The relationship with top talent begins at the earliest stages of the recruitment process. Your approach to its execution defines many aspects of employment, including engagement, productivity, and retention. Having complete management over the process – known as full-cycle recruitment – helps provide better experiences to candidates and improves cost efficiency in bringing on more employees.
Full-cycle recruitment utilizes a comprehensive set of stages, from structuring the process to onboarding a new hire. Taking an educated approach to securing the loyalty of talent begins with an understanding of how full-cycle recruitment works.
Keep reading as we review these stages and offer advice for implementing them.
What Is Full-Cycle Recruitment
Full-cycle recruitment includes companies overseeing the complete process of hiring a new employee as a coordinated effort. It consists of the following six stages:
- Preparation – This involves all the preliminary steps of job analysis, market analytics, assigning recruitment roles, and defining the recruitment strategy
- Sourcing – At this stage, the company will be implementing recruitment tactics to find suitable candidates internally and externally
- Screening – Once they receive applicants, they must review resumes and conduct short phone interviews to narrow down the candidates
- Selecting – Choose candidates by conducting in-person interviews, arranging tests, and selecting the most qualified candidate for the role
- Hiring – Once selected, contact the best candidate to send an offer and negotiate work hours and pay (if applicable)
- Onboarding – Bring the new employee onto the team by introducing them to current staff, scheduling orientation, and arranging training
Full-cycle recruitment is an effective strategy that ensures a thorough and efficient hiring process to select the most qualified candidate for the position. By overseeing all aspects, you can remove unnecessary redundancies and ensure you deliver a positive experience.
Benefits of Full-Cycle Recruitment
A full-cycle recruitment strategy streamlines the process by creating a cohesive structure and designing an effective procedure for the company and the potential employee. The most important benefits include:
Comprehensive Candidate Evaluation
Full-cycle recruitment allows organizations to thoroughly assess candidates' qualifications, skills, and cultural fit. The people interacting with the candidate have more direct connections to the team they'll be working on, giving better insight into the candidate and their qualifications. By conducting comprehensive screening, you can make more informed hiring decisions and ensure you bring on the best team members.
Access to a Diverse Talent Pool
A well-designed full-cycle strategy allows you to cast a wider net and attract various candidates. Defining effective sourcing strategies from the beginning helps you strategize how you reach candidates, which can help companies access a relevant talent pool. Knowing how to reach the candidates qualified for the position can speed up the process by reaching great candidates quickly – meaning you won't need to spend as much time and energy finding a great employee.
Time and Cost Efficiency
While full-cycle recruitment may involve multiple stages, it can save time and money in the long run by helping each process run more efficiently. It requires laying out each employee's roles in the process, ensuring everyone knows what's required of them while providing clear guidelines for each task. That standardization increases cost efficiency by using all time and resources effectively.
Investing in a comprehensive process reduces the likelihood of making poor hiring decisions that lead to high turnover costs, saving even more costs.
Higher Productivity
Full-cycle onboarding helps new employees become productive more quickly by providing high-quality training and support. Giving them support from the start gives them a clear understanding of their job expectations, company policies, and procedures. It also means they have the guidance and feedback to learn the parameters of their role early so they can work with autonomy and begin contributing to the success of your company as fast as possible.
Improved Retention
Full-cycle recruitment aims to find candidates who are not only qualified but also aligned with the organization's values. Organizations can improve employee retention rates by focusing on cultural fit and assessing candidates' long-term potential. Hiring candidates who fit the culture enhances the work environment for everyone, increasing the chances that employees will work well together and feel good about implementing tasks toward the common goal of helping the company grow.
Overall, full-cycle recruitment creates a cohesive and structured process that reduces errors, speeds up the hiring procedure, and enhances the recruitment experience for candidates.
Developing Your Full-Cycle Recruitment Strategy
Developing a successful full-cycle recruitment strategy begins with putting someone in charge of implementing it. Setting a singular point of contact in charge of the process helps coordinate it so that each component works smoothly. That point person can then handle the bigger specifics by doing the following:
Works With Teams to Learn Role Requirements
To achieve the goals of the preparation stage, you need to identify role requirements to put the process in the hands of an interconnected team within your company. Employees can undertake multiple roles, too. The person responsible for the strategy can interview team members, evaluate the current recruitment goals, and review business objectives. Another employee can determine the specific parameters of the role to develop questions that help them find talented workers.
Knowing the current job market can help streamline the hiring process, helping you find your best candidate as efficiently as possible.
Crafts and Share Job Openings
A well-crafted job posting attracts the most suitable candidates. When the posting appropriately conveys the requirements of the role by either listing the requirements or using technical language, it attracts candidates who fit the position. That will make it easier to get candidates into the following stages and make quicker decisions by having more relevant resumes to sort through, letting you truly choose the best of the best candidates.
The person responsible for the full-cycle recruitment strategy needs to combine the information about the position with the knowledge about the available candidates to create a job posting that resonates with the best talent. For instance, knowing what responsibilities the candidate would handle lets you list the role, which sets their expectations. If candidates come into a new job and are given different requirements, it may dismay them from your company, making them less interested in staying longer.
Conducts Interviewing and Screening
Depending on the role you plan to fill, you may have hundreds of candidates. You need to define the most effective interviewing and screening tactics to narrow the choice down. The person responsible for full-cycle recruitment can use their experience and available resources to design an effective selection process, asking questions that give you insight into their experience and personal traits, such as work ethic, integrity, and other aspects of how they mesh with your work culture.
Reaching out quickly to schedule interviews and then conducting them in an organized manner demonstrates your company values their time and is a stable, well-operated entity. That gives candidates a highly favorable impression of the company and shows them how great a place you are to work.
Hires the Best Candidate
Hiring the best candidate requires a careful approach to making an appealing offer. Less than 60% of Americans accept the first offer, though some candidates are willing to negotiate while others refuse immediately. Your hiring offer must be fair and competitive to win over your preferred candidate from the competition. Other factors that make your company stand out, like having an efficient hiring process, could be the tiebreaker by showing that your company is an excellent company to work for. As you continue to hire employees and grow, that develops your brand as an employer, making your reputation as a great workplace precede you.
The person responsible for full-cycle recruitment needs to leverage their experience and detailed knowledge of the top candidate to smoothly bring the new hire on board, offering them suitable compensation while properly negotiating if they need additional accommodation. The needs of someone supporting a family will be different from someone new to the workforce, and navigating those differences can establish a great impression early on and encourage them to stay longer in their role.
Oversees Onboarding and Training for Seamless Integration
A strong onboarding process can increase retention by 82%. By overseeing the onboarding and training process, a person responsible for full cycle integration can boost new hire's satisfaction, reduce turnover, and improve employee experience. Retention efforts begin when a candidate learns about your company, which continues through onboarding and training. Getting employees set up at the company seamlessly and effectively benefits you by helping new employees become productive quickly and making them feel good about their roles.
Having training procedures and tasks prepared as soon as they start gives them work to do immediately, letting them feel productive and that their time is valued. Employees starting new roles and not having enough work to do makes them feel impatient, but giving them an itinerary to follow at their pace empowers them and gets them comfortable in their roles more quickly.
Leverage a PEO to Conduct Full-Cycle Recruitment
While highly effective, full-cycle recruitment requires multiple resources. Many organizations don't have the capacity and staff volume to build and execute this type of strategy. Fortunately, they don't need to be alone when implementing a new hiring strategy and choose to work with a professional employer organization (PEO). A PEO has the experience, skills, and technology to help small businesses develop a comprehensive recruiting solution to attract top talent without straining the internal team. They can offer expert guidance to create internal hiring processes and set up repeatable training procedures to make a scaleable process.
