How to build a recruiting function from scratch — Guide for Beginners
I’ve been in charge of recruiting functions at a few different outsourcing companies for more than 10 years. The software outsourcing industry in Ukraine has its own processes and rules. This is why recruiting models are built in the companies according to specific functions they need to perform. 10 years ago the IT industry in Ukraine was still very young. That was the time of ICQ and Paper-printed CVs when Linkedin was just another little website almost nobody has heard of. Also, very little professional information, books, or guidelines were openly available. Colleagues from other companies were also in the same shoes, best practices were only shared through meetups and conferences. The first time I had to build a recruiting function from scratch it took me years to understand what parts it should have and how they should operate efficiently. The next time I made a move to another company and had to rebuild the recruitment function, I already had some experience of course, but the process was hectic and chaotic because of tight deadlines. Anyway, the prior knowledge and experience helped me to accomplish the goal much sooner. This time it took me a little over a year to create a very well functional and highly performing recruitment mechanism. One thing I noticed though is that 70% of recruitment projects I worked on were exactly the same I did before. The team needed to grow, team members needed to be mentored, Referral programs needed to work, Website applications needed to come, recruiters needed the search tools and an ATS to store and process candidates, and so on. The new things also came — I discovered that it is much more efficient to have a set of data at hand which would allow to analyze efficiency and remove bottlenecks. Point is — even though there are obviously a few specifics of its own each company has, the core would often be very much alike.
All that experience made me think about how I can optimize my knowledge to work in a more structured way.
I thought of a building, rebuilding, or improving a recruitment function as of a software project that needed to be designed, coded, or maintained. A software project would have an architecture, layers, processes, methodology, and tools. Very often software engineers select one of the existing Frameworks in case a typical piece of software needs to be created versus reinventing the wheel and coding the whole thing from the ground up. I tried to figure out what components of a recruitment function will always be the same in any company no matter the specific culture or processes, those go on top. It turns out you’d always have a team, you’d always need to interact with the external environment, build business processes, work according to some defined methodology, you’d need a set of sourcing tools, a place where to store candidate data and of course analytics to report, measure success and remove roadblocks. All these components should always be in place. One of them is missing and the whole mechanism will suffer. An engine can’t work without oil or without gears. With all that in mind, I came up with a model of a “Recruitment Framework” — in simple words a workbook and a guideline for myself that described all those components in detail. It is divided into three logical layers:
Frontend to include a recruitment team, communication strategy, and a brand strategy — basically, all those parts which interface with external and internal customers, candidates, and community. Each part has a lot more to it. For example, the team will have roles like sourcer, negotiator, storyteller, RecOps, client ambassador, and others. Each recruiter may combine several roles depending on personal ambitions and interests. That approach actually proved to be highly motivating as team members select roles by interests.
Backend to include an Applicant Tracking System (ATS) as a data storage, sourcing tools as recruitment toolkit, and metrics used for analysis and reporting purposes. Basically, all instruments used by recruiters to perform their daily work.
Middle Layer OR Business Logic to include processes and workflows, collaboration rules, and the knowledge base. All these elements answer the question — HOW? Everyone needs to know the exact steps to follow, rules to adhere and guidelines to pick up the knowledge. The recruitment methodology is also here — it is the rules of the game: how we groom the backlog and prioritize, how often and when we hold stand-ups, how we plan recruiting and sourcing sprints, how we look back at things in retrospect.
When I managed to structure this knowledge, it became much easier to build a recruitment operation in the next two companies I worked for. It took me less than a year each time to build or rebuild the core and set up a continuous improvement process. What is most important is that it gives me an understanding that I can always health check what I am doing against data and make sure I am not missing out on things — measure all parts of the Framework, analyze how they perform, then fix, debug, and constantly improve.
Here is the full article for reference:
Part 1 — https://brightgrove.com/what-is-recruitment-framework-architecture/
Part 2 — https://brightgrove.com/what-is-a-recruitment-framework-pt-2/
