What exactly is full life cycle recruiting? Simply put, full life cycle recruiting refers to the entire start to finish hiring process of a candidate- meaning going through the whole seven steps from start to finish during the hiring process.
Each one of these steps is important in terms of finding and hiring a qualified candidate. Utilizing these four steps will help reduce the amount of time your company is looking for a quality employee, saving everyone time, money, and valuable resources.
Here are the seven steps to follow when engaging in Full Life Cycle Recruiting:
1. Planning
You should always begin your cycle with the planning and preparing stage. The very first step to finding a quality candidate will always be preparing a clear and concise job description. Be sure you are formatting your job description in a simple and straightforward way that will easily allow potential candidates to get a good idea of the expectations, roles, and responsibilities of the companies’ future hire. Be sure to include the qualities your company is searching for as well as the benefits that any hire will receive by joining the company.
2. Job Posting
After you’ve created a good job description, the next thing you have to do is get that job description out there. Without proper distribution of your job description, finding that right candidate will be extremely difficult. In this day and age, using the Internet and social media is oftentimes your best bet. Post to websites such as Indeed and Linkedin for maximum exposure.
3. Sourcing
“Sourcing” refers to the process of using all available avenues to find all the available candidates. Consider sourcing as part 2 of the “Job Posting” step- now that you’ve posted the job, you must make sure you are using every source you can find to collect potential candidates: both by those who have already applied, as well as those who you think may be a good fit- and reaching out to them directly.
4. Screening
Now that you have sourced all the candidates you think would make a good fit for your job, the next step is to screen those candidates to decide which ones you would like to bring in for an interview. Screening will involve both personal research on each candidate as well as phone or email interviews where you can easily ascertain the amount of knowledge and previous experience each candidate has.
5. Scheduling
Once you’ve screened all your available candidates, the next step is schedule in-person interviews as quickly and conveniently as possible. This is part of the reason why the “Screening” step is so important- you don’t want to waste your time scheduling interviews for candidates that you know will not be a good fit for your company.
6. Hiring
Now that you have conducted all your interviews, the next step is to go through and pick the candidate you would like to offer the job to. Make sure you are taking into account the fact that there will be some negotiating involved in terms of salary and benefits.
Once you’ve successfully negotiated all terms in ways that are satisfactory for both the company and the new hire, make sure you send them a formal offer letter to accept, giving them clear, written confirmation that they are being offered employment, and all the terms you have both previously agreed to,
7. Onboarding
Once the hiring process is complete, “Onboarding” represents the final step of full life cycle recruiting. During this step, you will need to make sure your new hire is settling comfortably into the workplace, and feeling confident and welcomed by the other staff as well as the company as a whole. This is also the step where you will want to make sure all paperwork and other technicalities have been properly dealt with.
Now that these seven steps are complete- congratulations! You have successfully achieved full life cycle recruiting, saving both the company and your new hire time, energy, and resources.
