Full-Cycle Recruiting Process

Have you thought about the hiring process from start to finish? Taking a candidate from application to hire is no easy task. After all, if it was that easy, would hiring teams even be needed?

What’s more, the job market is more competitive than ever, and recruiters are burning themselves out trying to keep up with outdated equipment. 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 HR recruitment process requires preparation. Candidates must be sourced and screened. The full-cycle recruiters must then select, hire, and onboard the right candidates. As such, the entire process is incredibly overwhelming. Every stage requires careful planning and organization to achieve maximum effect.

Taking a strategic approach to the full-cycle recruiting process will help your business get through the best talent available as efficiently as possible. The full-cycle recruiting process gives hiring teams 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.

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.

Full Life Cycle Recruitment

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

Full life cycle recruiting means establishing a comprehensive view of the recruitment process. Additionally, this recruitment approach is 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. This allows recruiters to provide candidates with a remarkably personalized hiring experience.

Contrast this with other, more common, types of recruiting tactics where all the components of the recruiting process are fragmented and divided amongst numerous team members — which can result in a long time-to-hire and a disorganized team structure. 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 large teams viable.

Full life cycle recruitment is often considered 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. Additionally, the methods and approach of full life cycle recruitment provide benefits for larger enterprises as well.

The full life 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.

Recruitment Process

As we’ve discussed, the full life cycle recruiting process divides the whole process into stages. Here are the steps in the recruitment and selection process:

1. Preparing - An easy mistake to make is to think that hiring starts with sourcing candidates. After all, how can recruitment even begin without applicants? However, it is essential to prepare for the hiring process before undertaking the endeavor.
   
   During the preparation stage, you will identify what you are looking for in your ideal candidate. Determine what is necessary for the position and how it affects the company. This information will allow you to create a job description from here to appeal to the right talent to fill this position.

2. Sourcing - With an effective job description designed, recruiters can finally begin sourcing candidates. There are numerous ways to approach this, such as job boards, in-house recruiting, and employee referrals. Many modern recruiters have even turned to social media to reach out to candidates.  

3. Screening - Screening is the first step of the longest part of the journey which is the recruitment process - the interviews. According to Yello, 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.

Utilizing tools such as on-demand interviews at this stage can help avoid bottlenecks during this phase.

4. Selecting -  After screening comes selection; often 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.

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5. Hiring - Once the interviews and selection process is finished, you can finally 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. Albeit, this is the homestretch and only one more important task remains.

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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.

Following these simple recruitment cycle steps will allow you to design a simple and effective hiring process.

Talent Acquisition Strategy Framework

There are so many moving parts in a talent acquisition strategy framework that it can be a challenge to keep track of what’s what. There are governance, operations, recruitment, employer brand, and many other components that you need to consider in terms of talent acquisition best practices.

It’s important to note here that traditional hiring practices are time-consuming. For example, according to Yello, it takes many recruiters 30 minutes to 2 hours to schedule a single interview for a single candidate. Talent acquisition best practices tell us that this time, plus the time it takes to run the interview itself, can lead to an inefficiently slow recruitment process. And this is problematic for building a talent acquisition strategy.

Today’s recruiters need to be flexible, not only in their methodology but in their overall talent acquisition approach.

The most important benefit of a talent acquisition strategy framework is that it provides a guide to the hiring process that keeps the recruiting team and hiring managers working in a unified and efficient hiring machine.

The ultimate goal of a framework is to build a formalized approach to acquiring top talent and building a positive candidate experience during the hiring process.

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