Building a Winning Team: A Strategic Approach to Hiring

Building the right team is critical to business success, but that doesn’t mean the hiring process is easy. It can be an incredible drain on resources. According to the Society for Human Resource Management, the average cost to hire an employee is well over $4000, yet the true cost can be much higher than that. Hard expenses—everything from recruitment fees to HR software to onboarding often result in costs to the company around 1.5x the employee salary.

Beyond the hard expenses, the soft costs can have an even greater impact. While it varies by industry, the average time to fill a position is 44 days. That’s about six week’s worth of work for the team conducting interviews and seeking to find the right candidate. Often, individuals hiring for a new position are managing the increased workload on top of their usual requirements. And, if the job is currently vacant, either the workload isn’t being done, or it’s being covered by other team members—either way, it’s draining resources.

Outside of direct and indirect costs, hiring impacts everything from company results to company culture. When you make a mistake and hire someone who is not the right fit, it doesn’t just set you back on business goals. It can disrupt team morale and damage your reputation with customers.

That is why it’s critically important to ensure you manage recruitment through a strategic lens. By creating strategic goals for the wider hiring process, and then leveraging those goals to fit within each new job opening, you can better ensure you find the right person for the right opportunity, saving costs and improving employee satisfaction and long-term retention.

Consider these four steps when creating a successful hiring process:

Start with evaluating your current strategy

Before you jump headfirst into designing a recruitment strategy it’s helpful to evaluate what has worked well so far. Start by determining whether you have an actual strategy in place now or if you’ve been hiring on more of an ad-hoc effort. Who within your organization has been involved and does that need to change? If you don’t have a formal HR function, decide which members of the leadership team will take point on new hire processes and which will play a secondary role. 

Engage the appropriate stakeholders within the organization to determine what has worked well to date and what has not. Incorporate the various goals and objectives you determine into your overall business strategy. We recommend considering a visual approach to this exercise, which helps to simplify the process and makes it easier to track the effectiveness of meeting strategic outcomes. As part of that visual approach, be sure and connect the dots as to how your hiring strategy maps back to your broader business goals.

Next, build a framework to effectively describe your company, your culture and each open position

Writing the perfect job description isn’t easy, and there are common mistakes companies make, such as sharing far too much information about the company or being overly detailed in job duties and expectations. When job descriptions are too granular, it can be off-putting to potential candidates who may see the position as too rigid or may not be able to see their skill sets reflected in the description and forgo applying. This means the company loses out on qualified candidates. Though certainly there are important requirements for every position, creating job descriptions that leave space for interpretation can attract a better crop of candidates.

This is why designing a framework is so important. It allows the company to consistently represent itself, by seeking job candidates in a similar way. What’s more, it allows the company to better reflect its culture, which is critically important. This is where you can be clear (and concise!) about what it looks like to work for the company, how the mission of the company is reflected in the day-to-day work experience and what prospective employees can expect from their work life and team engagement.

Create a detailed plan for how to approach filling each vacancy

There are any number of ways to effectively look for job candidates. Working directly with a recruiter or agency can take much of the heavy lift, but it can also be expensive. A wide variety of job boards and websites allow you to easily post open positions, which helps in reaching a wide number of candidates but can also mean getting a host of applications that are not the right fit. Various software tools make it easier to sift through applications to find qualified leads, but leaving it all up to technology means sometimes strong candidates fall through the cracks.

There may not be a one-size-fits-all approach for each vacancy you’re looking to fill. Take time to familiarize yourself with the places where your prospective candidates spend time online. This may be specific publications or websites that cater to their industry and can be an excellent source for posting jobs. Your own website is critical as well, but unless you are actively driving people to your page it can easily be lost. Leverage your social accounts for promoting open positions as well as company newsletters, blog and other resources. And don’t forget the power of word-of-mouth. Many companies offer incentives for employee referrals, and this can be an excellent method to getting qualified candidates because existing employees have often worked with these individuals in prior jobs and believe their skills and personalities will fit well with the company. 

Whichever route you choose, make sure it is strategic. You want to ensure your job openings will be seen by the right individuals and that requires special thought and planning.

Finally, set the candidate – and yourself – up for success

Once you’ve found the ideal candidate and they’ve accepted the position, the work of recruitment is not over! Now is the critical time to properly onboard them to the company, the team and the role to ensure they are set up for success. 

Unfortunately, companies frequently struggle with proper onboarding. According to one Gallup study, only 12% of employees feel their organization does a great job of onboarding new employees. However, a strong onboarding process can improve retention of new hires by 82% and improve overall productivity by 70%.

Your onboarding process should be as strategic as your recruitment process. It needs to effectively integrate employees into your company’s culture and processes, help them to understand their role and responsibilities, effectively connect them with their team to establish a strong working rapport, and provide them with all necessary information, support and opportunities to find success in their new position.

Having a visual strategy map can be an extremely useful tool during onboarding. It’s a quick glance resource into the broader goals of the organization and how various activities and initiatives map back to those goals. It also makes it easy for new employees to see how their role fits into the wider mission of the company.

The hiring and onboarding process is not easy and it can consume significant resources from your company and your team if it doesn’t go well. Set everyone up for success by approaching the entire process through the lens of strategic planning and track what works and what does not. Over time, you’ll refine the process to ensure that each new opening is filled with the right candidate who is set up to achieve success.