December – January is the season of change, and the perfect time to reset your organisational recruitment goals.

Revisiting hiring objectives at the end/beginning of the year will help to ensure that you are setting your business up year long success.

Why is it important for businesses to set recruitment goals?

Hiring quality talent with the right skills is essential for a business to run successfully and meet its broader strategic objectives. According to a study cited by McKinsey and Co, “high performers are 400 percent more productive than average ones.” An efficient recruitment process ensures that the best candidates are hired in the most time and cost-effective way.

In a competitive market where candidate pools are declining, the war for talent is becoming increasingly fierce. To retain their competitive advantage and attract the best talent, it’s crucial that businesses set smart, actionable recruitment goals and track their efforts to ensure that they’re steering the business in the right direction.

Recruitment impacts all areas of a business, from culture, profit margins and leadership, to results, brand reputation, and the success of a product or service. Ultimately, an effective recruitment strategy makes or breaks business success.

The benefits of partnering with a specialist recruiter

Enlisting the services of a professional staffing agency such as CY Partners can remove the stress from the hiring process and keep you on track to achieve your recruiting goals. As recruitment experts, we have the tools and knowledge to manage your staffing needs. We take the time to sit down with our clients, to listen to their overall company plans and objectives and we advise on how these will impact their overall acquisition strategy. We then tailor a recruitment solution that caters for their specific requirements.

We know the current market and can advise on the most effective and realistic strategies for accessing quality talent in a tough market. We listen to the challenges faced by our customers and advise on the best avenues for ensuring that they are successful in achieving their recruitment goals. When partnering with us, our clients can rest assured that their hiring needs are our top priority. We work tirelessly to place exceptional candidates with top organisations and with our support, they’re able to successfully transform their approach to talent acquisition.

What are smart goals?

As we enter a new season, it’s time to refine your recruitment approach and set SMART recruitment goals to ensure that your organisation achieves hiring success this year and beyond.

SMART stands for:

• Specific: Goals need to be clear and well defined
• Measurable: Establish how you’ll know if you are on track, and include a quantifiable way of tracking progress
• Achievable: Are your strategies attainable? They should be both challenging and realistic
• Relevant: Business objectives should be in harmony with the company’s core values
• Timely: Each goal should have a deadline attached to it

Examples of smart recruitment goals

Setting SMART recruitment goals is a sure-fire strategy for driving business growth.

Here are just a few examples of smart, concrete recruitment goals to help your company thrive:

Talent Acquisition

• Increase the percentage of active vacancies from 35% to 65% by June 2023
• Invest £3,000 in recruitment marketing this quarter
• Work with the marketing team to increase job ad applications by 40%

Improve candidate experience

• Improve onboarding programme by 25% to ensure new hires are well equipped to perform their role
• Decrease average hiring time by 30%

Boosting the employer brand

• Increase social media marketing activity by 30% and regularly share employee testimonials, company updates and value-added content

Increase and diversify candidate pipeline

• Partner with a diversity-focused external staffing company
• Work with marketing to launch an employer branding campaign
• Increase candidate database by 45%
• Find an additional 8 quality candidates per job opening
• Increase annual placements by 15 people
• Increase renumeration package by 15% for permanent employees

Tips for achieving your recruitment goals

According to the same study revealed by Mckinsey and Co, “82 percent of companies don’t believe they recruit highly talented people. For companies that do, only 7 percent think they can keep it, and even more alarmingly, only 23 percent of managers and senior executives active on talent-related topics believe their current acquisition and retention strategies will work.”

The evidence is there, too many organisations are struggling to find top talent because they are failing to adopt a strategic approach to acquisition and to leverage the recruitment channels available to them. Furthermore, they are not allotting the required resources to their recruitment efforts.

Here are a few of our top tips to help you successfully achieve your recruitment goals:

• Measure performance against quantitative key performance indicators
• Revise recruitment objectives on a quarterly and yearly basis
• Work closely with other departments such as management and marketing to ensure that you are utilising the most appropriate channels and strategies
• Partner with a professional staffing agency

If you’re interested in talking to our team about how we could help you tackle your hiring goals in 2023, we’d love to hear from you. Contact us here.