How to Undertake a Year-End Recruiting Audit

© aa_amie / Adobe Stock

It’s almost 2022 and you have some questions about how effective your recruiting strategy was in 2021. A recruiting audit might be just what you’re looking for. 

What is a recruiting audit? 

A recruiting audit is a full evaluation of recruiting processes, tools, and operations to assess the efficacy of your talent acquisition and retention plans. It typically includes a variety of steps like interviews, surveys, and metrics analysis, and can cover everything from technology to onboarding and turnover. 

You can complete this process in-house, or you can work with an organization like Skywalk Group to outsource the auditing process. Outsourcing provides an independent and unbiased analysis of your internal recruiting function, which can help your organization get a more accurate view while still including internal perspectives and experiences. 

Why you should consider an audit 

Often, we get lost in the day-to-day details and forget to step back and look at the big picture view. This is true in all aspects of business, including talent acquisition. You might think your recruiting strategy has been extremely effective, not realizing you are only thinking back on the past few months, not the entire year. Plus, it’s easy to miss details that are hiding within the metrics themselves, such as time to hire. 

A recruiting audit accumulates all the available data and analyzes it, so you get a full, functional view of how effective your organization’s recruiting program has been over a given time period.  

The audit results can help you plan for the next year, strategizing ways to improve elements of your recruiting function.  

How to get started 

A full talent acquisition audit can seem overwhelming. Where do you even start? Sourcing? Retention? Budget? 

At Skywalk Group, we break the process down into three manageable subgroups: pre-audit, audit, and post-audit.  

Pre-audit 

A pre-audit should begin with creating a project plan. This plan should touch on all facets of your recruiting process and outline areas for investigation, all within a time frame that works with your goals. This is also the point in the process in which surveys or interview questions should be developed and approved for distribution, and reports or dashboards created. 

Audit 

The actual audit itself includes deploying surveys, interviewing stakeholders and employees, sending out reminders, reviewing budgets and expenses, and compiling all the data in a secure but easily accessible location, so that everyone who needs to access it is able to. 

Post-Audit 

The post-audit is arguably the most labor intensive. Now that you have all the data, it’s time to review, analyze, and interpret it. The final analysis becomes a report that is the official assessment of your organization’s recruiting operations.  

During the post audit process, you also have to decide how you are going to implement any changes you’ve decided on, and in what time frame.  

Which categories to consider auditing 

Deciding which aspects to assess really depends on how in depth you want your audit to be. For a high-level overview, you can focus on fewer, broader categories. The more detailed you want your results to be, the more categories you should consider covering.  

At Skywalk Group, we include the following categories in our audits: 

Efficiency - Recruiting process efficiency and functionality to attract and hire talent 

Technology – Current technology solutions implemented within the organization 

Strategy - Effectiveness of careers site, recruitment programs (diversity & inclusion, military, colleges, etc.), job distribution, employee referrals 

Connection - Marketing of employee value proposition, employment brand to attract talented audiences. Accuracy of job descriptions and nurtured leads to grow candidate pipelines 

Selection - Marketing of employee value proposition, employment brand to attract talented audiences. Accuracy of job descriptions and nurtured leads to grow candidate pipelines 

Onboarding - New hire onboarding to assimilate and reach full productivity and succession planning for internal mobility & retention 

Analysis - Utilizing reports and analyzing recruiting data & KPI’s to drive for better business outcomes; candidate experience pf those not selected for hire 

This all compiles into an incredible amount of data, all of which is extremely valuable in improving and refining your recruiting strategy. It might seem like only one area of business, but the staff you hire and retain (or not), the candidate experience you present, and the attraction marketing you use affects everything from your image to your productivity and ultimately, your success as an organization. 

To discuss a recruiting audit or other recruiting assistance, contact us today. We placed over 1,900 candidates so far in 2021, and we still have a few days left!