What’s full life cycle recruiting?
Full life cycle recruiting is used to describe the complete process of recruitment from beginning to end.
Full life cycle recruiting is also known as:
- Full cycle staffing.
- 360 recruitment cycle.
- Full cycle recruitment.
- Full cycle recruiting process.
There are different stages of the full life cycle recruiting process and they important for hiring quality employees, quickly.
Here are the steps you need to take to fulfill each stage.
Full Life Cycle Recruiting Process
1. Assess the hiring requirements of your recruitment life cycle
This first step of full cycle recruiting involves working closely with hiring managers to find out what requirements are necessary for the vacant position. You will need to compile a list of ‘must have’ and ‘nice to have’ qualifications and experience. On these lists, include characteristics such as work experience, skills and education. After you have defined this requirement of the recruitment lifecycle, the recruiter can then create a job description to attract the best candidates.
2. Track the right metrics in the full cycle recruiting process
Although there are a lot of metrics that can be tracked in terms of full life cycle recruitment, you need to focus on the ones that are the most important for your company and have the biggest impact. To continuously improve your full life cycle recruitment process, determine the metrics you will set and analyze before you start.
Some of the most important recruitment metrics to be analyzed in the recruitment life cycle include:
- Time to hire
- Cost per hire
- Application completion rate
- Employee retention rate
3. Use the best recruiting tools to improve full life cycle recruiting
Smart hiring means using the best tools to improve your recruitment metrics. Irrespective of the size of your business, you should make the best use of modern hiring software to facilitate the full life cycle recruiting.
Efficient and modern recruiting tools, like Fountain, help you to automate repetitive tasks as well as keep in touch with all of your candidates, irrespective of how many there are. The best recruitment tool should also be mobile-first to give candidates a better experience during the recruitment life cycle.
Essential features of the best recruiting tools include:
- Integration with third-party recruitment vendors.
- Advanced analytics.
- Scheduling toolkit for interviews.
All of these features and more come as standard with Fountain. Check out our features page here.
4. Describe the ideal candidate at the beginning of the recruitment life cycle
In order to write a good job description to attract the right people during the full life cycle recruiting process, you must define a candidate persona to know exactly what you’re looking for. Even with an Applicant Tracking System (ATS) to automatically filter resumes, you still want to make your candidate persona as precise as possible to engage the right candidates. When creating your candidate persona, ensure that you use data from previous recruiting drives. Also make sure that the buyer persona is detailed down to the minutiae, so you will know when you receive the right resumes.
5. Write a good job description for faster recruitment life cycles
After you have created your candidate persona, you can start writing a job description. You can streamline the full cycle recruiting process by using a template with traits that are similar to most jobs. We have developed job description samples for some of the most common jobs such as baristas, delivery drivers, customer service agents and electricians. This takes the hard work out of building a job description from scratch and can speed up the full life cycle recruitment process. You can either use the job description as-is or you can include information that is unique to your business.
Click here to use our simple job descriptions to find your right candidate.
6. Work out your sourcing strategy to streamline the full cycle recruitment process
When you know all the characteristics of your ideal candidate and your job description has been tailored to attract them, you now need to figure out the best ways to source them during the recruitment life cycle. There are many ways to source the ideal candidate – for example, free job boards, paid platforms, employee referral programs and even social recruiting.
7. Select a shortlist for faster full cycle recruiting
Once you have placed your job listing on the relevant platforms and resumes start coming in, you need to have a way to review and screen these resumes if you want an efficient full cycle recruiting process. Using an applicant tracking system (ATS), you can screen the resumes in relation to the different skills and experience that are necessary. After the ATS has screened the resumes, the next step of full cycle recruiting is for the hiring manager or the recruiter now reviews the resumes against the job description and they decide whether the candidates will move forward to a shortlist or whether they will be rejected from the recruitment life cycle process.
At this stage of the full life cycle recruiting process, you should have a way to communicate with all your applicants, whether they are successful or not. Neglecting to communicate with unsuccessful applicants leaves a very negative image of your business. The people who have applied could go to job review sites, like Glassdoor, to talk about their experiences. This may deter people from applying in future.
Therefore, you need to use a tool, like Fountain, to automate communication with all applicants during full cycle recruiting. This was done for The Turas Group who were able to communicate with thousands of applicants using Fountain’s automated SMS service.
Read the case study about the positive difference that Fountain made to the Turas Group’s full life cycle recruiting process here.
8. Screen candidates more efficiently during full life cycle recruiting
After you have made the shortlist, it is time to pre-screen the candidates. Some recruiters use phone interviews before going on to arrange in-person interviews. Other companies may have multiple rounds of interviews during full cycle recruitment. As much as possible, to save on hiring managers’ time, you should use the best employment pre-screening methods possible.
With Fountain’s one way video interviewing, you can find out more about your candidate by asking them to record a video within the app. Review this video to determine things like body language, communication and eye contact. This video interview does not have to be long. You can simply ask two or three questions and see how they answer. You can also use Fountain’s video interview feature to find out whether the candidates’ answers match up with their resume.
9. Make preparations for the interview
After the screening process is complete, this part of the full life cycle recruiting process is where you get to interact with your candidates by arranging face-to-face interviews. These can be quite stressful because candidates get nervous and hiring managers can become overwhelmed, especially if they have a lot of interviews to arrange.
With Fountain, our interviewing schedule toolkit takes the stress out of arranging interviews and also reduces the time it takes to get the ideal candidates in for a face-to-face interview during full cycle recruiting. Candidates who are qualified will get SMS messages and emails with links to the interview details. The time slots will be automatically updated on yours and all the relevant managers’ calendars. When a candidate chooses a time, they will get an SMS message confirming the interview and it is as simple as that.
10. Make offers as one of the final steps in full life cycle recruiting
When the hiring managers have made a decision, the company can make a provisional offer subject to the candidate passing background checks. To make carrying out background checks easier, Fountain integrates with the background check software Checkr to streamline the whole process.
This means that you will not have to complete another part of the recruitment life cycle separately since this is synched directly with Fountain. After you have made the offer, there may be negotiation concerning issues, like salary. You need to have a salary ceiling in mind, so that you will know what is acceptable and what is not.
11. Onboard new hires to wrap up the recruitment life cycle
Once the background checks have come out satisfactorily and the candidates have accepted the offer, the last thing you need to do is onboard your new hires and wrap up the full cycle recruitment process. This stage is critical and should not be overlooked. With Fountain, onboarding new hires is simple because you can send and receive documentation online. This enables the new hire to be familiar with your company and their policies.
Why full life cycle recruiting matters
As you can see, there are several stages to the full life cycle recruiting process. These need to be completed because it has a number of benefits for businesses. Full life cycle recruiting matters because it streamlines the hiring process.
When you have a strategy around the hiring process, the recruiter can exercise more control about how they go about sourcing, recruiting, hiring and onboarding the right candidates. This enables your company to have more success as they follow this process. This also enables the recruiter to move quickly since they have a proven system.
Here are some benefits of the full life cycle recruitment process:
More accountability during full cycle recruitment
Because there are so many parts involved in full life cycle recruiting, different aspects can drop off. With full life cycle recruiting, all the processes are detailed with owners for each stage. Therefore, everyone knows what they are responsible for. If there is a blockage, people will know what changes need to be done. A clear strategy with different owners from start to finish helps to create a better recruitment process. In order to determine where the blockages are, the tool that you use for your full life cycle recruiting should have advanced analytics to show where the recruitment process is falling down.
Fountain’s analytics gives insights into different aspects of the recruitment process, such as:
- Applicant conversion.
- Interview attendance.
- Team performance.
- Stage metrics.
- Drop off insights.
- Hire rates.
Decrease the time to fill in full life cycle recruiting
Another reason why full life cycle recruiting matters is that it reduces one of the most important metrics in the recruitment process, which is time to fill or time to hire. When using full life cycle recruiting, it allows your job postings to reach more qualified applicants. Therefore, this ensures that the right people apply and so it is likely that you will be able to get the right candidate the first time round without spending extra resources and money to go through another round of sourcing.
Improve the candidate experience during the recruitment life cycle
Candidates’ experience is a major factor in full life cycle recruiting. Given the low unemployment rate, candidates are searching for the best experience to determine whether they should continue with their application. Your branding extends to how you handle the recruiting process. Ideally, you should communicate with candidates, no matter what stage they are at, to ensure that each candidate is treated with respect.
Get better recruiting and business results
Full life cycle recruiting has the benefit of allowing you to improve your recruiting strategy. As well as improving the candidate experience, it decreases the time to fill and gives you a better quality of hire. This means that your company will not only have better metrics around recruiting, but will also have a higher productivity and staff morale. This is because a lower time to fill means that current employees will not be drafted in to fill vacant posts for too long.
Increases the quality of hire of your full life cycle recruiting process
Full life cycle recruiting matters because, as well as hiring quickly, you also need to recruit the best candidates. Finding the right candidates will ensure they fit in with the team and they are less likely to leave the job early. This will result in you needing to start the recruiting process all over again. The more quality hires you make, the more business success you will experience.
Conclusion: Full life cycle recruiting
The full life cycle recruiting process is important for every business. There are so many moving parts in this process. It is important to note that they can be tweaked to suit your company’s recruitment needs. The most important thing is that the process is made into a strategy that anyone can follow.
One of the most important aspects of full life cycle recruiting is the tools you use.
