Sustainable Recruitment: A Four Step Strategy

What is sustainable recruitment?

Sustainable recruitment refers to the practice of recruiting candidates with the specific goal of retaining them long-term as employees at your business. A sustainable recruitment strategy means focusing on candidates that reflect they will be retained in your business long term, through value compatibility, working on your employer brand, and coordinating with HR and line managers to ensure onboarding and long-term experiences at the company are designed to keep people engaged.

Why should I use a sustainable recruitment strategy in my business?

Sustainable recruitment aims to reduce employee churn, which reduces associated costs for your business. It also allows your organisation to invest in its talent and nurture potential without worrying about that talent going elsewhere soon afterwards.

Hireserve’s Four Step Recruitment Strategy

Give & Take

It’s not just what talent can do for your organisation, but also what you can offer them. No organisation is perfect, but taking a realistic look at what your employees are offered to identify strengths and weaknesses will be crucial in your sustainable recruitment strategy. Once you’ve identified where your organisation is strong, you can emphasise these points in your employer brand, so that talent who care about what you do will be able to better identify that compatibility early on it the recruitment process. Additionally, shining a light on your weaknesses helps your business to understand where they need to improve if they want to remain competitive and hold on to their employees.

Areas you may want to research and identify as strengths or areas to improve include, but aren’t limited to:

• Pay transparency
• Childcare benefits
• Flexible work
• Workplace technology
• Career progression
• DE&I
• Healthcare benefits

While not every HR or recruitment team have the budget and resource to improve everything, strategically boosting certain areas that are aligned to your ideal employee’s values can significantly strengthen the value you offer your people in exchange for their talents. Communicating your employee value proposition clearly in your job ads, website careers page, and initial interview stages will help you gain the attention of candidates who match well with your organisation and culture.

It’s more than their history

Don’t typecast candidates you perceive to be job-hoppers and take them out of the race on the assumption that they’ll jump your ship quickly too. It’s not always possible to know the context from a glance at a LinkedIn profile or CV, especially as many candidates may not feel comfortable sharing such information until they get the opportunity to speak with another human more personally. From sickness or bereavement to lay-offs and toxic culture – you simply can’t assume what may be behind their career history. If a candidate displays the skills and experience your recruitment team are looking for, take the time to inquire politely around the candidate’s career journey during the early interview stages. They may choose not to share or may reveal that they are in fact a job hopper, but your team may also discover a brilliant candidate that has experienced a run of bad luck or personal issues that needed their attention.

All hands on deck

For your sustainable recruitment strategy to be successful, you have to have internal coordination. This means HR, recruitment, leadership, and line managers all need to be on the same page about what the terms are for how you’ll go about your sustainable recruitment strategy and what metrics you’ll measure to track its success. You may also need coordination from various employees when gearing up to this.

For example, speaking to current employees who’ve had a long tenure with the business to better understand what made them stay will be crucial to informing your strategy – both around what characteristics to look for in candidates as well as how to position your organisation to them as an employer. Similarly, there will also be value in interviewing or surveying employees who are still only a year or two into their time at your business, to understand if it meets their initial expectations as a new joiner. Both groups are also likely to offer valuable feedback on improvements to the hiring process and employer brand.

Tech that supports your team (and the candidate!)

In order to be successful in your sustainable recruitment strategy, you have to have the right tools supporting you. On the candidate’s end, this should manifest as improved experience, from easy interview booking to a fuss-free application process. For your internal HR and recruitment team, this means your tech should enable you to identify the candidates that meet the criteria of being low churn risk, to streamlining processes so you can get through the recruitment process efficiently and get that offer on the table before another organisation does.

Hireserve ATS covers all of this ground – and more. Browse the below features to learn more about how our software solution can help you recruit:

Candidate Screening – A star rating is an instantly visual and engaging way of reviewing and screening candidates and ‘Killer Question’ feature which helps sift through applicants and manage their expectations are just two of the tools offered by our candidate screening feature.

Interview scheduling – Allows hiring managers and recruitment teams to set their availability for candidates to view so they can schedule (and re[schedule) their interview easily, slashing time to hire as it removes the need for time consuming phone calls or emails, interview scheduling allows you to get to the key stage of the recruitment process with ease.

Data & Reports – Offers to ability to create custom reports and easily visualise any data. Perfect for if your team wants to track the success of your sustainable recruitment strategy.