An In-Depth Insight into End-to-End Recruitment Process

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End-to-end recruitment is a term used to describe recruiting in its 360-degree view. Contrary to the myth, recruitment does not start with a job opening or end with a hiring. An extensive process gets executed between these two visible stages.

End-to-end recruitment is known by many other names, including full cycle recruiting, 360-degree recruitment cycle or 360-degree recruitment.  

Why Gain an Insight into End-to-End Recruitment Process?

An in-depth knowledge of recruitment widens your visibility into the process. Visibility improves transparency, which ensures that a fair recruitment and only the best hiring happen. 

Knowledge about end-to-end recruitment and selection process is also essential to keep candidates well-informed. When candidates and recruiters are clear about their share of responsibilities, hiring is smooth and leads to mutual success.

What can happen without visibility and transparency into recruitment?

A Haphazard Recruitment Process

When you are unaware of end-to-end recruitment life cycle, you cannot provide visibility for candidates. When candidates do not have a clear view of your process, they feel stranded. 

Candidates remain unaware of process objectives, milestones to be reached, and the subsequent actions to be taken for progress. Their chances of earning a win, as a result, are reduced.

A haphazard process leads to confusion, frustration, misdirection and unfairness. Ultimately, candidates become demoralized. They start investing little efforts in getting selected, and may leave the process midway.

For businesses, this error can be costly in the long-run. It leads to poor candidate experience, and loss of the best talents, and creates brand ill-will.

Absence of Candidate Engagement

Excellent candidate engagement from start to finish of recruitment, is key to attracting top talents and retaining them. In the absence of visibility, candidates experience low levels of engagement.

Communication is key to ensuring transparency and achieving excellent candidate engagement. Without proper visibility into your recruitment process, you cannot offer meaningful communication to candidates. Lack of efficient communication leaves candidates unengaged and misguided.

Without proper engagement, brand reputation suffers in the long-run. The instant results of poor candidate engagement are poor performance and no-shows. 

Loss of Brand Trust

Transparency is crucial in any process, and more so, in recruitment. Poor communication, misinformation and damaging rumors, can ensue from lack of transparency. These consequences destroy candidate-recruiter relationships and ruin trust for the brand in candidates.

Lost Opportunities for Process Improvement

With a transparent recruitment process, you can expect candidates to be more open with their feedback on different aspects of hiring. Lack of visibility cuts you off from valuable candidate inputs that can help you improve your process.

Without improvements, your hiring process starts stagnating and suffering from poor performance, subsequently impacting the bottom line.

Visibility into your recruitment process is key to attracting top talents and gaining candidate trust in the long-run. Not all information can be made public. But visibility into aspects such your work culture, and your past and present employee feedback, can be great. 

Start by providing visibility into the different stages of your end to end recruitment process & head hunting. If you are unsure about end-to-end recruitment yourself, then this article can help. 

With better knowledge of end-to-end recruitment, you will be able to design your hiring process more efficiently. When you are aware of the responsibilities that each stage of recruitment demands, you are better prepared with solutions.

As a result, your recruitment process becomes more:

·      Organized and efficient 

·      Result-oriented

·      Powerful at candidate engagement

·      Productive at attracting top talents

·      Successful at reducing turnover 

Goal of End-to-End Recruitment Process

The goal of an end-to-end recruitment process is to have the right people onboard. Companies that execute an end-to-end recruitment process are more likely to hire and onboard the right people. An accurate understanding of full cycle recruiting enables you to assess if your hiring was truly successful.

The Stages of End-to-End Recruitment

An end-to-end recruitment process flowchart typically starts at the point when a company starts facing the need for a new employee. It ends with the onboarding of the new employee. The success of the whole process depends on the achievement of set objectives in each phase.

End-to-end recruitment is an elaborate process. The responsibility to handle the process is entrusted with a single individual or a team, depending on the size of the company.

In smaller companies, it is usually a division manager that handles end-to-end recruitment. In mid-size companies, smaller HR teams handle the entire process, from start to finish. Team members specialize in different areas of recruitment and 

share the responsibilities among themselves.

In large corporations, a large-scale HR team handles the entire process. There are sub-teams to execute each stage of end-to-end recruitment.

Recruitment may also be outsourced to trusted external partners, for execution as a whole or in parts.

Requirement Analysis 

A successful end to end recruitment lifecycle begins with an efficient Requirement Analysis. This stage starts the moment a role that needs filling is identified. This phase involves describing the role and defining the candidate best fit for the role.

These tips can help you get the best results from this phase:

·      Develop profiles describing the ideal candidate. Profiles enable you to document your expectations from the hire. Well-developed profiles serve as a reliable guide throughout the recruitment process.

Candidate profiles also serve as a template for developing your job description. You can come up with a description that attracts the ideal candidate profile you have created.

·      Describe key parameters such as the qualifications and experience the candidate must possess

·      Describe characteristics and personality traits that make a candidate ideal for the position

·      Create job descriptions describing role responsibilities and expectations, and work location. Mention any special skills or experience the role may demand.

Specify working method – remote, in-office setting, hybrid or flexible. Provide details about salary and benefits included. Specify if you are open to negotiations.

·      Include a brief insight into company values and work culture through the job description

Sourcing 

Sourcing involves attracting talents for the vacant role. The job description and ideal candidate profile are shared on sourcing channels. Sourcing can be internal or external.

Internal Sourcing

This method involves selecting a candidate from within the organization. If there is an employee with the required skillset, experience and persona, then you can easily hire him/ her.

Employee referrals are the common channel for internal recruiting. As these employees are already working in your company, they are familiar with the work and team culture. They can easily integrate with the team.

If internal sourcing does not work, then you can go for external sourcing. 

External Sourcing

A simple search on any search engine can give you an opportunity to meet the right candidate. With 87% of passive and active jobseekers open to new jobs, your talent pool becomes quite vast with external sourcing.

Social media, online job boards and employee referrals are all great methods of identifying the right candidates. 60% of job seekers use online job boards. 56% rely on social media, and 50% go for referral method. Given these statistics, you cannot afford to miss any external sourcing channel. Advertise your role opening on all these channels.  

Screening of Applications

In this stage of full cycle recruiting, the focus is on choosing the best candidates with the potential to convert into the best hire. The recruiting team browses applications to discover candidates ideal for the job and the company. Applications take the form of resumes, cover letters and portfolios, depending on company specifications.

In some companies, screening may be a manual process. A manual process becomes tough if the volume of applications is huge. Human intervention also increases the risk of bias, errors and inaccuracies.

Companies are increasingly preferring enhanced automated screening solutions as they improve accuracy and offer maximum objectivity in screening. Recruitment solutions such as X0PA feature AI (Artificial Intelligence) algorithms.

These algorithms screen candidates for technical expertise as well as behavioral traits. Predictive analysis is employed for insights into future behavior to understand factors such as a candidate’s performance and job-hopping tendency.

As screening is AI-based, maximum objectivity in ensured. Automation also speeds up end to end recruitment process regardless of the volume of applications.

Selection

While every stage of an end-to-end recruitment process is important, selection is critical as your efforts to find the best candidate materialize here. Your assessments gain momentum, letting you know if your estimation of candidates was apt.

Interviews are conducted to test the efficiency of screened candidates. Interviews can be as classic as they can get with standard questions such as “Tell us about you.” They can also be spontaneous. No matter the form and format, these interviews are designed to test a candidate’s technical ability as well as soft skills.

Video interviews and one-way recorded interviews are increasingly becoming common given the benefits of such approach. Video interviews reduce travel expenses. There is no stress of having to answer questions in the physical presence of an interviewer. So, the likelihood of performing better can be significantly high.

Recorded interviews where candidates answer to a set of recruiter-set questions on video ensure fairness of selection. They allow candidates to prepare well for the interview. As candidates attend the interviews in a casual stress-free setting, they are more likely to perform better.   

A background check may be performed or referrals may be contacted as part of the selection process.

Hiring the Most Suitable Candidate

Once you have reached a decision about selecting a candidate, the next step is hiring. The hiring stage in the lifecycle recruitment process consists of two key tasks – placing the job offer, and undertaking negotiations, if needed.

A job offer needs to be well-developed to make the terms of employment clear to the candidate. Include all pertinent details, including job role, working hours, salary, company policies, and expected joining date.

Some candidates may not immediately accept the offer. Be prepared to negotiate with the candidate. Understand deal-breakers and explore possibilities that can make the offer mutually beneficial.    

Hiring is a precarious stage that can make or break the deal you have worked so hard for. Delicate handling is crucial at this stage to increase the chances of the desired candidate coming aboard.

Sensitive Onboarding

It may seem that the end to end recruitment and selection process is final with hiring. But you may still lose a top talent if your onboarding is not sensitive and efficient. A good onboarding plan includes strategies that makes new employees feel welcome.

A good plan also keeps new employees well-informed about their role and responsibilities leaving no room for confusion. 

An efficient onboarding makes employees happy and excited to start work with your company.

To be thorough and efficient, include the following key elements in your onboarding plan: 

·      Personalized welcome messages and gifts to make new employees feel welcome

·      An introduction schedule that familiarizes the new employee with his/ her team

·      An orientation section that explains the company’s vision, values, work culture and policy guidelines

·      A training segment that familiarizes new employees with their job role, daily work schedule, role expectations, and opportunities for advancement

An onboarding plan is successful when it makes employees feel they belong to the workplace. It should also inspire new employees to be prepared to give their best each day toward the vision of the company. 

The Right Automation Leverage: Streamline your End-to-End Recruitment Process

Automation involves eliminating human intervention in recruitment tasks that do not need such intervention, and getting them executed automatically. There are many software tools to help companies automate their end-to-end recruitment process.

Automation tools are not new to recruitment. There are basic automation tools that can speed up screening. But the drawback is that these solutions employ keyword-based algorithms that pick candidates based on keywords. As this approach is not comprehensive, there is the risk of letting the right candidates slip.

A smarter approach would be to choose automation tools that are comprehensive solution providers. X0PA, for example, offers automation throughout your recruitment process. With X0PA, you can:

·      Widen your talent pool for better sourcing

·      Screen candidates using NLP and ML (Machine Learning) and AI concepts with the capability to predict candidate stability and performance. You select candidates based on skills and not on keywords

·      Automate workflows at every stage of recruitment, using RPA (Robotic Process Automation). From emails and candidate references to interview scheduling, key tasks are automated for improved accuracy, speed and efficiency

·      Make bulk hiring and virtual career fairs faster, easier and efficient

·      Engage candidates through an omni-channel communication capability

·      Facilitate DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) and objective hiring

·      Select candidates based on unbiased data-driven insights

·      Maintain your talent pipeline for candidate rediscovery

Did you know that automation can bring down hiring costs by up to 17%? Automation can also reduce HR employee hours by up to 26%.

With 50% companies already employing AI-based automation for their recruitment, it is time to give your company the automation leverage. Know more about recruitment automation by booking a X0PA demo.

Conclusion 

End-to-end recruitment process is a series of stages with each stage featuring its own objectives. But these stages work together to impart a streamlined recruitment process. The efficiency of the entire process can be further enhanced with well-developed automation tools.

Despite the seeming span of the recruitment process, onboarding is never the end of the process. Modern recruitment widens the process scope to include engagement with prospective candidates. These are candidates that were great but could not fit the current role. Such candidates are constantly engaged by recruiters and are rediscovered for future roles within the company.Referred to as talent acquisition, this approach keeps your sourcing alive and prevents losing top talents to competitors. Complement your recruitment with automation and talent acquisition strategies to achieve top-notch results consistently.