Do You Need Targeted Recruiting? Find Out In This Detailed Guide

High employee turnover rates, mishires and ineffective recruitment practices can cost organizations thousands of dollars, wasting valuable time and resources. Thus, organizations are always looking for ways to improve their recruitment process and make it more efficient. Because there is always competition for candidates who're skilled in technical knowledge, have relevant experience, and possess the requisite soft skills.

This is why organizations opt for targeted recruitment - a well-defined recruitment approach for finding skilled candidates. Intrigued? Then read ahead to understand what targeted recruiting is, how it differs from traditional recruiting, its benefits, steps, and common examples:

What Is Targeted Recruiting?

Targeted recruiting is a recruitment type, similar to lateral hiring. It's the practice of recruiting individuals who possess a specific set of skills, knowledge, and experience through niche and targeted advertising channels and outreach programs. It's a customized hiring process that focuses on finding candidates who meet set criteria.

Organizations opt for targeted recruiting when they have specific business goals to meet. For example, hiring for a particular segment of the population to meet corporate mandates (diversity or disability hiring) or hiring skilled candidates for a specific location, etc. 

In the case of targeted recruiting, potential candidates, usually, are not actively looking for a new role, i.e., they are passive candidates. Since there is a need for candidates with specific qualifications or skill sets, the company's advertising efforts are tailored to attract a limited, well-defined pool of applicants. Moreover, the recruitment channels or candidate source is limited. 

This is what sets targeted recruiting apart from traditional practices. In both cases, organizations are on the lookout for candidates with the required skills. But in targeted recruiting, organizations narrow the scope of advertising and outreach.  

Is Targeted Recruitment Legal?: The Dilemma with Targeted Recruiting

Ideally, when recruiting, organizations benefit from reaching out to a diverse group of skilled candidates through multiple advertising channels - selecting the best from the lot. Organizations also have a moral and legal responsibility to not indulge in biased hiring and consequently, not restrict employment opportunities and/or the communication of a job opening from a select audience.

And yet, targeted recruiting does exactly that - leading to a moral dilemma. However, that's not the ground reality.

While on the surface it may appear that a targeted recruitment plan is excluding people, the reality is that the hiring is to meet a specified need. As long as organizations customize their approach according to their need, and not any other bias, targeted recruiting is legal and ethical. 

For example, if a company is opening a new branch in a different location but does not have the resources to relocate employees, it may target candidates on the basis of location - let's take Delhi, for example. In this case, restricting qualified candidates from outside Delhi is acceptable. But restricting eligible Delhi-based candidates on any other arbitrary criteria, like gender or sexual identity, marital status, religion, etc. is illegal and unethical. 

Developing A Targeted Recruitment Strategy

Here are the four crucial steps required to develop an effective targeted recruitment strategy: 

Set specific recruitment goals

Specific goals for recruitment need to be set, i.e. have an answer for whether the focus is on increasing diversity, reducing cost per hire, improving retention, finding candidates with essential skills lagging in the current workforce, etc. This will enable you to appropriately customize your recruitment plan and filter audience by skill set. 

Specify the required skill set and role

Once the recruitment goal is clear, it's time to specify the job description. It goes without saying a specific job description is the key to targeted recruitment. Recruitment teams should work back with the concerned department to accurately list down the exact skill set and experience level required for the role. They should also understand the candidate persona. Simply put, they should focus on both, soft skills and technical acumen required for the job position. 

Connect with the target audience through niche and appropriate advertising

Connecting with the target audience through appropriate channels is incredibly important for the success of targeted recruiting. Since the talent pool is often made up of passive candidates, organizations need to research and choose the best platform to connect. This could be a job board, an online platform, etc. 

Collect data and track the metrics

Recruitment metrics play a vital role in evaluating the success of any employment recruitment strategy, including targeted recruiting. The recruitment team should align the metrics with the specified goal and work to meet the overall objective. 

Common Targeted Recruitment Strategies

Here are some common targeted recruitment strategies that organizations employ: 

Employee referrals

Employee referral is an excellent way of finding the right candidate for the role. Potential candidates referred by existing employees are also more likely to be aware of the company culture and company policies. Current employees also have a better understanding of the type of candidates the organization is looking for. Thus, employee referrals can improve the quality of applicants. 

Pro Tip: An incentive-based employee referral program can also improve the retention rate and contribute to higher levels of engagement. It's also an excellent way to reach out to passive candidates.  

Campus Hiring

It's a common misconception that campus hiring is only done for mass hiring. Campus hiring can be a great source of targeted recruitment in cases where the job opportunity is for entry-level roles, and candidates need specific technical knowledge. For example, hiring an engineer for the role of an entry-level software tester, who must have knowledge of using Object Oriented Programming in C#. 

Specific job boards

Organizations can also choose specific a type of job board or recruitment platform to advertise and reach out to potential candidates. The chosen channel of communication should be one frequently visited by the targeted candidate pool. The type of job board can make a difference in the type of candidates who apply for the role. 

Pay-for-Performance

Pay-for-Performance is a form of recruitment wherein compensation is tied to targets. Organizations disclose that achieving set targets or bypassing the goals can lead to a higher incentive and/or bonus. This approach is common for sales roles. It's considered a form of targeted recruiting because only candidates who can meet the targets/prove they have met targets in past roles are considered for the role.

Remember: While this strategy can help incentivize potential candidates to improve their performance and help the company meet its targets, it may also lead to a stage where quantity overshadows quality. 

Key Advantages Of Targeted Recruitment

Targeted recruitment has numerous advantages, such as: 

Better-Quality Candidate Profiles

Targeted recruitment methods help companies source high-quality candidates from the applicant pool. Since the criteria for application is highly specialized, the range of candidates who can apply for the role is restricted and companies don't have to filter through unqualified applicants. This ensures that only high-quality candidates, who meet the rigorous criteria, are assessed for the available position. 

Reduced Cost per Hire

A targeted recruitment process can help reduce the cost per hire. Since it's a form of specialized hiring, it removes unqualified candidates from the talent pool, controlling the overall applicant volume. Consequently, organizations save time and effort in filtering through applications. 

Improved Diversity

Organizations looking to diversify their workforce often opt for a targeted recruitment process as well. The recruitment advertising efforts can target an underrepresented community (people with disability, ethnic minorities, etc.) in the organization. For example, Walmart launched CodeHers with Unstop. It was a diversity hackathon organized to meet the company's gender mandate. The hackathon ended with Walmart exceeding its gender mandate. 

Pro Tip: In this manner, targeted hiring can also contribute to building a positive employment brand image, while helping organizations find skilled candidates. 

Fill Challenging Positions

Since it's a focused recruitment procedure, it allows organizations to fill up challenging positions in an organization. The applicant pool is often large when it comes to roles that are easy to fill. And, among the hundreds of applicants who apply for the role, there is a fair share of high-quality candidates as well. The reverse is true for challenging positions.

In the case of difficult-to-fill roles, the applicant pool can be incredibly narrow, and not always include high-quality candidates. Forget hundreds of applicants, organizations (especially small-scale or new organizations) can struggle to find even a small number of eligible candidates. A strategic, targeted recruitment process can help organizations tap into passive candidates and find the right person for the role. This also helps in reducing attrition rates and may even reduce recruitment costs, because organizations are stricter with screening and the quality of candidate profiles is high.

Key Disadvantages Of Targeted Recruitment

While there are several advantages of using a targeted recruitment method, it also has two main disadvantages - it can be time-consuming and complex. 

Time-Consuming: In this recruitment method, organizations focus their talent acquisition efforts on finding the right candidate but the talent pool is small. It's also, often, made up of passive candidates who have special skills. Organizations also have a specific goal to meet with this hiring. Thus, while candidate quality is high, candidate search can be time-consuming. 

Complex: Targeted recruitment is a slightly more complex recruitment method than traditional recruitment because organizations have to invest considerable effort in strategizing ways to reach the right candidate audience. It also requires a higher level of preparedness before setting up interviews with candidates. 

Targeted Recruitment Metrics to Assess Effectiveness

Considering the time and effort spent in building a targeted recruitment plan, it's essential that organizations evaluate the results. Here are a few critical recruitment metrics that organizations can use to understand what went right with their targeted recruiting strategy and work on flaws in the process, if any: 

Source-to-Hire: Source-to-Hire measures which candidate source gets the most responses, in terms of quantity and quality. 

This is one of the most important metrics to assess the effectiveness of targeted recruiting because this recruitment method hinges on finding the right candidate source, that can improve the candidate pool quality. 

Cost-per-Hire: While it's a common belief that targeted recruiting lowers the cost-per-hire, it's a good practice to actually track these metrics. Organizations need to take into account the candidate sourcing costs to evaluate the overall success of the campaign. If finding skilled candidates exceeds your recruitment budget, then there is a need to either revise the budget or the recruitment approach. Or both. 

Time-to-Fill & Time-to-Hire: Both of these metrics focus on the time taken to close the job position. Time-to-Fill takes into account the time taken from when the acquisition request was approved. Time-to-Hire measures the time taken from the moment an applicant applies for the role.

Targeted recruiting has a tendency to be time-consuming and it's important that the talent team tracks these metrics to find ways of reducing the overall time. 

Offer Acceptance Rate: Yet another important metric is the offer acceptance rate. The offer acceptance rate measures the conversion rates of offers made. It is calculated by dividing the total number of candidates who accepted the job offer by the total number of offers made. 

This recruitment strategy involved approaching skilled candidates who were passively looking for a job. Thus, a high offer acceptance rate indicates a competitive and well-liked compensation package. On the contrary, a lower acceptance rate means the organization needs to tweak its compensation policy and do better research on what candidates are looking for in this position. 

Candidate Experience: Candidate Experience Metrics can help organizations gather feedback about their recruitment process and understand how it's perceived by potential applicants and future employees. 

Apart from these, there is a wide range of recruitment metrics available. Organizations can align the metrics with their business goal and track data to evaluate the success of their recruiting strategies. 

Open vs Targeted Recruitment: Which One To Use?

Both recruitment types have their advantages and disadvantages. Thus, which strategy will work better depends on the situation.

The following table highlights the main differences between traditional or open recruitment and targeted recruitment:

When hiring for a specialized role with limited vacancies, targeted hiring is a better choice. Here, the desirable candidates have a combination of soft skills and technical knowledge - for example, a sales manager with B2B sales skills.  

And when hiring for multiple roles that do not require specific skills and the organization is willing to spend time on training and onboarding, open recruitment serves well. An effective broad-based recruitment plan leads to a deeper candidate pool but the applicant quality may not be restricted to higher-quality applicants. 

Today, there are several recruitment solutions available for organizations - it's all about identifying your needs, working around your challenges, and finding the option that works best for you. 

Suggested Reads: 

1. Campus Recruiting Metrics: The Key To Creating Effective Hiring Strategies
2. Lateral Hiring: A Complete Guide To The Process, Its Benefits, Challenges & Best Practices
3. Lateral vs Fresher Hiring: Which Is A Better Choice?
4. Campus Hiring Platform: Why Do You Need It & How To Find The Best One?
5. Step-By-Step Approach To Building A Winning Campus Recruitment Strategy