Full Cycle Recruiting: Everything You Need to Know

If you are a talent acquisition leader, you might have come across the term “full-cycle recruiting.”

And while full-cycle recruiting isn’t easy, when executed correctly, it can benefit the recruiter, the candidate, and the company as a whole and help attract high-quality candidates within no time.

In this piece, we’ll take a look at full-cycle recruiting, the various ways in which it can benefit businesses, and the five main stages it encompasses, so keep reading!

What Is Full Cycle Recruiting?

Full-cycle recruiting (also referred to as end-to-end recruiting or full life cycle recruiting) is just the recruitment process in its entirety.

A recruiter or (often) a recruiting agency usually plans and executes this recruiting model from start to finish. In other words, a full-cycle recruiter will likely begin the recruitment process from the start and finish their job only when you onboard a qualified candidate.

The primary difference between full-cycle recruiting and other types of recruiting is that the former houses all constituents of the hiring process under one roof. Other recruitment processes follow a very fragmented approach, wherein each part of the hiring process, such as scheduling, sourcing, or screening, is handled by specialists.

Benefits of a Full Cycle Recruiting Process for Businesses

There are endless benefits to leveraging full-cycle recruiting, especially for small and medium-sized business owners who initially don’t have the operational muscle or budget to deploy a comprehensive hiring process.

However, regardless of the size of your company, there are two primary benefits of full-cycle recruiting that almost every business will experience when it’s implemented the right way.

1. Catalyst in Promoting Positive Candidate Experience

According to the findings of a recent survey,nearly 78% of candidatesbelieve that the overall candidate experience at a particular company indicates how much that organization values its people.

Full-cycle recruiting can help talent acquisition leaders provide a more personalized approach to hiring, which boosts candidate experience. With this type of recruiting model, candidates have a single point of contact from the time the hiring conversation gets initiated to the time they get onboarded.

Leveraging the full-cycle approach to recruiting can have several benefits for your company:

• It can mitigate “buyers remorse” a recruit might feel if their experience is too impersonal
• It can considerably increase a recruit’s sense of belonging and community, which can then increase productivityand reduce turnover
• It can make negotiations a lot smoother, reducing time-to-hire and cost-per-hire (which is crucial to your company’s growth since unfilled positions are costly)

2. Consolidates the Recruiting Process at a Macro Level

One of the most visible advantages of full-cycle recruiting is integrating all the different operations with the hiring process into a single entity or role.

To begin with, it consolidates accountability. When all tasks and operations are unified, every person on the recruiting team knows what their responsibilities are, which considerably increases the efficiency and completion rate of the overall workflow.

Secondly, full-cycle recruiting consolidates the team’s strategy and vision. When the same recruiter is taking care of the hiring process from start to finish, it gets less troublesome to create and maintain a central company vision and achieve it within the specified time. But even more importantly, it is easier for the recruiter or agency to integrate hiring objectives into larger business objectives.

Lastly, full-cycle recruiting consolidates jobs data so that it can be generated, organized, analyzed, and stored in one central location, that too in an organized manner.

Apart from the organizational efficiency, it also makes it easier for hiring managers to review past candidates from their talent pool who may not have been the right fit for that position at an earlier time, but maybe a good fit now.

Different Stages of the Full Cycle Recruiting Process

Stage 1: Preparing

When wanting to create a successful full-cycle recruiting strategy, preparation is the key. It would help if you came up with a candidate persona that defines your ideal recruits alone and prepared a job description that targets only those at large.

A candidate persona is nothing but a semi-functional depiction of your ideal candidate, formed by defining the skills, traits, and characteristics that make up your target candidate.

One recent article published on Glassdoorexplains in detail what truly goes into forming the right candidate personas: “The most effective candidate personas go beyond information found within a resume and explore other, less tangible traits that make someone the perfect hire. This often includes personality traits, career goals, soft skills and sometimes even employment preferences.”

This first step is essential because it guides talent acquisition leaders and makes end-to-end recruitment goals comparatively more straightforward for them to achieve.

Once you’ve defined your candidate persona and shortlisted the qualities you’re looking for, the next step would be to think about ways you can attract candidates that possess those skills and qualities your way. Make sure to write an accurate and concise explanation of the responsibilities and job. Try to include additional information about the salary range, perks, and benefits, and your company values within the job description too.

Stage 2: Sourcing

When formulating a robust full-cycle recruitment strategy, the next step would be to find new, innovative methods to find your ideal candidate.

The proper sourcing channels can take HR leaders a long way in recruiting high-potential hires, especially in today’s competitive landscape when there is a high demand for talented workers. As many as 70% of candidates are passive (ones who aren’t actively seeking a new opportunity) today, and you can only reach out to them with effective sourcing channels.

Some of the most effective sourcing channels out there are:

• Web sourcing:This sourcing strategy involves a single web search that can scan hundreds of thousands of online active and passive candidate profiles to retrieve crucial information such as resumes, email addresses, past work experiences, etc.
• Social recruiting:This approach involves leveraging social media channels such as LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, etc., to gather profiles of relevant candidates depending upon the requirements of your specific company.
• In-house recruiting:In-house recruiting includes locating great candidates internally among your existing employees (these can either be from different departments within the organization or the same department that the vacancy is for).
• Employee referral programs:This sourcing strategy works around providing structured programs and perks to existing employees when they recommend talented candidates for open positions at your organization from their professional networks.

Stage 3: Screening and Selection

The third stage within a full-cycle recruitment process involves narrowing down all the relevant candidate profiles you’ve gathered to the very best candidates.

Screening begins with reviewing employment applications, including resumes, cover letters, and portfolios. The prime reason for reviewing these documents is to find applicants whose skills, qualifications, and experiences best match the specific requirements of your open position.

Once you’re through with candidate screening, the next step with the screening process itself will involve selection.

You can use various candidate selection methods, like different types of testing (programming tasks, psychological tests, custom written assignments, etc.) or auditions. The most widely used selection technique, however, is conducting interviews.

Before making the final decision on the best candidates, this full-cycle recruiting stage can also at times include a background check of employees and their references.

Stage 4: Hiring

The hiring stage of the full cycle recruitment process usually involves two primary hiring operations: sending the job offer and negotiating.

Once you find a candidate that ticks off most of your requirements, it’s time to notify them. According to one recent LinkedIn survey, close to 77% of candidates prefer receiving good news over a phone call. Once you’ve made that phone call, you can send them the official offer letter.

A carefully-formulated job offer spells out all hiring terms and includes information on essential candidate prerequisites such as benefits, compensation, working hours, contract length, employment start date, etc.

One best practice you can follow to improve the chances of your job offer being accepted is personalizing the offer letter to talk to the candidate directly.

At times, a candidate won’t accept your job offer right away. Therefore you may require further negotiations to reach a mutually agreeable employment contract. This recruiting stage is usually the most delicate of the entire full-cycle recruitment process and needs added care and attention.

Stage 5: Onboarding

Despite popular belief, a recruitment life cycle doesn’t end with hiring a candidate.

Onboarding concludes the most critical stage of the full cycle recruiting process. It can make or break your entire hiring process.

Onboarding is all about making the new employees feel welcomed and helping them ease into their new workplace by teaming up with their new coworkers. Great onboarding starts with introductions, then moves on to orientation, and ends with training.

Combining all these activities is the right formula for creating a winning onboarding which will guarantee a great start at your company for your new employee and the final success of your recruitment lifecycle.

To know more about full-cycle recruiting and what you can do to successfully leverage it within your organization to land the best hires, get in touch with us today atRecruiter.com !

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