I’d say first, start with a bit of empathy! Understand you can’t tackle it all, but you can find ways to improve the experience for everyone (candidates, clients, colleagues) by making it more connected, and measure the improvement along the way.

That’s where Connected Recruiting best practices comes into play, helping you create a more engaged talent pool while improving the relationships you have with your recruiters and clients. To ensure lasting success with the Connected Recruiting strategy, you must first understand what your team does well and then build a plan for transforming and delivering improvements across the talent lifecycle.

Read on for helpful suggestions to get you off to the right start:

Define

Define what is important to your organization. Understand your mission, vision, and values and align them with measurable operational outcomes. Once you do this work, you’ve set the foundation for aligning your culture to your processes and supporting technologies. This allows you to let the data do the talking and avoid implementing strategies that don’t align with your business goals. Have confidence in what’s essential to the business and stay the course.

Design

Design your business around people and experience. This means evaluating processes that impact people and designing an experience that creates connections at every point.

Do you have a way to measure incoming candidates? Do you have understandable metrics around time to placement? Do you evaluate the percentage of people contacted? Have you been through your own hiring process?

Put yourself in each player’s shoes – candidates, clients, and colleagues – and ensure you’re providing an experience you’d want to repeat. This means that integration and continuity are of the utmost importance to create a connected experience for all three groups.

Deliver

Remember, Rome wasn’t built in a day. Many agencies I work with are under the impression that they will implement the latest technology and be done. The caring and feeding of your technologies, processes, and people is an ongoing lifelong commitment requiring resources, consistency, and execution.

You should be meeting with your vendors quarterly, monitoring ROI, mystery shopping your agency locations, and building annual roadmaps in partnership with your technology partners to ensure you’re in line with your overall vision and always honoring your values.