What is recruitment infrastructure and why is it important?

Data dashboard, case libraries, ATS reviews, salary benchmarking, and more all fall into a recruiter's toolbox. We like to call this recruitment infrastructure, and here are the resources that we believe every talent team needs to tackle recruitment from start to finish.

When you think about the world of work, it is undeniable that every person working in any field requires specific tools to get their job done. Take a construction worker, for example. For a construction worker to turn a piece of land into a stable, architecturally sound house, they need A LOT of resources to make it happen. They need the architect’s plans, tools, electricity, materials, time, and a team of other specialists to help them get the job done. In the same light, when a recruiter is asked to hire key roles or even fill out a team, they are essentially also looking at a blank slate in the sense that they need guidelines, tools, and resources to turn that blank slate into a cohesive, efficient team of top talent.

That’s where recruitment infrastructure comes in. Recruitment infrastructure is that toolbox of guidelines, tools, and resources that recruiters need to do their job - and it’s a crucial element of a great hiring process. At Amby, we spend a lot of time ensuring that our recruiters and our partners have top-notch recruitment infrastructure in place so that our partners get the best ROI from our recruiters, and even when the partnership comes to a close, they have a solid foundation to run their recruitment.

Why is recruitment infrastructure important?

While a recruiter can hire someone without having solid recruitment infrastructure, Amby has found that recruitment infrastructure helps recruiters work more efficiently and make better hiring decisions. This is especially true when your organization is looking to scale quite quickly. For your recruitment team to find quality candidates in large quantities, they need to have the most up-to-date tools and resources at their disposal to make accurate and efficient hiring decisions.

As an agency, working to make sure your client is set up with good recruitment infrastructure is also really important. So your first step during the partnership is to understand where their infrastructure is at and work to fill any gaps in their infrastructure before you begin the process. This is so that your recruiters can provide the best ROI for them and so that they have a solid infrastructure set up for recruitment in the future. The same principle applies to companies who are running their own recruitment - you need to nail your workflows, templates, and systems to set your hiring team up for success.

What is recruitment infrastructure?

Recruitment infrastructure includes all the resources that a recruiter needs to perform their job responsibilities from start to finish. Recruitment infrastructure includes more obvious things like ensuring you have a solid ATS in place, reliable sourcing tools, and a well-thought-out sourcing strategy. It can also include things like recruitment data, career pages, and candidate satisfaction surveys. Essentially, it is all of those support tools and projects that operate outside just “filling roles.”

At Amby, we pride ourselves in kitting our recruiters out with the most comprehensive and up-to-date recruitment infrastructure toolbox available so that they can provide top-notch service to our partners. Here are a few of the things we believe are essential elements of any recruiter’s toolbox.

Planning Infrastructure 

At the beginning of your recruitment process, it is important that you plan your search and hiring workflow thoroughly. Getting clear on your project plan and sourcing strategies ensures that once you kick off the actual search, you have a clear idea of your direction, KPIs, and targets. Here are a few steps you can take to make sure you get started on the right foot!

1. Get an overview of what infrastructure you already have in place and identify any potential gaps. Do you already have an ATS? Is it meeting all of your needs or do you have recurring bottlenecks and blind spots with it? Identify these and start putting them in a backlog with priorities and deadlines.
2. Clarify what roles need to be filled in the short and long term. Why this role and why now? Store long-term roles in a hiring backlog and start tackling your short-term roles by setting up candidate personas for each role. These personas allow you to get a super clear understanding of the kinds of candidates you should be sourcing and what their triggers are. At Amby, we make a set of hypotheses around what might make a passive candidate tick and then employ a series of A/B tests to confirm or deny our original assumption. If you want a better understanding of candidate personas and how to create them, check out our candidate persona guide. We also touch more on these later in the post!
3. Create a sourcing strategy, a clear set of recruitment process blueprints (i.e., what does the process look like step-by-step), and set recruitment targets for each role. Every role is different, and it’s important that you recognize and adapt to the nuances where necessary. This also allows your hiring team to have a clear understanding of the how, who, what, where, and when of their duties. You can use historical recruitment data to set more realistic strategies, blueprints, and targets.
4. Decide who will form part of your recruitment team. When doing this, it is important to look into the experience of your recruiters so that you choose the most well-suited team for the specific role you are trying to fill. Also, be upfront and realistic with your hiring managers about how much time you will need from them so that they can start blocking their calendars!
   
   

Data Collection

Once you have a clear idea of who will be doing your recruitment and how they will carry it out, it’s time to collect the data needed for your team to make informed decisions. Your ATS likely collects basic process data, which you can supplement with a data analysis tool (even if it’s just Excel) to get a data rig set up for your hiring team. At Amby, we funnel data from spreadsheets and surveys into Tableau for visualization. The data you collect is ultimately up to you, but here are the data points that our Amby recruiters find useful.

1. Historical recruitment metrics. Benchmark your performance and review the historical data so that you have an idea of where you are today and where you want to go. These metrics can include time-to-hire, passive versus active candidates, and retention rates, so set up data collection points (i.e., start date, signing date) that help you paint a picture of historical performance.
2. Pipeline metrics. Your pipeline includes a network of passive candidates that have been sourced, and who are a potential match for the role you are looking to fill. Having an understanding of your pipeline metrics is helpful when you want to measure the effectiveness of your sourcing strategy, and if you need to rethink your current ways of doing things. If you’re using LinkedIn Recruiter, the kind of recruitment metrics that you can expect when using their LinkedIn Recruiter Pipeline Report include Candidate Activity, the number of archived candidates, and conversion rates.
3. Messaging performance. This is a relatively quick and easy element of recruitment infrastructure, which can provide a great ROI. By using LinkedIn Recruiter analytics, you can track what kind of response each of your InMails receives. This is helpful because you want to ensure that you are contacting your prospective new hires with the most enticing InMail possible to ensure a high rate of positive responses. So, when you’re writing your inMails, try and write at least two so you can track which of them is receiving the most positive attention, and then use that one more often.
   
   

Tools and Systems

These are the more obvious parts of recruitment infrastructure that a lot of recruiters find useful. The tools and systems you choose to use will help make your job easier and your recruitment more efficient.

1. A solid ATS. A good ATS is helpful for things like staying GDPR compliant and keeping a detailed and up-to-date record of all your candidates. At Amby our preferred ATS is Workable, and it allows our recruiters to keep an accurate and detailed record of each and every candidate, as well as work more efficiently because it ensures that all the information our recruiters need about the candidates is at their fingertips. It is also helpful because it automatically ensures that all the data processing that your recruiters are doing is GDPR compliant.
2. An easily accessible GDPR policy. Speaking of GDPR, it’s important that you have an easy-to-read and accessible GDPR policy that your hiring team can reference. GDPR can be complicated and it’s easy to make mistakes, especially when you are new to recruitment or not involved in the day-to-day management of candidate data. Create a layman’ terms document outlining the dos and don'ts of GDPR so that your hiring team can stay informed and compliant.
3. A good talent acquisition tool. Ah yes, LinkedIn recruiter - the perfect tool for sourcing active candidates. If your company is looking to start large-scale growth, this tool is very helpful when building large pipelines of potential new hires. It can also help you keep track of your recruitment metrics with its reports and analytics.
4. A good HR system. Once you have chosen the perfect candidate to fill the position you wanted to fill, a good HR system is helpful when it comes to the offer and onboarding stage of the hiring process. An HR system like Bamboo - which is what we like to use at Amby - can help you keep all the administrative information about your new hires up to date and in one place.

Candidate attraction infrastructure 

This includes all the resources and documentation you need to have in place to attract the ideal candidates for the position. This is where your candidate personas will come in handy because understanding what kinds of things your ideal candidates are looking for in a job will give you a better idea of how to attract them. Once you have a clear understanding of who you are looking for, you can use these resources to attract them:

1. A job description bank. A complete list of responsibilities for the roles you are trying to fill will help your hiring team understand what the responsibilities and qualifications entail and how it fits into the rest of the organization. Compile these into a “bank” or shares folder where people can access and review various job descriptions - this is especially important if you are filling multiple positions for the same role (i.e., 5 senior backend developers). It will also make sure that they know exactly what skills and competencies to look for when sourcing for the role. It is also a great way to attract and retain top candidates because the more detailed the job description the more likely it is that you will be able to get relevant candidates to apply for the job.
2. Engaging job advertisements. It goes without saying that if your job advertisements are lack luster, you will struggle to attract attention. We have found that including a short video that includes an office tour and employee testimonials can big a big drawcard when advertising a vacancy in your company. You can also make use of buzzwords and eye-catching design work in your job ad to draw more attention to it.
3. An informative landing page. Making use of an application like Qwilr or Notion to design landing pages that include all the information that prospective candidates want to know about your company, the role, and the process, is a great way to set yourself apart from the rest.

RecOps Infrastructure 

Recruitment Operations (RecOps) infrastructure includes the resources you need to be fully prepared for the hiring process so that it all moves smoothly. Having these things ready before you begin the hiring process is a great way to make the process more efficient.

1. An interview guide. Having an interview guide is a great way to ensure that all your recruiters are giving candidates the same experience during the interview process. Making sure that the candidates that go through your hiring process have a good experience is so important for employer branding and hiring good quality candidates. Interview guides also make it easier for your recruiters to work more efficiently because they have a predetermined understanding of how to run their interviews. Including these in a “bank” similar to your job description bank also ensures that these guides are easy to access and up-to-date!
2. Case assignments. and tech interview tests If you are going to include a case assignment or ability testing in your interview process, it is important to ensure that you get these ready ahead of time; for example, during the screening call phase. If you don’t have them ready in time, it can increase your time-to-hire, make the candidate experience less enjoyable because of long waiting periods between interviews, and even cause candidates to drop out of the process along the way. Lastly, be sure that you store historical cases so that you can use them for reference and inspiration in later processes.
3. Candidate satisfaction surveys. Candidate satisfaction surveys will show candidates that you value and respect their experience during your hiring process, as well as give insight into the areas where you can improve. We recommend setting these surveys up in a way that sends them automatically based on the candidates hiring status. For more inspiration on the kinds of questions to ask in your candidate surveys, check out our article on designing a candidate survey.

Compensation and benefits structure

The last thing that we think is important to have in place before any recruiting is kicked off, is to have a clear idea of what kind of offers and compensation you can offer your potential new hires. Here are a few ways that you can make sure your compensation and benefits policies support your hiring efforts!

1. Salary benchmarks. When branching into a new market or hiring for a role you haven’t had to hire for before, we recommend doing as much research as possible before you start the hiring process on what kind of salaries your prospective candidates will expect. This will help you set a realistic salary budget and ensure that you have the means to attract the kind of candidates you’re looking for. There are paid reports or even free downloads of this data on sites like Deel and Remote. We also recommend tracking this data yourself for each role that you hire so you can see salary and negotiation trends across different roles and markets over time.
2. A benefits and perks structure. Perks and benefits include things like insurance, leave, and career development opportunities. Having this information ready ahead of time will assist your recruiters in answering common questions that candidates will have during the interview process. It is also helpful for attracting as many candidates as possible because the general mindset of candidates is “what’s in it for me?” A recent trend is also to allow employees to decide their own benefits using services like Ben. This is a great option for those who want to empower new hires to take control of their own benefits, while also reducing administrative complexity.
3. Relocation benefits. Understanding whether you can provide relocation benefits is helpful for your recruiters because it will inform them about how far and wide they can expand their talent search. If you are expanding your talent pool to the international market, it’s critical that you understand your role in helping your new hire relocate.

To sum this relatively long blog up, we believe that to ensure that your recruitment processes flow and that you attract and engage hire top-tier talent, it is essential to make sure that your hiring team has reliable and up-to-date recruitment infrastructure.

Is there anything else you and your team use that we didn’t mention here? Shoot us an email at hello@amby.com!