What is Recruiter Capacity Plannning and why is it important?

December 2, 2022

With talent acquisition becoming more challenging and hiring requirements scaling up for organizations today, it’s vital to set your expectations right with the recruitment team. As you step into a new quarter or year and brainstorm your hiring needs, recruiter capacity planning must be the priority. But what does it mean?

How many recruiters does it take to build a team of 12 developers in 3 months? What has the available manpower achieved historically and what’s the output the current resources are likely to produce in the future? Organizations need to know the crystal clear answers to these questions.

To find out the real potential of your existing recruitment team, you need to trace and connect the numerous dots of the recruiting process.

Once the recruiting process is broken down and analyzed thoroughly, map them to your talent acquisition requirements and you will be able to derive an action plan. Sounds too overwhelming? Don’t worry - we will make it simpler for you in this blog.

But why do you need to plan your recruiter capacity? As an organization, you set certain goals for talent acquisition. In order to meet the growing demand and set up your recruitment team for success without causing work overload, capacity planning is absolutely essential.

Let’s now dive deep into the nuances of recruiter capacity planning. Stick around till the end to discover:

What is Recruiter Capacity Planning?
Why is Capacity Planning Vital for Organizations Today?
Things to keep in mind while planning workload for recruiters
How to Build a Recruiter Capacity Plan?

What is Recruiter Capacity Planning?

Every talent acquisition team should know its ultimate truth. It’s nothing but the answer to – is your team realistically capable of fulfilling the hiring needs? Here’s where recruiter capacity planning comes in. It compares your hiring goals to the existing capacity of your talent team.

Recruiter capacity planning refers to measuring and optimizing the hiring resources required to meet your talent acquisition goals. Every organization needs to ensure its recruiting teams are equipped adequately to successfully build the teams that will lead business growth.

On the other hand, it also means your TA teams don’t get overburdened by the headcount requirements and convincingly meet expectations.

Suppose you decide to transform your product by adding significant new features and subsequently need to scale up your engineering team. Effective recruitment capacity planning will help ensure that you have enough resources to cater to the needs seamlessly.

Optimal capacity planning involves analyzing historical data in order to predict the recruiting needs and your team’s potential to fulfill them. Just like the recruitment process, there is no one size fits all solution for planning your recruiter capacity.

A number of factors – both external and internal influence the resource planning for a business organization (more on this later). The capacity planning model you build for meeting your talent requirements in the future uses historical hiring data to evaluate and modify your recruiting strategies.

What are the Main Goals of Recruiter Capacity Planning?

Suppose your organization forecasts the hiring requirements for next year by Q4. By the time the recruiting teams are informed about the forecasted headcount needs, it’s already the middle of Q1. Now if you have the required resources to meet hiring requirements, planning your recruitment would take some time and you will only be a couple of months behind the yearly targets.

On the other hand, if you are not equipped with the required resources (which is often the case), you need to find and hire recruiters – which takes another couple of months.

Did you see what happened here? The hiring requirements forecast was given priority and ensuring enough capacity to meet those, was the second part. This sets businesses well behind their targets by a few months.

The goal of recruiter capacity planning is to prevent this from happening. To break it down further, you work towards ensuring that you have adequate resources to meet the upcoming hiring requirements of your organization.

Why is Recruiter Capacity Planning Vital for Organizations Today?

Numerous reasons account for the importance of a recruiter capacity model today. Let’s take a look at the most significant ones.

Forecasting your hiring accurately

First things first, forecasting your hiring capabilities depends on recruiter capacity modeling. In order to analyze your hiring potential – historical productivity analysis and predicting future performance correspondingly is the key. It’s vital to know how equipped your organization is for hiring the headcount growth you’re aiming for. Otherwise, you will be significantly overburdening the recruiting team, which causes more harm than good in the long run.

Adding up hiring resources when required

Now if your forecasted hiring requirements are more than what your current recruitment team can handle, you need to hire more recruiters. Building a recruiter capacity model for your organization will further help you in determining:

How many resources do you need to hire?
What are the desired skills to specifically look out for while hiring?
By when can hire those recruiters?

Effective recruiter capacity planning also enables you to build adequate talent teams.

Meeting business growth objectives

Business growth and sustainability are directly defined by the talent that you possess and acquire along the way. Effective recruiter capacity planning is vital for consistently meeting the organization’s growth goals.

Suppose you have planned to expand sales internationally. Now you need to hire salespeople from multiple geographies to support you in this goal. Having the recruiter capacity analysis in place will help you determine if the talent team is equipped enough for meeting business goals. Further, effective planning will help you achieve those goals seamlessly. As you know everything about the hiring team and its capabilities - making a decision around resourcing becomes easier.

Calculating and analyzing recruitment ROI

One of the most underrated advantages of recruiter capacity planning is the ROI analysis and optimization that follows. As you measure your recruiting team’s historical productivity and focus on metrics like cost per hire and time to hire – you can analyze the ROI with respect to the size of your hiring team.

Further, you can find out ways to improve your performance through effective recruiter capacity planning. Different organizations have varying definitions of ROI as their goals vary. While some want to hire fast, others want to priorly optimize the cost and quality of hire.

Identifying the gaps in your recruitment cycle

Data-driven analysis of your hiring team’s performance and recruitment process immensely helps you in identifying the gaps in the entire cycle. If your hiring team is not producing results even after being equipped well, it’s a clear sign the recruitment process needs to be optimized.

On the other hand, if the process is alright but you’re still significantly behind your targets, the recruiting team needs restructuring. Finding and filling gaps in the recruiting cycle consistently is one of the most productive steps you can take to strengthen your organization’s growth in the long run.

Building credibility in the organization

Top-level executives and stakeholders do not know much about the ground-level work required in recruitment and hence need to be brought into such discussions. Now without a recruiter capacity model, if the team and the hiring manager keep missing out on key targets, it’s hard for the leaders to bank on them.

An effective recruiter capacity plan helps avoid this problem. How? As your organization is aware of the current and required recruiter capacities – the credibility factor significantly improves.

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How to Build a Recruiter Capacity Plan in 6 Steps?

This step-by-step guide will help recruitment leaders towards effective capacity planning for their organization.

Be a part of talent requirements planning

A large number of organizations surprisingly do not involve recruitment leaders in the initial stage of their talent requirements discussions. In that case, you need to initiate and be a part of the planning that goes behind headcount requirements for the upcoming quarter or the year. Additionally, recruitment leaders should be closely connected with various vertical heads and VPs including Sales, Product, Finance, Tech, Marketing, Customer support, and others. The key is to be a part of headcount planning communications consistently.

As a recruitment leader, you need to deeply understand the different requirements of each department within the organization. Only then you will be able to convey and initiate your team’s requirements to support the headcount needs of respective verticals. It’s a crucial step for building a recruiter capacity plan as you ensure that all the stakeholders understand the current capabilities and do not expect beyond what is possible.

If you’re provided with requirements that need much more resources than are available right now – convey the availability and needs of the recruitment team clearly. Being ambitious is good, but you need to be realistic and have the access to the necessary resources for chasing them.

Sort out roles and form a priority order

Now that you know about the headcount requirements of each department, it’s time to sort out different roles. There’s no way you can linearly distribute the headcount requirements to each of your team members. This will create disparities as all the roles have varying complexities with respect to the effort required in sourcing and hiring.

So ideally you should set up a prioritization framework and sort the roles as per difficulty in filling them. For example – tech roles are always tricky to hire for, and take more time as multiple interview rounds are involved. Similarly, you can and should sort the open roles based on seniority. If you have been in recruitment for quite some time now, you would know how difficult it is to hire for VP or executive-level roles as compared to hiring entry-level roles or associates.

Apart from the complexity and seniority, a number of factors contribute to recruiters’ workload. Here are the top criteria you can use to assess the overall efforts required in hiring and distribute accordingly:

How common the role is to the organization: If the role you’re hiring for is pretty new, expect recruiters to take more time in aligning with it.

Source of hire: Find out whether the role will require active or passive sourcing and how competitive is the market right now for such talent.

Recruiter experience: Assess the ideal experience required for filling a particular role.

Location: This is especially applicable if you’re hiring from multiple locations. As recruiters have the cultural and regional knowledge required for some locations, you should leverage that.

As your draw out the framework of a capacity model in this step – try to keep t fairly simple.

Evaluate your past productivity

The basis for creating a recruiter capacity plan is knowing the historical recruitment metrics. You can also utilize recruitment industry benchmarks in case your organization is in an early stage and you don’t have the necessary data.

The primary recruitment metrics you would need to determine the team’s historical productivity are:

Total hires
Average-time-to-hire
Cost of hire
Offer acceptance rate
Offer decline reasons
Percentage of qualified candidates
Interview-to-hire ratio
Department wise time-to-hire

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All of these metrics and more are combined to calculate the productivity-per-resource (PPR). While evaluating your historical recruitment productivity, you will find an emerging pattern that has led to the good, average, poor, and excellent performance of your productivity.

Measuring and assessing all of these metrics will help you understand the efforts required during the past few years. So that you exactly know the various activities involved in hiring a certain number of candidates for respective departments per quarter or per year. Divide that by the number of recruiters in your team and you will get the PPR.

Analyzing your productivity and working on relevant measures to improve the recruitment metrics which are concerning – can help your recruitment team improve their performance.

Use generated insights to forecast future performance

It’s now time to calculate recruiter capacity, our ultimate goal. Suppose a recruiter hired 6 entry-level software developers per quarter last year, there are high chances they will match the previous performance this time too. Here’s where Productivity Per Resource (PPR) comes in.

Knowing about the historical PPR of your organization’s recruitment team, you can get the recruiting capacity by multiplying the total number of recruiters with it. If you’re wondering – “But the team will have a mix of experienced and comparably junior recruiters”, you’re right. If your PPR per quarter is 6, some will hire 4 while some will hire 8, so the average remains around 6 throughout the cycle.

However, your capacity model is still not ready. You need need to consider the attrition rate as well as the buffer time period. Attrition rate refers to the percentage of employees voluntarily leaving the organization over the course of your considered year.

So if your organization needs a total of 100 software developers in a year and the current headcount is 50, so you ultimately need 50 developers. Suppose your company’s attrition rate is 10%, you will be short of 5 software developers even though you hire 50. This happens if you don’t consider the attrition rate and plan your hiring accordingly.

The next factor you need to take into account is the buffer time for unavoidable scenarios. Your recruitment team too will face unexpected resignations along with sick leaves, parental leaves, and more which will delay the recruiting. Having a pre-decided timeline is important, but a buffer is equally beneficial when it comes to capacity planning.

Discuss the capacity with other stakeholders

In organizations with multiple recruiting teams and a dedicated talent leadership committee, you need to confirm if they are on board with the decided numbers with respect to current recruiting capacity. You calculated the PPR based on historical data but is their team equipped enough for delivering the decided number of hires per member?

A lot of factors contribute to the productivity of recruiters, including:

Current market conditions
Location of hiring
Type of candidates required
Roles involved
Payroll offered/budget for candidates
Employer Brand
Experience of recruiters involved in hiring
Recruiting tools used

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Getting the feedback of fellow recruiting leaders and adjusting the capacity model is critical for fulfilling the hiring requirements of your organization effectively.

Close identified gaps

Now that you have analyzed the historical data, forecasted the capacity, and taken feedback from recruiters - it’s time to lay down the action plan. First of all, you need to finalize the gaps between your recruitment team’s capacity and the organization’s talent acquisition goals. Some ways you can fill this gap are:

Adjust hiring goals: If the recruiting budget is limited or if your organization does not really need certain roles, you can lower the acquisition goals.

Grow internal recruitment team: Hire more people in your recruitment team. You can also try out contractors or even part-time recruiters in case of short-term requirements.

Outsource a part of your hiring: Hire third-party agencies experienced in niche hiring as per your requirements.

Adjust the hiring timelines: Do you really need to hire all the headcount requirements within one year? Discuss this with different stakeholders and if you can, adjust the hiring timelines to fulfill them with existing capacity but within an extended time period.

Leverage AI and automation tools: This is one of the most optimal solutions for mapping out your hiring requirements to the existing recruitment capabilities. Automate the repeated mundane recruiting activities using automation tools and boost your recruitment team’s productivity.

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Nurturebox enables talent teams to amplify their productivity significantly with comprehensive candidate sourcing automation. With your sourcing pipeline streamlined, you can also automate targeted engagement campaigns. Overall, your recruiters get enough time to interact with candidates and deliver more hires in the same period of time.

Amidst today’s noisy digital world, brands find it challenging to create meaningful connections with their customer base and target audience. Getting the target consumer’s attention and persuading them to buy from you gets even trickier. Hence, content marketing has become more crucial than ever for brands to attract, educate, and retain customers.

Content creation is a top priority for 80% of marketers, and there is no reason it shouldn’t be. Consistent, high-quality, and engaging content impacts your audience’s decisions through education and persuasion.

Depending on your business goals and requirements, the role of Content Marketers you hire will vary. The primary responsibilities revolve around forming consistent brand messaging and deciding upon a unique and identifiable voice, style, and pitch across various distribution channels.

From raising brand awareness to attracting a relevant audience to your website, boosting social media presence and engagement, generating leads, and building brand loyalty – content marketing drives all the growth efforts for your brand. When done effectively, it can help you:

Build positive brand awareness
Make your audience stick around for longer
Get better traction on social media
Gain more trust of your audience than ever
Generate qualified leads
Improve conversion rates
Boost business visibility with SEO
Position your brand as an authority
Cultivate loyal brand fans

While content marketing is a broad role with numerous areas of expertise involved, it’s vital to thoroughly understand your company’s current marketing goals and the related requirements. In this blog, we will dive deep into the step-by-step approach to hiring a Content Marketer.

What is The Role of a Content Marketer?

A Content Marketer must be deeply passionate about telling your brand’s story to the world. The objective is to educate and nurture the target audience to establish brand authority using thought-leadership and drive more people to buy from you.

As a candidate is expected to be a mediator between the brand and the target audience, they are primarily responsible for planning, creating, and sharing valuable content to grow their company’s awareness and engagement to bring more business.

To be more specific, the role of a Content Marketer requires a perfect blend of creativity and attention to detail in an individual. It’s a balancing role, as they need to ensure creating content that resonates and strengthens business relationships, using strategies that position your business as authentic and problem-solving.

Take a look at the core responsibilities of a Content Marketer that most businesses expect them to take over:

Research and Competitor Analysis: The first and foremost step to creating a content marketing strategy is effective initial research. It not only helps a Content Marketer understand the nuances of the industry through competitor analysis but also study and understand the target audience thoroughly. ‍
Building Content Marketing Plans: Once the competitor research and target audience analysis is done, a Content Marketer needs to work on the different plans for all the business objectives, targeted channels, segments of the audience, and the bigger marketing strategy. A content marketing plan typically consists of:
Specific goals along with a pre-decided timeline
Various channels to be targeted for content distribution
Types of content to be created
Budget for the entire staff, outsourced services, and paid promotion (Collabs and Ads)
Creating Editorial Calendar: Creating, managing, and maintaining a content calendar is one of the most crucial responsibilities of a Content Marketer. It is a centralized visual document that enables effective collaboration among the marketing team and helps Content Marketers ensure on-time production and delivery.‍
Content Creation: Once the strategy and calendar have been approved by relevant stakeholders, Content Marketers need to do the on-ground work. This task usually depends on the scale of your company and content marketing strategy. Suppose an organization already has a set of writers, then the Content Marketer doesn’t need to create content by themselves.‍
Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Producing quality content that educates your target audience and resonates with them, isn’t enough. You need to optimize your content creation to make it search engine-friendly. While most companies need a dedicated SEO specialist for keyword research and planning, Content Marketers need to closely collaborate with them and should be well-versed in the basics of SEO.

While the practices discussed above are primary responsibilities of a Content Marketer, they also need to be proactive with

Content editing and ensuring adherence to a certain style guide
Continous publishing and distributing content
Measuring and analyzing performance

How to Hire a Content Marketer: Step-By-Step?

Content marketing has become the key to driving growth for businesses. Unlike a few years ago, it’s not possible now to get away with a one-person team for content marketing. You need deeply trained individuals for specialist roles.

Let’s now dive into the step-by-step approach of hiring a Content Marketer. But before you even source your first candidate, you should have a clear expectation of the skillset and experience to look out for top content marketing candidates.

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Step 1: Create a Candidate Persona

Let’s sort out the priorities first, and decide the type of content marketing candidates you want to recruit. From exceptional research skills to storytelling, communication skills, relationship building, audience engagement, and more capabilities must be comprehensively considered. Identify and break down the skill requirements for Content Marketers:

What are the educational qualification criteria for the role?
How many years and what type of work experience do you want in candidates?
What are the specific skill sets you’re looking for?
Which industry experience would you primarily prefer?
Are there any tools your candidates should be hands-on with?
What are some personality traits that will fit your company?
Where do they look for a new job?
What are their career and life goals?

Forming a candidate persona by answering all these questions would ensure you are not shooting in the dark while sourcing candidates. Further, it helps you determine the traits of the ideal candidate, and plan your sourcing and recruitment strategy further.

Step 2: Document the Role Requirements and Decide on Your Recruiting Process

Next step is determining your role requirements suiting primarily to organizational needs and business goals. A content marketing professional is expected to own the entire content strategy, creation, and distribution. But what about your business’s unique requirements?

You might need someone comfortable with frequently creating long-form content pieces like blogs, ebooks, or whitepapers, or creating engaging video content based on your industry trends.

Talk to various relevant stakeholders for seeking the complete detailed company requirements for the role.

Before you enter the recruitment funnel, outline your talent acquisition process. Identify various strategies, channels, and other informational insights you would need – and maintain a collaborative document.

As you update the tactics and tweak your recruitment process for meeting hiring requirements optimally – keep your document up to date.

Step 3: Prepare a Content Marketing Job Description

Once you have finalized the role requirements with respect to your current content marketing goals and team, you can start sourcing candidates. Preparing the job description is the first task you’ll need to do.

Here are the necessary components you must have in your job description:

Job Title: The position you’re looking to fill. For example - Content Marketing Specialist or Content Marketing Manager.

Roles & Responsibilities: An outline of the candidate’s day-to-day activities. From ideation to implementation and the impact on the organization, everything should be covered.

Skill Requirements: Skills and abilities a candidate must have to perform the job successfully.

Perks and Benefits: The compensation details, perks of the job, and any other benefits.

About the Company: Why should a candidate consider working with your company?

Content Marketer Job Description Template

Role

The job of a Content Marketer is to perform competitor research, create user persona, and write plagiarism-free content for blog articles, social media, and the company website. They need to stay updated on the latest SEO techniques.

Responsibilities

Develop, write and deliver persuasive copy for the website, email marketing campaigns, sales collateral, videos, and blogs
Build and manage an editorial calendar; coordinate with other content crafters to ensure standards
Measure impact and perform analysis to improve KPIs
Include and optimize all content for SEO
Contribute to the localization of processes and content to ensure consistency across regions
Review and implement process changes to drive operational excellence

Requirements

Proven content marketing, copywriting, or SEO experience
Working knowledge of content management systems like WordPress
A well-maintained portfolio of published articles, blogs, copy, etc
Proven experience of working under pressure to deliver high quality output in a short span of time
Proficiency in all Microsoft Office applications, Google Suite
Fluency in English or any other required language

Soft Skills

Excellent verbal and written communication skills
Excellent writing and editing skills
The ability to work in a fast-paced environment
The ability to handle multiple projects concurrently
Strong attention to detail and the ability to multi-task projects and deliverables

Step 4: Source Candidates

Once you have the tailored job description in hand, it’s now time to do the groundwork and source candidates. Create an attractive job post to promote your job across job boards and social channels.

Begin with what to expect from the role at your company?
Why should candidates apply for the position?
Highlight the growth opportunities
State the company vision and mission
Briefly describe the recruitment process

Prepare an impactful job post and also execute paid job ad campaigns if required. The next step would be promoting your jobs on various job boards and hiring platforms. You can leverage the following platforms for hiring Content Marketers:

LinkedIn
Indeed
Instahyre
ZipRecruiter
Monster
GlassDoor
CareerBuilder

Not to forget - almost 3/4th of the workforce includes passive candidates, so you cannot miss out on passive talent sourcing as well. Reach out to qualified candidates on communities, LinkedIn, Twitter, and even Facebook to offer them suitable opportunities.

Step 5: Evaluate Candidates and Interview Shortlisted Ones

Once you have filtered candidates based on their experience and skills listed on their profile, it’s time to evaluate them deeply. Ask them to create a content strategy for your website, along with a value-adding content piece like a small blog. The topic of the article must fall within the scope of the strategy.

Interview the candidates whose profiles got shortlisted. Keep in mind the parameters covering skills, relevant experience, and personality traits of candidates.

Step 5: Make the Hire

Reach out to selected Content Marketers and communicate about the compensation.

Further, extend your offer letter to all the candidates who have been selected. In the case of passive sourcing, extend to only those who were aligned with you on the compensation and are willing to move forward.

Ensure having a deadline for the joining date and mention the necessary documents required by your recruiting team.

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Get the required documents and set up the offer agreements with candidates
Organize an orientation session for the onboarded candidates
Introduce them to the entire team and the marketing teams they will be working with
Guide the new candidates about your company management tools and communication channels
Provide candidates with forms for benefits and perks like Health Insurance.

Supercharge Your Hiring for Content Marketer with Nurturebox

Inbound candidate sourcing doesn’t work effectively anymore. Do you also find challenges in closing quality candidates through job posts even after spending on ads?

Don’t worry, passive candidate sourcing can be an optimal solution for hiring top content marketing candidates.

Nurturebox is a one-stop talent sourcing and engagement platform which is powered by automation. Here’s how you can source product managers from LinkedIn using Nurturebox:

Install the Nurturebox Chrome plugin and sign up.
On your LinkedIn profile, start sourcing Content Marketers with boolean searches stating the required experience from targeted locations and including other criteria
Add the qualified candidates to your sourcing campaign pipeline with just a click
Automate the candidate engagement through email, Whatsapp and LinkedIn direct messages for reaching out and nurturing candidates at scale.