What Is Full-Cycle Recruiting?

A full-cycle recruiting process (sometimes called 360-recruiting) is a complete hiring process that includes all the stages of hiring, such as sourcing, screening, interviewing and onboarding. Whether in the context of corporate recruiting or agency recruiting, a 360-Recruiting desk is defined as a recruiter who manages the full lifecycle of the candidate hiring process.

What is Full-cycle Recruiting?

Full-cycle Recruiting is the process of hiring a candidate and making sure they are successful in their role.

It’s the entire process of finding, screening, interviewing, and onboarding a candidate. The full-cycle recruitment process includes sourcing (how you find candidates), screening (how you identify strong candidates), interviewing (what questions should be asked during interviews), and onboarding (the new employee’s first 30 days).

360-Recruiting starts from the initial sourcing process. This can include outbound cold email using a tool like Chatkick Talent CRM, to mining your team’s internal ATS. The full recruiting cycle ranges all the way down to project managing the candidate through the interview process with the client (e.g. hiring manager).

Why Is Full-cycle Recruiting Important?

Full-cycle recruiting involves the entire hiring process. This includes initial screening, interviews and assessments, offer negotiations and onboarding. A solid hiring process can help you attract and retain the right candidates faster.

The challenge of 360-Recruiting is that it requires a deep knowledge of both the business relationship and the candidate pool. Often 360-Recruiting is more common in smaller agencies or companies since there is often a need for a full range of skills.

At larger firms, recruiting is generally done as – you guessed it – a 180 degree model. This typically entails having dedicated specialists handle candidate sourcing and outreach, while recruiters manage the rest of the hiring process.

This split (180) model is generally how large companies tend to rely on external agencies: External firms handle niche sourcing while internal talent teams navigate the rest of the way after the prospective candidate is handed off.

How Can You Improve Your Full-cycle Recruiting?

A great way to give your full-cycle recruiting a boost is to borrow elements of your sales team’s strategy. Because the goals of recruiting and sales are so similar一closing/hiring the best deal/candidate for the product/role一it behooves you to pay attention to what sales teams are doing right. Here are some things you can learn from them:

• Develop a cohesive end-to-end strategy - Sales teams have a playbook they run for every deal, and they make sure that every salesperson knows it by heart. Likewise, recruiting should follow a similar step-by-step process to ensure that all interviewers understand what’s happening and when. This makes your team feel more comfortable and delivers a better candidate experience.
• Share information - Even though there’s a set sales playbook, people naturally add their own flair. Feedback should be a critical piece of the recruiting puzzle. Set up satisfaction surveys for your team as well as candidates. You’ll be surprised by how much you can learn and integrate into your process.
• Abide by clear guideposts - It’s easy for sales teams to get distracted by questions or requests from a potential whale client and run off-script. Enablement teams deliberately create checkpoints in the cycle to keep salespeople on track and limit the risk of losing such a deal. Recruiting should be the same way. Each role should have defined competencies, and candidates must have demonstrated a certain level of competency to move on to subsequent rounds of interviews. As candidates check off these boxes, you’ll know you’re getting closer and closer to finding the perfect fit.
• Be brand-conscious - Sales teams don’t want prospects to get the wrong idea about the product they’re selling or the company they work for, ever. In that same way, recruiters need to make a conscious effort to treat every candidate as a potential customer, personalizing outreach, automating follow-ups, and nurturing relationships over the long term. In addition, recruiters need to uphold the company’s reputation by paying attention to glassdoor reviews, sending out candidate satisfaction surveys, and fixing anything that might be turning candidates off.
• Generate inbound leads -In recruiting, your goal should be to have 90% of your leads be inbound. This is hard to do, and a lot of it will come from marketing. You need recruitment marketing and brand awareness to drive traffic to your careers page. Then, adopt a sales teams’ attitude of maintaining a wide funnel so that you can make a good impression on all applicants while still honing in on the most qualified prospects.