How to Make the Business Case for a New Recruiting Strategy

By Jessica Miller-Merrell

For me, the field of HR and recruiting is a constant anthropological study. I ask questions to industry practitioners on their best practices, preferred process and most importantly how they gain the necessary executive support to create a new strategies for HR, hiring or recruiting.

Several weeks ago I had the pleasure of talking with Katherine Rand, Talent Acquisition Operations Manager of Aramark Global Talent Management. She shared details on how to make the case to build a new program or gain support when it comes to adopting new HR or recruiting technologies. As a leader in the recruiting space, she has been responsible for building and implementing new strategies and programs and she has had extensive experience focusing on mobile, recruiting and sourcing matters.

We all understand how complicated and challenging it can be to create the right program or strategy in today’s always-changing world of talent management. When you do finally find the right solution, it is beyond frustrating when we face the challenges from the lack of support from the internal stakeholders. Am I right?

Let’s be better prepared to handle those political set backs and be fearless ready to move our stellar strategies and programs ahead with a solid business case.

From my conversation with Katherine, I would like to share four steps that will help you make a confident stride in preparing the right business case for successfully deploying a new strategy or program.

1. Research.
• Join a consortium (like CareerXroads)
• Reading blogs
• Attend conferences
2. Experiment.
• Become an expert or bring on an expert
• Educate your team on the variety of tools
• Think like your target audience
3. Test.
• Create a small 90-day pilot program to get statistics
• Define parameters and benchmarks
• Measure growth and goals
4. Measure everything.
• Understand the CEO’s bottom line
• Provide examples from non-industry practices
• Compare current status with competition’s activities

I hope you will find this four-step strategy resourceful as you build a solid business case that convinces your stakeholders to support you and your efforts. If you have any additional insight on how to develop a leak-proof case that successfully persuades leadership into trusting us to launch our strategies and programs, please reach out and let me know! Like everything else we do in this talent market evolution, we are always open to improving in the name of success.

Jessica Miller-Merrell, SPHR is a workplace and technology strategist specializing in social media. She’s is the Chief Blogger & Founder of Blogging4Jobs. You can follow her on Twitter @jmillermerrell.