Hiring Success

Hiring success: the secret to improved recruiting

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Are you looking to elevate your hiring practices? Hoping to improve the quality and speed of hires while forecasting accurately? If so, then you owe it to yourself to read on for more information on Hiring Success, a plan for improving your hiring process and the culture of your company.

Table of Contents

Why hiring well and efficiently matters

As the Harvard Business Review tells us, companies today are hiring a huge amount, and spending more than ever doing it. The biggest problem? Companies “don’t know how effective their approaches are, because they don’t track the results.”

bird's eye view photo of two men and one woman sitting at a table going over business documents.

In order to elevate their success in recruiting, companies need to use a solid methodology that includes tracking of results in order to decrease cost and increase efficiency, speed up the process to increase the chances of landing the best talent, and to do so with the speed that experts agree is necessary.

SmartRecruiters’ concept of Hiring Success is the solution to these modern recruiting problems. It allows us to partner with you in the process of building an effective, efficient and rapid hiring plan that evaluates where you are in your business on this issue and plans how you can improve.

What is Hiring Success?

As we’ve sought to provide the best products to businesses and HR professionals, we have found that just providing an innovative product isn’t enough. We know that recruiters need more support than just great technology- they need support, they need a plan and they need a different approach.

This is why we developed a methodology to achieve a specific outcome: Hiring Success. We define Hiring Success as “the ability to attract, select and hire the best talent for any role, on-demand, and on budget.”

The guiding principles of Hiring Success

As we built this methodology, we found that in order for companies to achieve the goal of success in hiring, they needed to focus on three guiding principles: Compelling Candidate Experience, Engaged Hiring Managers and Empowered Recruiters.

These ideas, that companies need to be able to find the best and more experienced candidates, that they need to be able to engage their hiring managers through collaboration and that they need to empower their recruiters by giving them an efficient, insightful platform to make their work attainable are the basis for what we do.

Having found that these are the secrets to successful recruiting, we set out to design a methodology that would help companies attain their goal of Hiring Success. The methodology begins with a business recruitment audit that consists of three key questions.

The first question

The first question you need to ask is “who do you want to hire?” It’s important to chart out both the scarcity of the employees you are looking for and the impact that the employee(s) will have on your business.

The United States continues to struggle through a skilled labor shortage, and the issue of scarcity, in conjunction with the impact that each employee has, must be top in the minds of recruiters everywhere. Here’s how to plan for this issue.

Identify the nature, impact and relative availability of the positions that you need to hire for. Positions like sales development roles or support roles will be easy to fill and have a lower impact on your business. We call these roles “Core.”

Consultants, marketers, and engineers will also be easier to find but will have a higher impact. We identify these types of roles as “Professionals.”

Image of SmartRecruiters' Talent-Scarcity Impact Framework

Specialized employees such as nurses, technicians or software developers are harder to find but have less of an impact on your company. We call these positions “Specialists.”

Finally, high-scarcity and high-impact roles such as executives or surgeons, we term “Unicorns.”

The first step in implementing Hiring Success is to identify what type of employee you are recruiting the most, and the type of employee that you struggle most with hiring. This step allows us to assess the situation and build the most effective plan for you, moving forward.

The second question

The second question that your company needs to ask itself is “Where are we now?” To do this, we designed a model that can help us see where you are as a business right now.

Maybe you are “Simple and Transactional,” at the ground floor of organizing and integrating technology.

Perhaps you are “Focused and Contemplative,” starting to work with software, but seeking to look at the big picture. Or maybe your business is “Integrated and Data-Driven,” thinking about results and focusing on local conditions.

Finally, you may be “Customized and Predictive,” having integrated technology to work proactively to fill future needs.

The third question

The final question that we will ask you to consider is “How do you quantify your Hiring Success? In what ways do you balance the quality of the hire against the cost of the hire and the time it took to fill the position?

These questions are important for assessing the strength of your methodology, the pressure put on your teams and the number of resources that you are investing in the recruiting process.

Image of a hiring scorecard.

To help you in this process, we recommend a hiring scorecard to help you accurately measure three key metrics: Hiring Budget— the cost of recruiting new hires , as a percentage of the total salary of new hires (or new hire payroll); Hiring Velocity—the percentage of jobs filled on time; and Net Hiring Score—similar to the Net Promoter Score (NPS), which measures customer experience, the NHS measures the fit between new hires and jobs

Building your Hiring Success methodology

Once you have the answer to all of the above questions, you’ll be able to build your plan. We recommend three pillars of Hiring Success: “Talent Attraction and Engagement,” “Collaboration and Selection” and a “Management and Operation Model.”

Talent attraction & engagement

In the first pillar, we will help you identify how well you are sourcing, nurturing and engaging quality talent, an essential step to building and maintaining a workforce as Sharon Florentine notes, building a pipeline “of strong talent starts with identifying, engaging and nurturing high-potential employees at all levels, and then working to develop their strengths and retain them long-term.”

Photo of five colleagues sitting around a table and talking.

We will work with you to design a plan for deep sourcing, advertising, community management, and internal mobility programs.

The goal of this pillar is to help you improve your work in attracting the best candidates by consistently and effectively engaging with talent. We will look at your process and plan for attracting talent as a holistic process, using a complete plan of talent attraction and engagement that will address all of your issues from diversity and inclusion to referral management and job advertising.

Collaboration & selection

This pillar is all about building a world-class hiring process for your company. We work as partners with your hiring teams throughout the collaboration and selection process to configure an easy to use and interactive platform that will create the best possible experience both for hiring managers and candidates.

Photo of two women discussing something while looking at a laptop computer.

We will build and select a platform that will sell your business and get candidates in through the door. Within our work on this pillar, we will help you move through a plan for screening and review, interviews and evaluation offer management and onboarding, all in a way that will elevate your hiring plan.

Management & operating model

Once your self-study is complete, and once we have provided you with the kind of platform that will help you excel, you will be empowered to drive efficiency and make good decisions about investing in your business through data and analytics.

You will be able to build a management and operating model to provide the foundation for other success in making smart decisions about spending security and compliance, mobile platforms and employee training, among other areas.

What kinds of improvements can you expect by using this methodology?

As Entrepreneur Magazine tells us, “Knowing how to hire is as important as knowing your marketing, knowing how to innovate and knowing how to manage corporate cash.”

Hiring well, hiring quickly and making the best use of your resources to find the very best members of your team is the bedrock of success for your success as an company. At SmartRecruiters, we will use our Hiring Success methodology to help you evaluate, strategize, transform and optimize your recruiting.

Our customers have found significant gains in all areas of Hiring Success by using our methodology. Companies see a 48% improvement in speed of hiring, a 41% improvement in the optimization of hiring budgets through cost savings and reallocation and a 50% increase in candidate quality, seeing better people in their recruiting pipeline.

We know that we can help you achieve similar results and we look forward to helping you take the first step in your journey to Hiring Success.


Rebecca Carr

Rebecca Carr is the Senior Vice President of Growth and Hiring Success at SmartRecruiters.