Full-Cycle Recruiting

Hiring is a time-consuming process from start to finish. And with the job market more competitive than ever, recruiters are burning themselves out trying to stay ahead. Even with all the right tools and people, recruiting teams will find themselves behind if they don’t implement the right strategies.

The recruitment cycle in HR is more than just contacting a candidate, interviewing, and making offers. The recruitment strategy requires preparation. Candidates must be sourced and screened. Then recruiters must select, hire, and onboard the right candidates. As such, the entire process is incredibly overwhelming. Every stage must be carefully planned and organized for maximum effect.

Taking a strategic approach to full-cycle recruiting can help your business push through to get the best talent available as efficiently as possible. The full-cycle recruiting experience provides hiring teams with the means to achieve faster hiring, improved ROI, and better communication. All of these are necessary to stay ahead of competitors and acquire the best talent on the market. What’s more, the full-cycle approach to recruiting can actually be used by teams of every size.

Full-Cycle Recruiting Meaning

So, what is full-cycle recruiting? How does it differ from other recruiting methods?

Also known as an end-to-end recruitment cycle, full-cycle recruiting refers to the entire recruiting process, from recognizing the need to fill a position to onboarding the new employee and everything in between. This approach lays out the whole process into organized and approachable steps.

Full-cycle recruiting means establishing a holistic view of the recruitment process. This approach is also often handled by a single recruiter or recruiting agency where the recruiter owns every stage of the recruitment cycle. In full-cycle recruiting, the recruiter will start the recruiting process from the beginning with sourcing and remain responsible for the entire process until onboarding.

Other types of recruiting tactics — where all the components of the recruiting process are fragmented rather than kept in a single place — can result in a longer time-to-hire and a disorganized team. In these other approaches, each stage of the recruiting process is handled by a specialist, which is common in larger companies with the internal resources to make it possible.

Full-cycle recruiting is often an overseeing role in larger organizations and a jack-of-all-trades for smaller organizations. Smaller organizations typically hire a single full-cycle recruiter responsible for the entire process at a small scale. The methods and approach of full-cycle recruiting provide benefits for larger enterprises as well.

The full-cycle recruiting approach does more than make recruiting viable for smaller teams. It also improves the overall candidate experience in the hiring process. This is achieved by creating a more personalized experience for the candidate. Candidates have a single point of contact for the process rather than being passed between different hiring team members.

Stages of Full-Cycle Recruiting

As we’ve discussed, the full-cycle recruiting process divides the whole process into stages. There are six stages of full-cycle recruiting.

1. Preparing - It is a common misconception that hiring begins with sourcing candidates. However, it is essential to prepare for the hiring process before undertaking the endeavor.
   
   During the preparation stage of full-cycle recruiting, you will define what you are looking for in your ideal candidate. Determine what is necessary for the position and how it affects the company. You can create a job description from here to appeal to the right talent to fill this position.

2. Sourcing - After designing an effective job description for the position, recruiters can finally begin sourcing candidates. There are numerous ways to approach this, such as job boards, in-house recruiting, and employee referrals.  

3. Screening - Screening is the first step of the longest part of the hiring process, the interviews. The average recruiter spends two-thirds of their time in this stage of the hiring process. However, passing the right candidates to the next stage of the hiring cycle is essential. Screening traditionally includes a brief live phone interview. However, with potentially hundreds of candidates that each take upwards of two hours to schedule a meeting with, it is little wonder that the hiring process can take more than a month.
   
   

4. Selecting -  After screening comes selection in another round of interviews. At this point in the cycle, you and your team know exactly what you’re looking for and already have narrowed the applicants down to a narrow group of strong candidates.
   
   Screening ensures that the applicants possess the skills and qualifications they claim, while the selecting step is dedicated to learning about the candidate in depth.

5. Hiring - After the interviews are finally finished, you can make the decision of which candidate is right for the position. That means it’s time to make an official offer to your chosen candidate.
   
   Go over the terms of the position, including salary, hours, and clear job expectations. Be prepared to negotiate terms if the candidate does not accept the offer right away.

6. Onboarding -  The final step of the end-to-end recruiting process is onboarding your new hire. Introduce your new hire to the team, and schedule them for the appropriate training and orientation programs before they can become a full team member.

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Benefits of Full-Cycle Recruiting

Full-cycle recruiting has numerous benefits regardless of your organization’s size. The chief of these benefits is increased accountability in the hiring process. As a single person owns every stage of the process, your team avoids the confusion that comes with multi-tiered hiring processes. For big businesses, this helps cut down on the bureaucracy of large hiring teams. For small businesses, full-cycle recruiting reduces the time spent waiting for other members to forward.

Full-cycle recruiting also creates an improved candidate experience — a top priority for many recruiters across industries today. Not only does a better experience make finding qualified candidates easier, but it improves your employer brand. By creating a single point of contact throughout the hiring process, recruiting teams can provide the candidate with better communication and a more personalized hiring experience.

This approach to hiring can also help your recruiters speed up the time-to-fill. According to Zippia, the average vacancy costs employers $98 per day, with an average fill time of $4,129 over 42 days. As such, speeding up the hiring process is more than the race to find qualified candidates; it is to build a better ROI into the hiring process itself. Full-cycle recruiting allows for increased visibility of job postings, a better candidate pipeline, and a streamlined hiring process, all of which contribute to faster hiring.

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Recruiting teams looking to implement a full-cycle recruiting approach to hiring should also consider they will need the right tools to make it happen. Qualifi’s on-demand phone interview platform allows a single recruiter to screen more candidates than ever.

Start your Qualifi pilot today to see how it can fit into a full-cycle recruiting strategy.

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