Now is a good time for a Recruitment Audit

Why do you need a recruitment audit? If you haven’t reviewed your recruitment model for a long time you could be repeating poor practice, wasting time and money and alienating your prospective and future candidates.

If your business is regularly recruiting or your current recruitment strategy isn’t working you should take the time for a recruitment audit to identify what works, what doesn’t and how to improve. In this blog we explore what areas you should consider for your recruitment audit.

Applicant Experience

Your candidates’ experience in the recruitment process will leave a lasting impression of your business. Improving this experience is essential for any successful recruitment strategy. The Recruitment Audit helps your business to adjust its processes to improve your candidate experience, increasing your chances of engaging a suitable candidate. It’s important for your Employer brand that you treat unsuccessful candidates well too. They have friends and family and will talk about their experience during the recruitment process. Candidates who are not successful for one position may be ideal for jobs you are recruiting for in the future.

A Recruitment Audit essentially helps you understand if your practices are effective in engaging the right candidate. Carrying out a simple survey will help you identify how you can improve your applicant experience. For example; What do people feel about your recruitment process? Would they reapply? Would they recommend your business to their friends, family and colleagues? Based on the answers, your business can then identify specific factors which may be causing potentially suitable candidates to drop out.

Manager Experience

While it’s important to provide the best candidate experiences, it’s just as crucial that the recruitment process meets the needs of your hiring managers. Hiring managers should be given the tools, support and guidance they need to conduct recruitment properly and well. This will improve your recruitment results and your candidate experience too. There are numerous ways to improve your manager experience. Exploring these will identify how candidates are assessed and selected, to create a thorough and fair briefing/debriefing process and highlight any training needs.

Quality of new recruits – what works and what doesn’t

All too often recruitment is just measured on number of roles filled, instead of the quality of those recruited. However, if you track the success of your new recruits longer term, you will have a better understanding of whether your recruitment and onboarding has been successful. Things to monitor are whether your new employee passes probation, has good performance reviews, gets promoted, or exceeds expectations. If they are not reaching their potential, identify how you can improve these areas.

Using analytics to monitor the success and quality of employees is a great way to assess the effectiveness of your hiring process. What measures do you monitor and how are the results used?

What methods do you use to promote jobs or identify candidates?

Not every recruitment channel will provide the best quality of candidates. The Recruitment Audit process enables you to track which routes your top talent and new starters come through. This will help you identify which methods are most effective in engaging the best applicants. You can then adjust your spend accordingly i.e. more targeting of passive candidates and more social media. You should see reduced time to hire, increased quality of candidates and a greater return on investment.

Direct spending where it will give the best returns

There are numerous ways you to reduce your recruitment spend but to really understand where you can, or should be spending less, analyse what you spend your money on. The Recruitment Audit will help you understand the impact of your expenditures and highlight areas where spending less in the short term is costing you more in the long term. For example, a quick hire for a role may seem like a good idea but when they perform poorly and need replacing, you might find it would have been less costly to spend some resources on Talent Mapping or developing internal talent.

Are your recruitment team providing a positive experience for candidates?

For an effective recruitment process, all of the recruitment team involved must be making a valuable contribution. A Recruitment Audit is the best way to evaluate the team and understand what every member is adding to the process. Through KPI’s and data reviews, the recruitment audit will highlight if the team have enough experience, if the manager has confidence in them, and if they’re employer brand advocates. It’s important to get this right as each member of your team can add value to the recruitment process and candidate experience when done correctly.

Create a strong Employer Brand

Having a strong employer brand puts your business in an excellent position to recruit the right level of talent. Even if your business does not have a particularly strong employer brand at the moment, the Recruitment Audit will help you to reflect on what you are offering your employees. Your Recruitment Audit will identify brand awareness, brand perception, and brand value. Based on the insights from your recruitment audit, you can begin creating and implementing an employer brand strategy which aligns with your recruitment goals, leading to more suitable and top talent being attracted to your roles.

How do you advertise jobs and your company as an employer?

Talent attraction has been very competitive as those looking for work in the labour market shrank following the pandemic and Brexit. Any business who fail to create a positive employer brand simply risk being left behind. One of the most effective way of building a relationship with potential external talent is through the creation of content. Recruitment content on your website and social media channels is recognised to improve the reputation of your organisation as well as strengthen your employer brand.

Your Recruitment Audit should assess how engaging, authentic and accurate the content you post online is. Are you reposting job descriptions or creating material which will encourage people to apply? Does your career site share how great it is to work for your company? These types of questions will help you see how visible your employer brand is. It will also help you to consider other ways of engaging candidates.

Assessment and selection process review

Maintaining a robust and objective assessment and selection process should be the main goal for any recruitment exercise. However, finding the balance between cost effective and fair can be a challenge for many businesses.

Internally, Recruitment Audits can enable you to consider how you assess and select candidates. Do you know how and why the best candidate got the role? If you don’t, then review and improve your recruitment record keeping so you know what’s working. This will also help to make sure your assessment and selection practices are fair, and within the law, as well as being effective in hiring the best quality of candidate.

Reporting will make sure the business supports your recruitment plans

Recruitment reporting is recognised as a key aspect within a Recruitment Audit and in ensuring a successful process. Specifically, implementing reporting into recruitment processes enables businesses to generate results in an accurate and timely manner. This is useful as it can be used to present to stakeholders when seeking approval for a new role, or internally to identify the successes and failures of previous recruitment activity.

Why do employees leave?

In the current tight recruitment market retention of staff is as important as recruitment.

There are four key areas that cause employees to leave, so by asking your employees why they are leaving you’ll identify areas to improve your employee retention. Conducting and reviewing Leaving Surveys can give you valuable insights. For example, are your employees given enough responsibility to keep them engaged? Do they feel valued? Are they praised or given feedback on a great job? Do they have enough training and the tools they need to do a good job?

Is a Recruitment Audit for you?

This blog has explored the value a Recruitment Audit can bring to your business. Whether you’re a Business Leader, HR Director, or recruiting manager, an audit will help you improve your recruitment success going forward.

Not all organisations have the skills, time and resources to complete a robust and effective Recruitment Audit. If this sounds like you then you could ask an expert provider to audit your recruitment model for you. Appointments Personnel have years of experience of working with businesses locally to help them review and improve their recruitment process with tangible financial results. If you want to improve your recruitment success BOOK YOUR AUDIT NOW.

Or give us a call and speak to us about how we can help, by contacting us 01782 338787. 

Return to our Recruitment Bulletin Winter 22