Building a Recruitment Team

How to Build a Recruitment Dream Team

This article will outline skills and functions needed to build a dream team for recruitment. The reason why I say building a "recruitment dream team" instead of a "team of recruiters" is because I have never met one person who is equally good at all phases of recruitment in order to find the best talent available. Most of my experience is in the healthcare industry, however this information can easily be applied to virtually any industry.

Similar to the starting five a Dream Team of Olympic Basketball players, there are five major positions|roles that need to be filled by three or more types of players. This is because one person can usually successfully perform up to two roles on the team. For example on a basketball team, a forward can fill in at the center position and the shooting guard can fill in at the point guard position, etc. On a recruitment team, we will identify below when one person can successfully fill another position.

It is important that if the same person is performing more than one role, that they make sure to identify and allocate which roles they are devoting more or less time to in order to fulfill their goals.

We will identify the five roles and give advice on the type of person(s) are best suited for each role:

Recruitment (Account) Manager | HR Business Partner

Interfaces between hiring managers and recruitment team. This person serves as the main contact to the organization. He or she may also serve as the most experienced closer on the team, and is ultimately responsible to their hiring managers for successfully supplying the best 'hirable candidates' available. An account manager wears many hats.

Main responsibilities of this person:

• Participating in planning meetings where future and current openings are discussed.
• Collecting and prioritizing needs with respective hiring managers. This also includes setting reasonable expectations for when a person could be identified according to the organization's preferences.
• Offering updates to hiring managers on progress and/or challenges. She or he may delegate this to the recruiter assigned to the respective requisition.
• Collecting feedback from hiring managers and quickly communicating this with the recruitment team for follow up with candidates. This also may be delegated in order to devote more time to planning and attending meetings.

Talent Acquisition Professional | Recruiter

In many organizations, this role can be combined with the previous one, however larger organizations will need to separate this role for maximum effectiveness and efficiency. This person is capable of full life-cycle recruitment and is responsible to the account manager and/or hiring managers depending on if it is the same or different persons. She or He interfaces with all qualified and interested candidates in order convert the generated candidate leads into successful hires.

This person is able to clearly articulate the organization's story, and why they are the best place for the candidate to grow in their career. They are also able to determine if the person is a potential finalist to be considered for in-person interviews with the hiring manager. Part of this role also entails collecting extra data from the potential candidate such as: current and desired compensation, qualifications, background, potential concerns, competing interests, availability, as well as their desire to ultimately make a career change.

Talent Acquisition (Recruitment) Coordinator

Interfaces with the resume miner, list builder, and lead generator in order to supply the recruiter with a steady flow of candidate leads. Sets the groundwork for screening based on information coming from the recruiter. Organizes all mass communications with prospective candidates via job boards, social media, email, text and phone.

This person can also assist with on boarding and/or credentialing if one is not available on the HR or Medical Staff Services team. Coordinators are highly organized and are usually tasked with the role of creating reports for the performance of the team.

Talent Acquisition Screener | Candidate Lead Generator

Interfaces with applicants on requisitions with an overflow of candidates for further screening to make sure they are a good fit before presenting to the recruiter. In addition, this person calls candidates who didn't apply. This would include calling candidates who have their resume/CV on a job board or social network. If there are still not enough qualified candidates, then this person will also call passive candidates supplied by the list builder.

Resume Miner | List Builder

This person mines resumes from the job boards. There are many potential applicants who are interested in hearing about new opportunities, however they are no longer active on the respective job board in order to view the position, so this person identifies and mines all candidates that closely match the minimum requirements of the position. Next, the miner will also seek out social media profiles such as profiles on Linkedin and collect them on a spreadsheet for possible inclusion in the organization's database. This person, or a different one, will then build lists based on other possible candidates including top performers that are not yet publicly available on job boards or social media.

Why not just hire one person to perform all the roles?

Sounds a bit too complicated? I agree, it does sound a little cumbersome. Granted, most recruitment departments today have one person do everything in filling their jobs, or perhaps they supply them with one shared assistant. However is this the most effective way?

Can't we just hire one person to perform all the roles? You can, and many organizations do this. However this is not the most effective way to build a dream team of recruitment. This is because several of roles|positions require much different skill sets. For example the different roles require a successful person to be exceptional at rapport building, another at negotiation, another at analytical collection of data, and another at organizing and reporting the data. As both a recruiter, and recruiting manager for over 12 years, I have not met one person who is equally successful at all of the aforementioned roles. They are usually very good at one or two roles, and functional or inadequate at the other roles. A dream team, this does not make (in my Yoda voice).

"A dream team, this does not make" (in my Yoda voice).

There is another reason to avoid having one person do it all; employee satisfaction goes way down when employees are forced to perform roles that they either dislike, or are not proficient at. It will be an exercise of frustration and futility to force a good negotiator/closer (roles #1 and #2 above) to also: call and screen hundreds of potentially unqualified candidates, cold call passive candidates, compile large amounts of resumes and social media profiles, as well as accurately report all the results. One or more roles will be compromised.

Conversely asking one of the other roles to perform the others tasks will meet with equally inadequate results.

Ask yourself, are there currently enough candidate leads to support two recruiters? Since most hiring managers I have interacted with prefer to interview three to four candidates per position, this would equate to needing about six to ten qualified and interested candidates to seriously review and consider per requisition. If there are not enough viable candidates in their pipeline, this means that the additional recruiter may end up spending a lot of their time performing tasks that they either do not enjoy, or are not very good at. If they spend too much of their time in these areas, they will grow frustrated and will eventually want to work elsewhere.

Rethink Allocation of Resources

Most companies will need at least one person fulfilling roles #1 and #2 listed above. On the following three roles, it may be best to hire 1 person to perform these roles BEFORE hiring an additional equivalent recruiter/account manager.

Creating a Budget for Building the Team

Every professional sports team has to deal with budgetary issues. Most are familiar with the term salary cap. Similarly, the organization has to address the amount of budget they are willing to allocate toward talent acquisition (recruiting). Numbers vary greatly across industry as well as the type of recruitment talent being sought after. Below I will supply some guidelines in building the team based on a prescribed budget. This may also help you create one if you don't have one.

The amount of requisitions I have heard most corporate recruiters is 20-30 at any one time. On average, recruiter should be able to fill/hire around four positions per month with an average level of difficulty, or around 50 per year. An exceptional recruiter, or one working on mostly entry level positions, should be able to fill 60-80 per year.

Budgeting for Growth and Turnover

According to Compdata Survey's Benchmark Pro for 2015, the average total turnover rate is 16.4 percent. This would mean that an organization with 1,000 employees would likely need to replace 164 employees, not including new positions. If they are looking to grow their workforce by 20% (200), for example, they would need to be prepared to hire 364 new employees in order to keep pace with a projection of 20% growth.

If we take 364 hires and divide it by 7 recruiters, we come up with 52 hires per recruiter. This equates to four to five hires per month not including contingency/retained hires arranged through a recruitment agency. This would mean that the company would spend about $455k (using an average of $65k including taxes and benefits cost per recruiter) plus the cost of the tools and resources. If we add an additional 15% ($68k) for tools and resources (advertising, job postings, applicant tracking system, list purchasing resume access), that would bring us to $523k per year (approx. $44k/month).

Smaller organizations of less than 1,000 employees will be hard-pressed to justify a need for a team of seven or more recruiters. Unless a large percentage of the positions to be filled have a high difficulty level, such as with physicians and advanced practice nurses.

After arriving at a budget based on the amount of requisitions and recruiters needed, now we can backtest the numbers into our dream team model. I would suggest to allocate approximately one-third to one-half of the overall budget to account managers/recruiters and the remaining amount for the support staff (roles three through five) plus recruitment tools and resources. The reason for the range on roles one and two is that this depends highly on the level of talent available as well as the level of difficulty of the positions needing to be filled.

As always, I look forward to your comments, questions, and feedback!