Make the Most of Your Post: Three Keys to Objective-Based Recruitment

Politicians run campaigns to be elected. Blockbuster films use multichannel ads to drive ticket sales and downloads. Community fundraisers aim to collect enough money to upgrade ageing playgrounds. Every successful campaign has an objective it aims to achieve. Why should your recruitment be any different?

Successful recruitment campaigns are built on measurable goals that go beyond simply filling an open role. As a recruiter, you aim to achieve meaningful recruitment outcomes that add value to the business.

With this in mind, let’s look at how you can build objective-based recruitment campaigns. Developing a clear, impactful and measurable strategy starts with asking the right questions; answering these three questions can help you create more focused, deliverable goals.

No. 1: Do you know your company’s goals, and are they clearly explained? 

Companies of all sizes usually define their operational and strategic goals and share them with stakeholders, including employees. These objectives guide an organisation’s intentions, visions and values, forming the 'who we are' component of brand identity. Although there are similarities, operational objectives may focus more on how things are done in the shorter term, while strategic objectives might refer to long-term goals that drive organisational changes. 

For example, a mission statement expresses strategic goals, such as Indeed’s one-sentence summary, 'We help people get jobs'. This provides a framework for everything Indeed does. Meanwhile, an operational objective might refer to revenue, productivity and growth goals to support that mission. At Indeed, 'We help people get jobs' provides the purpose behind operations such as research, product development, organisational structuring, and messaging in internal and external communications, advertising and social media.

Companies lacking this kind of intentional statement can benefit from creating their unique business objectives. Using the acronym SMART – Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic and Time-Based – provides a good guiding framework for crafting objectives, be they operational or strategic. Making goals specific, attainable, realistic and time-based keeps them meaningful and grounded in reality, while measurement is important for defining success as well as opportunities for improvement.

No. 2: How can business objectives translate into purpose-driven actions?

When each division, team, manager and individual contributor understands and can define your company’s goals, it creates a sense of shared purpose – which, in turn, impacts growth.  

In 2019, Harvard Business Review released information from an eight-year study conducted on high-growth companies. Researchers found something unexpected – high-growth companies that 'let purpose be their guide' were able to redefine their playing fields and reshape their value propositions. 

This study was released pre pandemic, and the effects of COVID-19 highlighted the crucial importance of being able to change direction in these ways. Indeed’s case study of Human Technologies Inc. (HTI) supports this idea, illustrating how a clear purpose enables successful navigation in a challenging time. HTI is a US-based company that partners with employers to develop staffing processes and practices for building engaged, committed workforces with long-term performance and profitability. Its statement of purpose – responding to client needs with 'creativity and urgency' and working for 'continuous improvement' – set the foundation for addressing large, pandemic-driven drops in applicant volume combined with a turnover rate that was twice as high as normal. 

With a culture primed for agility, HTI was willing to try new recruitment solutions and technologies to expand candidate outreach. So recruitment teams got on the road with the Job Mobile 'job truck' to extend recruitment beyond their physical locations; they also went virtual, adopting the Indeed Hiring Events so candidates could interview easily and safely. 

No. 3: Can I turn my company’s strategic and operational objectives into recruitment guidelines?

Well-crafted business objectives are able to shift in scope from high-level organisational concepts to team projects and campaigns in each segment of the recruiting funnel – and even individual actions and tasks. If, for example, your company has business objectives based on 'continuous improvement', you should always strive to evolve your hiring practices and processes, too. That purpose will also drive your recruitment campaign’s strategic focus. Here’s an example:

Our talent acquisition team will continuously improve our recruitment funnel effectiveness by routinely capturing and analysing data to optimise job-posting reach, jobseeker engagement, application rates, number of interviews and the cost per hire.

Now, using the SMART framework, translate that objective into more specific, attainable steps, with appropriate time frames and methods of measurement to define success. The team responsible for job postings might add their own objectives for developing new reports that share hiring insights into labour market trends, talent pools, jobseeker interests and competitive intelligence. Or they might focus on adopting the latest recruitment automation to efficiently and effectively target job postings across multiple channels. Once the measurable components are identified and grouped within a specific time frame and around a related deliverable, you will have an objective-based recruitment campaign.

Developing objective-based recruitment campaigns starts with shared purpose

Aligning an organisation’s 'why' with its more specific 'what we do', 'who we are' and 'how we do it' creates a unified vision, reducing friction and breaking down barriers to success across projects and campaigns. This can have positive ripple effects across the company, from increasing revenue and productivity to improving recruitment and retention and strengthening the company brand.

Understanding your company’s business objectives unites your talent acquisition team around a sense of shared purpose, helping you cultivate specific, defined and measurable recruitment objectives. From there, objective-based recruitment campaigns that strategically set your team up for success will naturally grow.