How to Scale Your Recruiting and Hiring Efforts

By Jessica Miller-Merrell

Growth is a great thing. In fact, in business it’s the most obvious sign of success and is what every CEO and company is looking for. However, there’s a reason the term “growing pains” was coined so long ago. We all understand that after the celebration comes to an end, growth is accompanied by change, stress and business needs. The company’s human resources team is often sought out to become the hero and fix the growing pains that seemingly popped up over night. This is a both a major opportunity and significant challenge for HR departments to exhibit their value to an organization.

In order to be able to step up when the time comes, you’ve got to be prepared ahead of time. Take the reigns and scale your efforts when your company starts to hyper grow by implementing these four steps:

Create a process

Any time you hope to duplicate something, the first stop is evaluating how you currently complete the task, in this case successfully recruiting a new employee. By evaluating how you do so, a pattern will likely emerge that will become your process. After your natural process has emerged, you’ll want to record it, which means identifying steps and the order in which they work best. This is no different than a recipe in a cookbook. What ingredients bring about the best end result and how do you put all those ingredients together so that they’re each optimized?

Document everything

After you’ve established your own process, step outside yourself and get into the minds of your best recruiters. You know what your secret ingredients are, but what else are the most successful recruiters using to make their secret sauce? Uncover and document the timesaving tools, creative resources and technologies that those around you are taking advantage of so that those you want to be successful in a short amount of time have a head start.

Communicate

Communication is the key to any successful team. Whether it’s with your hiring managers, business leaders, new hires or former candidates, you’ve got to set expectations, ask questions and sometimes hardest of all, manage expectations. Most importantly, you and your team should work to exceed those expectations every single day. The only way this can be achieved is through ongoing information sharing, holding people accountable and peer mentoring among those you bring on during times of growth and current team members.

Make it fun

Periods of hyper growth can be extremely hard on many areas of the business and HR is no exception. Recruiters can easily get burned out, so it’s important to stay grounded and remember that people are human. Set goals, work smart by using your data and dashboards to track results and continually encourage creativity. The best results happen when we manage to have fun with our friends and succeed at the same time.

 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.