Recruitment Planning - New Beginnings

HR Professionals Agree Recruitment Plans

As we are reaching these year-end months, it's time to check the Recruitment toolkit and pull out the planning techniques.

Recruiting professionals and managers takes a lot of time and money.  Good HR professionals meet this challenge by having an overall recruitment plan or workforce plan detailing the time and location of recruitment activity throughout the year.  Of course you cannot plan for the unexpected, however agreeing ahead of time with your boss on the recruitment that you know about will make it easier to argue for more resources when the unexpected happens during the year.
If you have any questions, do not hesitate to contact HR2B Executive Search in Vietnam.

Start with the Business Plan

Your Recruitment plan should start with a thorough understanding of the direction of your business in the next 12 months.  If you don't know what this is go and ask your boss.  Once you have the information sit down and create an overall "HR Management Planning Worksheet" to organise your thoughts.  I am absolutely sure that from this you will identify items for your recruitment plan.

Next Detail Location and Timing

With your HR Management Planning done you now need to consider what this means for the number of positions in your organisation.  This "Workforce Planning Spreadsheet" at a minimum should detail;

1. The name of the Job;
2. The location of the Job;
3. The size of the Job;
4. The number of headcount needed for the Job;
5. The month these headcount will be needed by your company.

Review your Plan

Now you have a clear idea of the recruitment activity you know about.  Next review your plan and consider adding rows that take into account the expected level of turnover for each location or business unit.  You may want to add a column to your spreadsheet indicating these are estimates.  By the end of this you should have a clear idea of the amount of recruitment you will need to do in each location.  I suggest you do a summary table showing the number of headcount your need to recruit at each job level in each location.

Assign Resources

Next you have to assign this recruitment need to your recruitment team.  Who is going to do what? The way you do this depends on the size of your organisation and the complexity of your recruitment process.  It may be as simple as adding a column to the Workforce Plan spreadsheet or you may need to create a new spreadsheet.  Whatever you do at this stage check to see you have enough people to meet the recruitment needs of your company.  For months where you are overloaded consider options such as;

1. Re-scheduling non-critical recruitment activity to less busy months,
2. Hiring temporary staff to handle the extra workload,
3. Outsourcing your recruitment to a service provider such as HR2B.

Share Your Plan

Once you have done all this work share it with your boss and your peers.  That way they can support your recruitment efforts and be on your side when it comes to assigning resources to HR work.

Comments?

As always, please feel free to leave comments and questions below. 

Do you ave a recruitment planning story to share?

Any tips for new HR professionals when building recruitment plans?

Next time - Detailed Recruitment Planning