12 Key Recruitment Goals for TA Teams

October 25, 2024 —— Read time: 4 min

For a talent acquisition team, it's important to have a defined set of goals. It's easy to say there's just one goal in recruiting: to fill open positions. However, it's important for your team to track how efficiently and effectively you fill open job requisitions and how cohesively you work as a team.

Here are the 12 recruitment goals to help you accurately track how well your TA team is operating.

1. Reduce Time to Fill

Aside from “fill open positions,” “fill open positions faster” is the most obvious recruiter goal to have. Still, it's an important one to have. The efficiency of a company relies on the efficiency of the recruiter.

Attempting to meet a lot of the following recruitment goals will directly improve your req-filling efficiency, so you could see this as a main goal with several of the following goals as sub-tasks. Another important step in reducing your time to fill is to closely analyze every recruitment KPI and see where each member of your team is experiencing inefficiencies. Then, you can find recruitment courses that address those particular steps or have another TA team member teach the one facing slowdowns to learn how to get past those steps more efficiently.

2. Reduce Cost per Hire

This recruitment goal goes hand-in-hand with reducing time to fill. After all, if you fill open roles faster, you'll be spending fewer hours on recruiting for that role and therefore reduce the cost per hire. But there are other ways to reduce your cost per hire as well.

Another good way to reduce spend is to analyze the software and assets your TA team uses. With a bit of research, you might find that there are more cost-effective alternatives out there. Like reducing time to fill, reducing cost per hire could be seen as a main goal with many of the following as sub-goals.

3. Improve Quality of Hires

This goal is an important counterbalance to "reducing time to fill." While you could rush and hire the first applicant to speed things up, if they're not a good fit, they won't stay in the role, and you'll have to start the whole process over again.

So, how do you ensure the candidates you present to the hiring manager are high quality? First, thoroughly research each candidate. While this can slow down your time to hire, using a talent acquisition platform that pulls data from across the web can help speed up the process without sacrificing quality.

Secondly, make sure that you take advantage of all the different ways to find talent: inbound recruiting, outbound recruiting, and ATS rediscovery. By utilizing all three recruitment channels at once, you'll be able to find the best talent every time—whether they're an applicant, a passive candidate, or already in your ATS.

4. Elevate Your Employer Branding

Ultimately, it's easier to get a candidate interested in a role if you can convince them that your company is where they want to work. To do so, it's important that the employer branding you show to prospects is on point.

There are many ways each member of the TA team can contribute positively to your employer's brand image. Here are some tried and true suggestions:

  • Gather testimonials from new recruits who had a positive experience with the recruiting experience and share them wherever/whenever possible
  • Share positive experiences from recruiting at your company on social media
  • Monitor and respond to reviews on Glassdoor

This is by no means an exhaustive list, but it's a good place to start. We'll leave you with this thought: If you make it clear that you want to work there, it's way easier to convince prospects that they want to work there.

5. Improve Communication with Candidates

If job openings are the demand, then job prospects are the supply, and you don't want to do anything to harm your supply chain.

We've all been in a situation where we haven't heard from a recruiter in a couple of weeks, and we don't know if we're still in the running or have been ghosted. Maybe the process is taking a while because someone vital to the interview process is out of town. If your best candidate gets frustrated with a slow process and lack of communication, they may bow out of the running. Even if a candidate is ultimately rejected, they may be perfect for a role down the line. But if you upset them with a lack of communication, they may not want to get drafted back into your recruitment pipeline.

It can be hard to keep up with communication when you're managing hundreds of applicants and prospects. However, with the advancements in automated messaging nowadays, this really should be a non-issue. Communicate better and it will make hiring easier.

Additionally, implementing candidate surveys can provide valuable feedback on how well your team handles the recruitment process. These insights can highlight areas for improvement and ultimately help you achieve the following goal.

6. Reduce Employee Turnover

This goal is very closely aligned with the previous goal (you may have noticed a pattern of interconnectedness here). If you've smoothed out any complications with your recruiting process, new employees will be happier to be on board and more willing to weather the storms that sometimes accompany starting a new position. But there's also another important factor for keeping turnover rates low: you also have to ensure that culture and values are aligned between the company and the candidate.

If, for example, the company needs all of its employees to work overtime occasionally, but the candidate refuses to work more than 40 hours a week, then the fit is poor, and turnover is likely. Or if the company emphasizes working together, but the candidate is a steadfast lone wolf, the candidate likely won't last long in the role. You need to ensure that the company is right for the candidate and that the candidate is right for the company to keep turnover rates low.

A happier employee who wants to stick around for a while will also be more willing to help you meet the next goal.

7. Acquire More Employee Referrals

Even if you don't have the perfect candidate in your network, it's possible that one of the employees in your company has one in theirs. Find ways to encourage or even incentivize employee referrals to improve your role-filling efficiency. It's likely that the employee is already familiar with the referral's work and knows that they'd be a good fit for the company, so an employee-referred prospect would likely be a quick hire.

8. Improve Your Use of Automation

We're not going to say “integrating automation” is a recruiting goal because if you haven't integrated automation into your workflow by now, you're already leagues behind everyone else. Instead, you should be focused on improving your use of automation. Here are some ways to make automation a greater asset for your team:

  • Find new software or ways to use existing software to cut time spent on recruiting tasks even more
  • Find ways to automate as many menial tasks as you can
  • Utilize training offered by the recruiting automation software companies or go for an external AI in recruiting certification

Improving your use of automation is one of the many sub-goals that will ultimately shorten your time to fill.

9. Strengthen Relationships Within Your TA Team

This mostly applies to improving the recruiter-hiring manager relationship. Many TA teams seem to have a division between recruiters and hiring managers, even though they share the same overarching goals. It's easy to blame one or the other for this divide, but the truth is, it's on both parties to keep the relationship running smoothly.

There are many guidelines for how to strengthen relationships within the TA team, but they mostly come down to one thing: communication. Share your thoughts, strategies, and the steps you're taking to fill job requisitions and encourage your teammates to do the same. Give the hiring managers a heads-up about job requisitions that are about to come down the pipeline. If everyone communicates effectively, it'll make it easier to have a faster turnaround time.

Lastly, just as candidate surveys can provide valuable insights, implementing manager surveys can help you identify potential issues within your processes. This feedback will empower you to address challenges and strengthen the recruiter-hiring manager relationship, ultimately helping you achieve team goals more effectively.

10. Build and Nurture Healthy Talent Pools

The quickest way to fill an open role is by seeking out candidates you've already reviewed—those who are familiar with your company but just were not the right fit for previous positions. When you find such talent, plop them into your talent pool for later. Don't just leave them alone until you find the perfect role for them. Remember, the most open candidate is a nurtured candidate.

Automated messaging can help you nurture these candidates effectively. Use it to maintain regular communication, sharing updates and insights about your company. This approach keeps them engaged and informed, ensuring they remain enthusiastic about future opportunities with your team.

11. Strengthen Your DEI Strategy

The best company is a diverse company. There are many ways you can improve your DEI recruiting strategy. Some talent acquisition platforms have built-in filters to help you seek out diverse hires. There are also DEI recruiter certifications you can pursue to ensure you're using effective strategies. It's likely that your company has an overarching DEI goal, and you want to be seen as someone who supports that goal.

12. Stay Knowledgeable About Changes in the TA Field

Every member of your TA team should be encouraged to stay current in their talent acquisition knowledge. Recruiting conferences can help your team get outside perspectives on the current state of talent acquisition, plus offer networking opportunities. Talent acquisition courses are another great way to keep your TA knowledge up-to-date, and there are even recruiter certifications you can pursue to improve your knowledge of specific TA topics.

It becomes a lot harder to meet your recruitment goals if you don't have the right software available to do so. With hireEZ, you can automate candidate screening, sourcing, and outreach to speed up the recruitment process; and our reports show you exactly how efficient you are at meeting all of the most commonly tracked recruitment KPIs. We also offer intelligent talent pools and DEI filters. With hireEZ, you'll meet your recruitment goals faster than ever before.

Book a demo today to learn more.

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