Modern recruitment is highly competitive, and today, skill gaps are common but getting increasingly harder to fill. As a result, numerous companies have adopted recruitment strategies like job simulations, structured interviews, and skills tests. However, beyond simply adding recruitment practices, you need a proper plan for a successful hire.
This is where a recruitment plan comes in. It directs your entire hiring process, aligning with your business goals, clearly defining the position’s responsibilities, and setting the tone for data-driven decision-making. In this guide, we will discuss why this strategy is important and how to develop a recruitment plan that ticks all these boxes.
What is a recruitment plan?
A recruitment plan is exactly what it sounds like: a recruitment program plan for recruiting and hiring new employees. An effective recruitment planning process allows HR teams to align hiring goals with the overall objectives of the organization. It also helps address and remedy skill gaps, allocate resources, and prioritize goals such as diversity hiring.
Typically, a comprehensive recruitment plan takes a top-down approach to hiring. It starts by identifying the strategic hiring needs that must be addressed to support the growth of the company. Here’s a quick breakdown of the parts of a recruitment plan:
- Job analysis & role definition: This is the starting point of any recruitment effort. It involves clearly outlining the purpose of the role, key responsibilities, and the skills, qualifications, and experience required.
- Candidate sourcing: This part of your recruitment plan defines where and how you’ll find potential candidates. It includes identifying the best paid or free sourcing tools to reach your ideal applicants, such as job boards, social platforms, career fairs, or employee referrals, and aligning your efforts with where top talent is most active.
- Candidate evaluation: Your candidate evaluation plan outlines the process for assessing applicants fairly and consistently. It includes the criteria for judging skills and cultural fit, the stages candidates will go through, and the types of assessments and interviews involved.
- Employer branding & value proposition: This component of the hiring plan highlights how you will present your company and its values to potential candidates. It includes information on your company culture, mission, values, benefits, and opportunities you offer.
- Recruitment timeline & budget: This includes estimated timelines for each stage, from posting the job to making an offer, and expected costs for advertising, tools, agencies, and other expenses.
For numerous businesses, a recruitment plan offers a set of guidelines and steps that can be replicated no matter what position it is you’re trying to fill. This strategy helps you identify what internal resources need to be in place before you kick off the hiring process.
Benefits of using a recruitment plan
Filling an open role is a hectic process that can get even more complicated without a defined plan. Plus, with the Hays Report highlighting that about 85% of hiring managers have found skill gaps in their workforce, there’s a clear need for hiring plans in modern recruitment.
Whether you’re hiring for one role or a hundred, a recruitment plan guides each step of the process. Below are some more benefits of recruitment plans you should know about:
1. Cost saving
Hiring can get expensive fast, especially if you rush to fill a role and end up with the wrong person. According to research from CareerBuilder, a single bad hire can cost up to $17,000 on average. Even if you end up with a good hire, it’s easy to overspend on job ads and screening unqualified candidates when you don’t have a recruitment plan.
A recruitment plan helps reduce these costs by streamlining your entire process and tracking how much you intend to spend at each stage. By setting out hiring objectives that align with the broader company, you can allocate the right level of resources to help you meet your goals, save time, and prioritize your recruitment budget.
2. Improved productivity
Without a proper plan, hiring can become disorganised, leading to a slower pace and conflicting processes. As a result, hiring teams scramble to define job roles, interviews are conducted inconsistently, and candidates are left in the dark. All of that back-and-forth affects your team’s productivity, especially if you’re hiring for key roles.
On the other hand, a recruitment plan prevents that by outlining responsibilities, timelines, and criteria from day one, so everyone is aligned with your hiring goals. This means less time spent coordinating the team and more time getting work done.
3. Reduced time to hire
Research from the Global Talent Climate Report of 2023 shows that the average global time to hire was increased to 43 days to fill a role. However, without proper planning, this period could become even longer.
An effective recruitment plan speeds things up by eliminating guesswork and adding order to your hiring. With this plan, you can define job descriptions ahead of time, create a reliable sourcing strategy, and prepare assessment tools in advance. Instead of scrambling at the last minute, you’ll always be ready to move as fast as necessary.
4. Easier recruitment ROI tracking
An exceptional hiring plan makes provisions for setting goals and applying measures to track them. By monitoring recruitment Return On Investment (ROI) KPIs like time to hire, cost per hire, and source of hire, you can tell what strategies work best and which ones achieve a particular desired result.
These insights let you build a data-driven hiring strategy that not only ensures great hires but leaves room for optimisation for better outcomes. Based on this data, you can determine what recruitment strategies yield your required results and channel your resources accordingly to ensure excellent hires.
How to create a recruitment plan
According to HR.com’s 2024-2025 report, only 24% of companies today would rehire their past year hires, indicating a significant issue in the quality of recruitment. Poor recruitment planning can contribute to this, and it gets even worse when you’re applying the right strategies, just not in an effective way.
To prevent this regret, here’s a step-by-step guide on how to make a recruitment plan that’s comprehensive and effective.
Step 1: Assess current and future hiring needs
The first step to creating your hiring plan is to perform research. You can do this by assessing your company’s current skill inventory and performing a skill gap analysis to find out what skills you need to meet future needs. Statistically, almost a third of companies (around 31%) use technology to inventory skills and, in turn, track the gaps they need to fill to achieve their goals.
Adopting this trend lets you define the roles that need to be filled quicker and gives you a clear focus for your recruitment. Here are some common goals that hiring teams articulate in support of a company’s mission:
- Improve diversity hiring
- Reduce time-to-hire
- Reduce the cost-per-hire
- Reduce repetitive HR admin
- Improve employee retention
- Build a strong talent pipeline
- Use few external recruiting resources
Step 2: Develop job descriptions and requirements
With the insights gained from your skill gap analysis and company research, you can outline the roles you need to fill, ranking them based on priority. Then, develop job descriptions and role requirements for each one.
While writing your job description, use sentences that clearly define your company and its values, explain the role, and outline what the ideal candidate looks like to your organisation. Also, prioritize using clear language when defining the role’s responsibilities so that the applicants can understand them quickly, thus reducing underqualified applications.
Step 3: Choose the right recruitment channels
In truth, not all recruitment channels work for every role. For example, while LinkedIn might be perfect for mid-level professionals, entry-level roles might get better traction on university job boards or niche industry sites. So, after your job description is ready, you must identify where your ideal candidates spend time and focus your sourcing efforts there to get the best ROI.
Job boards like Indeed and Glassdoor work great for high-volume hiring. However, if you’re looking for faster recruitment with fewer underqualified applications, you can harness a company career page. This lets you find candidates who are already interested in your business. You can also tap into employee referrals or internal mobility when filling roles that are best promoted from within.
Step 4: Implement a screening & evaluation process
At this stage, you define how candidates will be assessed throughout the hiring journey. This could include resume reviews, phone screens, skills assessments, and interviews. Ideally, while selecting the type and number of screening methods to employ, it’s also vital to choose the perfect screening platform too.
For example, if you’re adopting skill assessments, you can use pre-employment screening software like Vervoe to create, modify, and deploy these tests to candidates in a reliable way. You can also adopt video interviewing software for remote roles or backup interviews following skills tests.
While doing this, ensure the process is standardized, fair, and aligned with the key competencies you’re hiring for. This reduces bias and improves the quality of your hires.
Step 5: Streamline the hiring workflow
Now that your fundamental hiring process is defined, you’d need to streamline it by applying specialised tools to stay organised throughout. For example, you can use applicant tracking systems (ATS) like Greenhouse and Lever to track each candidate’s progress through your recruitment funnel.
To further streamline your hiring workflow, you must define who handles each stage, ensuring that your hiring process is clear, structured, and easy for both your team and candidates to follow. This leads to faster hiring decisions and better candidate experience.
Step 6: Enhance employer branding
A huge part of recruitment relies on your ability to represent your company properly to potential candidates. To achieve this, you must integrate brand elements into your entire recruitment plan. For example, you can use your company’s colors in the job description or attach your logo to every page of an online assessment.
With great employer branding, you can showcase your culture, mission, and what sets your workplace apart across your website, job postings, and social channels. This helps to build trust with applicants and attracts better talent.
Step 7: Leverage data and metrics
Relying on instinct alone to hire top talent isn’t enough. Leveraging data from your recruitment and tracking key recruitment metrics gives you the insight needed to refine your hiring strategy continuously. For example, if your time-to-hire is creeping up, it could mean your screening process is too long, or your job ads aren’t reaching the right candidates.
To gain rough data, you can track metrics like cost-per-hire, source of hire, quality of hire, and even diversity metrics. These numbers help you make informed hiring decisions and adjust your strategy to prevent recurring issues and cater to future needs.
Step 8: Create an onboarding plan
Research shows that great onboarding can improve employee retention by 82%, yet the majority of organizations don’t onboard well. Ideally, your recruitment plan should lay out the steps that take place after a new hire accepts the offer. Onboarding can take place remotely, even if the employee is planning to come to the office eventually.
Based on the number of open positions you anticipate, be sure to allocate sufficient resources to ensure all new hires are set up for success. This can include investing in onboarding software, creating an employee handbook, and purchasing equipment in advance so new team members are ready to go from day one.
Step 9: Secure a budget for your hiring plan
As a final step before implementation, all of this information can be translated into a recruitment budget. Fundamentally, your budget should cover:
- Sourcing costs, such as employer branding expenses, advertising on job boards, job fairs, campus recruiting costs, and agency fees (if applicable).
- Screening costs, such as background check fees, and assessment tools.
- Onboarding costs, such as equipment costs and welcome packet costs.
These costs will vary depending on how many positions for which you’re recruiting, whether or not you’re hiring virtually, and what recruitment software you will use to complete the process. Try to separate one-time costs from recurring costs to help senior leaders understand how your budget request specifically supports your recruiting goal.
After developing a recruitment plan, what’s next?
Like any plan, a hiring plan is only as effective as its execution. Ideally, proper implementation involves ensuring your team has the right tools, training, and processes to bring that plan to life.
One excellent way to ensure you get the best talent is by integrating a reliable assessment platform like Vervoe to filter through applicants and identify those who can actually do the job. But it doesn’t stop there. You can utilize Vervoe’s features, including job simulations, pre-designed skill assessments, and several anti-cheating measures to ensure you accurately predict candidate job performance even before you hire.
Plus, depending on your standards, you can craft your own tests from scratch using our AI Assessment Builder. It creates custom assessments based on your job description, identifying key skills baked on the role’s requirements, and suggesting inquiries from a database of 300,000+ pre-designed and validated questions. This lets you develop a comprehensive skill assessment within minutes.
Ultimately, Vervoe lets you optimize your recruitment and focus more on data-based recruitment, leaving no room for unconscious bias or hiring errors.
Pro tip: If you’re looking to go a step further after creating your recruitment plan, especially with skills-based hiring, we’ve put together a detailed guide to help. Check out our ebook, The Recruiter’s Guide to Skill-Based Hiring, for expert insights on implementing true skills-based hiring and tips to turn your recruitment into a sustainable, results-driven process.
From recruitment planning to execution: Hire right with Vervoe
Without a doubt, building a recruitment plan is the foundation for hiring smarter, faster, and more confidently. However, creating the plan is just the beginning. You’d have to execute it properly to yield the results you want. This includes training your hiring team, choosing the right time frame for the recruitment process, and, most importantly, using the right tools.
A great place to begin is with Vervoe, an AI-powered pre-employment skills testing tool equipped with an extensive assessment library containing over 300 tests suited for almost any role. Furthermore, by applying realistic job previews, personalized grading, and candidate performance ranking, your evaluation process can be stress-free yet data-focused and effective.
Not sure where to start? Register for a free demo, and we’ll take it from there.
