When it comes to business and performance goal-setting the acronym S.M.A.R.T is familiar to most people in HR. Since its rise to prominence in the early 80’s businesses have been setting Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant & Time-bound objectives.
SMART is also a good way to think about your recruitment technology, if your ATS and Talent Management software can’t provide you with support for SMART recruitment objectives, then your recruitment team won’t be able to work SMARTER.
SPECIFIC
Goals need to target specific areas for improvement. The key word here is TARGET. Do you set targets for your team, does your recruitment software help you define these targets and provide progress reports in real-time? Targets could be set individually (e.g. No. of candidates at first interview) or collectively for teams.
MEASURABLE
How measurable is your recruitment? Often we find companies using outdated recruitment software only get hindsight reporting. These static reports are run at the end of a period or campaign and tell you how you performed. The smarter approach is to ensure progress is indicated throughout the period – telling you how you are performing in real-time.
ACHIEVABLE
Your recruitment goals need to be realistic and attainable. So, look for tools that help you understand past performance and activities when it comes to future objective setting. To make this simpler and more accurate, it helps if your recruitment software covers the entire recruitment journey. This way, you get the ‘completeness of data’ required to provide actionable insights.
RELEVANT
The only objectives worth setting are those that matter. Unfortunately many legacy recruitment systems provide fixed, standard reports. These may not be sufficient to measure the objectives that really matter to your organisation. Often this will require expensive customisation from your vendor to give you custom reports.
Instead, look for a platform that gives you the flexibility to define your own metrics and targets. Better still- if each individual user can easily configure their own reporting dashboard. This will ensure everybody can focus on the metrics that matter most to them.
TIME-BOUND
Recruitment is a time-critical operation so your recruitment software should enable you to set time-bound objectives. These help focus the recruitment team on achieving the goal within the required time-frame by stressing urgency. Look for a solution that gives you the flexibility to define short, medium and long term targets. This will give you the flexibility to adapt to a changing environment and take advantage of unforeseen opportunities that will arise during the year.
So, that’s SMART…but how do we make it SMARTER? At Eploy, we add a couple of additional criteria into the mix.
ENGAGING
How do you provide performance reports to your recruitment team? Dull spreadsheets? Basic charts? Rather than take this approach we designed Eploy Dashboards, not only as flexible way to monitor and track the recruitment metrics that are important to you, but to make them the first port of call in the recruiter’s busy day. A dashboard isn’t just a bunch of charts, it’s an interactive way to drill in to the information, to make sense of the numbers. They also provide the primary way to navigate around the system. They help you plan your day – highlighting your key tasks and activities. They keep you up to date on industry and competitor news – through news feeds.
Eploy Dashboards turn recruitment software on its head. They encourage your team to work from the objective to the activity. The goal becomes the starting point rather than just the end result.
RECOGNISE SUCCESS
With your whole resourcing team now focussed on achieving agreed objectives it’s important to ensure success is recognised. This could be in the form of Leader Boards that display individual or team achievements. By bringing an element of gamification into your dashboards you can introduce a sense of belonging, fun and encouragement.
Eploy’s SMARTER approach to dashboards monitors your recruitment pulse - alerting you to the things that need to get done, inspiring your teams to success and much, much more.
Take a look today eploy.co.uk/dashboards