How Recruitment and Your Business Strategy Are Inseparably Linked

This is a contribution from Tomáš Haviar, a Recruiter at Bynder Orbit – a creative content management software provider.

In many organizations, recruitment is reactive. Businesses only start seeking people once a glaring hole in the company becomes apparent instead of preemptively seeking people as part of a business strategy.

Yet, people are key to reach any business goal. Take the following three objectives for example.

• Build a new workout app.
• Market footwear to the right audience
• Put on a world-class event to showcase your new SaaS platform.

The necessary ingredient to accomplish any of these objectives is people – people with the right skills and at the right time.

Your business strategy could fall apart if you don’t have the right team which means recruitment can’t be an afterthought. 

Recruiters know that finding the right talent isn’t as easy as just posting a job advertisement so here’s what you need to know to turn your hiring process into a proactive system that grows your business.

Make recruiters your partners in strategy.

Involving recruitment in your key business strategy decisions is beneficial for creating realistic budget and time expectations.

Recruiters can help you figure out whether the people you need to make your business strategy a reality are available in the recruitment market at the moment. If they are not, then recruitment can also advise on how long it might take to recruit those people, and therefore how long it will take to put your business strategy into practice.

Let’s say your tech company wants to create an app, then you will need IOS and Android developers. If there is a shortage of IOS developers and Android developers in the market at the moment, then you will have to set longer and more realistic deadlines for the creation of the app.

Your recruiter can also let you know how much finding and hiring these developers will cost and if they are out of your price range you can reconsider how vital the project is to your overall business strategy.

An additional advantage of including a representative from your recruitment team in your business strategy meetings is that the recruiter can gauge the direction in which the organization is moving, and can start the recruitment process with the future of the company in mind. This means that when the organization does firmly decide on a business strategy, the necessary recruitment process is already underway.

What exactly can recruiters do with this extra lead-time?

Recruiting for in-demand positions takes time. It’s not just a case of writing a job description for your career site. The best talent is usually passive. So it’s important to nurture your desired candidates and slowly build up their interest in your company. That way, once you are ready to hire, you have a full pipeline of interested candidates.

There are a number of ways to begin nurturing your ideal candidates:

• Look for the kind of events your ideal candidates go to and go along to them. This is where recruiters can meet their ideal candidates in a less formal setting.
• Before you start talking about interviews or job offers, invite ideal candidates to the office for a coffee or beer, just to show them what the company and its culture are like.
• You can also promote your company and its culture through website content. This could be as simple as a blog post on the company blog on ‘6 reasons why working for Bynder will change your life’.

These are long term strategies with high rewards. The sooner the recruiter can be brought into the business strategy, the sooner these techniques can be put into practice and the rewards reaped.