Delegating Online Recruitment Tasks: A Client Centered Approach
Client Centric Approach
Before thinking about work breakdown structures, a client centric(whether internal hiring managers or external clients) recruitment organization should first develop their client or customer engagement model – thereby putting the customer first – and then build their team structure and processes around this. Adopting this client centered approach will mean that the underlying administrative teams will work in synergy with your client facing teams, rather than against them.
Client Facing Recruiters
As a typical mid-sized business corporate recruiter, you will most likely be faced with an internal environment composed of several departments or business units, probably including some or all of the following functions: Finance, IT, Sales, Marketing, Research and Development and Production. To be a truly customer centric recruitment organization, you would ideally segment your client facing recruiting team so it reflected your client base or develop clearly assigned roles for recruiters by specialization and department. You would thereby have a dedicated specialist recruiter for each function, e.g. an IT Recruiter, Finance Recruiter and so on. This means that your recruiters can become specialists and therefore offer a more tailored, consultative and customer focused service.
For the Director level positions in each function, you might also assign a dedicated specialist recruiter who can provide the more tailored, discerning and often more discrete service that is characteristic of senior level appointments. You might rotate these functions, but at any given moment, have clearly defined roles and develop a clearly defined set of competencies.
Recruitment Support Pool
With your client centric front line recruitment service in place, you can now begin to develop your back office structure to support this process and build a fully integrated recruitment team.
For maximum flexibility, it is recommended that you develop a shared pool of recruitment support resources that each of the client facing recruitment coordinators is allowed to access. Having done this, you now need to divide the duties within your recruitment support pool, and I suggest this is done in a way that reflects the structure and needs of the client facing team. For example, the client facing recruiters will most likely need support in the following areas:
1. Preparing Job Posting and Posting Jobs
2. Acknowledging and Rejecting Candidates
3. Long Listing candidates
4. Setting Up Interviews (for senior recruiters)
5. Managing/Maintaining the Applicant Tracking System
6. Sending out offers and arranging start dates
Continuing with our client centric model, your recruitment team’s shared resource pool would ideally reflect the client facing recruiting team’s structure. This can be achieved by training each recruitment administrator to perform the six administrative tasks detailed above, which means they can pair up with one or more senior recruiters and help them throughout the entire recruitment life-cycle, from job posting to appointment. In this way relationship dictates responsibility instead of technical job function.
The fact that a senior recruiters get to work with a dedicated recruitment assistant for the entire life cycle of their recruiting project means they can develop a stronger working relationship and that the administrator can be more familiar with the particular recruiter’s posting, which is a more customer centric way to divide up your online recruitment tasks.
This customer centered approach is scalable, as you can add more multi-skilled administrators as needed. It is sustainable as administrators will find the jobs more engaging and interesting than being shoehorned into one role. It is also very flexible as senior recruiters can pick and put down administrators as and when they need them, and if one recruiters is absent or leaves, other administrators can step in to provide support.