How recruitment can impact your organisation’s goals
…and help you be recognised as a major strategic contributor
by James Muskett
A key goal of nearly every recruiting leader and staff member is to be recognised by their senior executives as providing a major contribution to the corporate strategic plan and its goals. But how do you convince your CEO that recruitment is a major contributor?
Here are five actions you can adopt which should lead to the recruiting function being considered as a corporate strategic star.
1. Identify the goals that have the greatest impact
Every strategic function sets priorities to devote its available resources to the areas that produce the highest return and this is no different for the recruitment team.
Once you have identified a complete list of the goals for your organisation, you can then identify the ones where recruiting has the biggest opportunity to impact, such as increasing revenue.
If you identify that increasing revenue is the most important strategic goal to impact, you can directly focus your recruitment plans on this. For example, by filling revenue generating jobs faster and with higher performing individuals.
By designing a process to measure the increased performance and output that occurs as a result of hiring better performing individuals, you will strengthen the recruitment function’s value to your organisation.
2. Adopt a prioritisation approach
It is an absolute requirement for the recruitment team to adopt a job prioritisation approach. This means prioritising those jobs that create the highest dollar impact when they are filled with top talent and recruiting for these jobs first.
You should also plan for devoting either more resources and/or your top recruiters to undertake these tasks.
3. Acquire the most effective recruiting processes and tools
By developing and utilising the best processes for identifying, sourcing and assessing higher performing individuals you will directly increase your business impact.
Use your resources to support the most effective tools and develop an effective process for hiring better performing recruiters and for increasing their on-the-job performance.
4. Show that you are developing your hiring managers
Because hiring is a shared responsibility between the recruitment team and managers, high-impact hiring cannot occur without well-developed hiring managers.
Part of the recruitment function should be to provide the hiring managers with the most effective recruiting tools and development that ensure they make the best decisions. The recruitment team needs a process to convincingly show that the recruiting function develops hiring managers to the point where they continually hire the best performers.
5. Demonstrate your ‘impact’ on the corporate goals
The recruitment team must have a method for demonstrating that its recruiting processes produce superior results when compared to their competitors.
In order to demonstrate a clear and direct connection between improved recruiting results and a subsequent improvement in business results, partner with your CFO. After all, the CFO is the expert in corporate metrics and if he or she agrees that your mutually developed approach is credible, it will have greater impact with your senior executives.
Final thoughts
Previously, administrative functions like supply chain, customer service and even technology were not regarded with the recognition they are afforded today. If the recruitment function wants to be recognised as a major contributor to the organisation’s corporate goals, they can learn from these functions and adopt a more strategic plan that directly impacts the corporate strategy.
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James Muskett is a Senior Consultant in Dixon Appointments' Recruitment Team. For further information, contact James at jmuskett@dixonappointments.com.au or call 03 9629 9999.