HR Management Glossary: Recruiting
Recruiting in human resources is the comprehensive process of sourcing, attracting, screening, interviewing, and hiring talented employees, involving tasks such as job description writing, posting on job boards and social media, managing applications, conducting interviews and background checks, negotiating offers, and can be managed internally or outsourced, often supported by automated Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) to streamline hiring workflows.
What is recruiting?
Human resources recruiting is the process of finding and hiring talented employees. Recruiting includes tasks such as sourcing, attracting, screening, and offering jobs to high-quality candidates.
Recruiting may involve the following tasks:
- Developing an elegant candidate acquisition program
- Designing a hiring plan
- Submitting and obtaining approval for job requisition requests
- Writing job descriptions
- Posting jobs to job boards, careers pages, and social media accounts
- Tracking hiring metrics
- Receiving and tracking applications and resumes
- Creating screening questionnaires and candidate scorecards
- Writing interview scripts
- Scheduling and conducting interviews
- Performing background and reference checks
- Writing offer letters to make a good impression
- Negotiating employment contracts
- Managing compensation and benefits programs
- Creating internal hiring and employee referral programs
- Finding the best candidates who may not even be looking
Who manages recruiting?
Recruiting is handled in different ways by different companies. In small businesses and startups, owners or managers commonly handle recruiting. In larger organizations, a Human Resources department hires and retains the talent acquisition team that finds candidates for open positions. Enterprise-level companies may have a specialized team with hundreds of recruiters working to fill job openings. Large companies may also outsource recruiting to staffing agencies and professional recruiters (sometimes called headhunters).
Automated Recruiting using Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS)
An applicant tracking system (ATS) automates nearly every task involved in hiring. These tasks include job posting, tracking and managing resumes, sending emails to applicants, creating hiring workflows, filtering candidates, creating interview scripts, and writing job descriptions.
How can job boards improve recruiting?
A job board is a search engine that allows users to search open jobs by a variety of variables. These include job role, geographic location, industry, and job type (contractor, part-time, remote position, etc.). Some job boards specialize in tech jobs or a specific geographic area; others focus on an underrepresented employee demographic. Job seekers can apply for jobs and upload resumes on the job board; recruiters can post open jobs and search for best-fit candidates in the resume database.
What is a job distribution platform?
This is a website that aggregates thousands of independent job boards. For those seeking employment, it doesn’t work much differently than a job board. Users can search by job title, location, company, job type (part-time, remote, intern, contractor) or many other variables. Job distribution platforms allow companies to post jobs on multiple job boards at once, making it quicker and less expensive than posting to individual job boards. These platforms also provide artificial intelligence tools to help recruiters identify the best boards for their specific job postings.
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