Recruiting Strategy 3
(Nov 04, 2008) Whether conscious or not, all organizations have a Recruiting Strategy. (This notion is akin to the idea that all organizations have performance reviews whether formal or not.) In other words, one way of thinking about Recruiting Strategy is that it is the organization’s consistent pattern over time. Company X recruits this way; Company Y recruits that way. Strategy, from this perspective, is simply an expression of corporate culture.
You can probably guess that our notion of Recruiting Strategy is far more structures and intentional. Rather than an intention that can be inferred from actions, a conscious Recruiting Strategy is a multi-level detailed plan. A Recruiting Strategy begins where you are and moves you to the desired end state. The strategy should describe the way that you’ll know if you are on the right track and when you get there.
A Recruiting Strategy contains three elements:
- A Detailed Assessment and Description of the Current Situation
- Desired End State
- Principles for Progress (Guidelines for Resource Utilization)
Without this sort of big picture framework, it’s impossible to provide enough strategic guidance to make decision making easy. The whole point of a well defined strategy is that it makes flexible on-the-ground decision making easy. Any recruiter familiar with the overall strategy (and they all should be), will have enough information to make important situational decisions.
Strategies don’t work very well if they are not congruent with the organization’s culture. They also fail quickly if there isn’t a way to rapidly respond to the environment. Any strategy must be flexible enough to shed the ideas that aren’t useful in favor of more interesting things that pop up along the way.
