitment model, you must be encouraging candidates to submit applications at all times.
Work your Network!
Contacting and growing your network can help a lot when implementing continuous recruitment.
Having employees look at their network, if possible, is a good move too. It’s important that employees are happy and comfortable with new coworkers and vice versa. As long as employee referrals are qualified, hiring an employee’s acquaintance can create a strong, motivated, and reliable team.
Having a database ready allows you to ask your network throughout the year and add anyone that may be a good fit for your business. While not everyone would say yes to switching jobs on the spot, they are likely happy to have the opportunity at some point, at least to hear about an opening.
Also, go to recruitment events, job fairs, university jobs events, and the like, as well as industry events to build your recruitment network.
Think About Your Brand and Reputation
The people who will put in applications even if a job is not available are the ones that really want to work for your company. Having a great brand image, good reputation, and good work culture is critical in attracting these candidates.
Make yourself stand out as an amazing place to work where employees will grow and get lots of value and perks back from you, along with them adding value to your business.
Getting employees to fall in love with your company and way of doing things can entice them to add you to that list of companies they’d drop everything to work with.
Conduct Interviews
If you can, consider interviewing people in advance, even if this is just over the phone.
Interviewing before a position becomes available can save time and effort later on. Knowing if promising applicants on paper are a good fit by interacting with them can help ensure your database includes only those you’ll hire.
After interviewing, you can keep successful applicants marked for an opening. Or, you may want to create a position for them, which is next.
Contacting and growing your network is an important component of implementing continuous recruitment.
Create Custom Positions for Top Talent
It can be worth bringing on top applicants even if a position is not available.
Having a short and long-term recruitment plan can help with this. Say you want to add two additional web designers to your team in a year or so. If you find an incredible candidate before that time, adding them to the team now can bring lots of benefits.
Even with the extra salary, you’re paying out, the value the new hire brings should cancel out that cash outflow.
Consult with Your Current Team
Before implementing continuous recruitment, consult your current employees. Make it clear that these candidates will not replace them, at least not until the point when they decide to give their notice.
Get current employees active in this process too. Talk to each department about what additional positions could help them and what they want in an employee that will join their team.
You could even have current employees monitor the applications as they come in. They can use their experience and judgment to add only the best candidates to the recruitment database.
Have yourself and your team reflect on what was wrong with past employees that didn’t work out.
Partner with a Recruitment Agency
Continuous recruiting and recruitment agencies go hand in hand. These companies are constantly working their network and conducting outreach to build a database of qualified candidates.
By working with a recruitment agency, you get access to the database at any time you like. As soon as you have an opening, the agency can find a shortlist of top talent. They may even get in touch if they come across a candidate that they think is a great fit, even if you don’t have a position going.
Using a recruitment agency has the added benefit of saving you and your team a lot of time too!
Boutique Recruitment Agencies
If possible, look to work with a boutique recruitment agency that specializes in your niche.
A broad-reaching agency can help you find top talent. But a recruitment team that has direct experience in your industry and niche will bring their industry-specific knowledge and talent database to your recruitment process. This specialization makes finding qualified candidates more successful.
For example, the team at Lynne Palmer has a vast amount of experience finding talent for companies in the publishing and medical communications industries. Our highly experienced team will be able to bring a knowledgeable approach to your search if practicing in these industries and offer access to the most top-level, qualified candidate databases out there.
In Conclusion
Having read this blog, you should now understand the importance of continuous recruitment much more clearly.
Making ongoing recruitment a part of your operations and always looking for top talent will likely result in finding better talent than recruiting only when a vacancy occurs. The addition of having a database of qualified candidates ready to contact as soon a position opens up will also reduce the time and stress level involved in quickly filling a vacancy.
If you’re interested in trying continuous recruitment but feel you don’t have the time or resources to do so, get in touch with our team at Lynne Palmer!
We would be happy to work with you to understand the qualities of your ideal candidates so that we can quickly and effectively present a personalized list of incredible candidates when a role becomes available.