Building a properly supported in-house recruiting organization, or developing the support you need from an RPO, is a key to ensuring that you get the right people into the right job at the right time. It doesn’t stop there, once you’ve determined the number of people you need, you also need to consider the level of expertise required, the seniority of the recruiters supporting you. Your solutions must be data driven, strategically aligned and executable.

Having studied the challenges in getting the right people into the right jobs at the right time, we have built resource models to support staffing agencies, RPO providers and in-house regional and international recruiting teams. After working with teams of recruiting leaders, consultants, and recruiters themselves, we know this can be applied to virtually any organization.

Here are some of the things we’ve learned:

  1. Dig into the data! Start with an understanding of how many people you’ve hired year over year. Additionally, you’ll want to examine the talent market for those roles. Ensuring you look at it through the lens of talent segmentation will help you in determining what your team will look like.

  2. Look at your projected growth, determining where you will need external hiring versus internal mobility. You’ll need different strategies for each of these hiring approaches.

  3. What were the inherent challenges in hiring for roles in the past and what does the talent market look like for your projected future external hiring needs?

These steps will provide you with a complexity equation and directly relates to the expertise level of recruiters required. High volume, lower skilled requirements doesn’t mean it will be easier, don’t be trapped by that idea. High volume lower paying jobs generally have lower retention, so you’ll want to factor that in.

Once you’ve analysed all the data, and considered the talent market, you’ll want to look at your processes as well.

  1. Recruiter SOPs, are you regulated and have additional requirements that recruiters must complete? If so, it will mean tweaking the equation.

  2. Determine where your hand-offs are and whether or not that complicates a recruiter’s daily functions.

  3. Finally, is your technology optimized? Are your systems helping you speed up the recruiting function or slowing it down?

The math used to determine how many recruiters you need at what level is standard with some flexibility based on the process and technology analysis. In highly performing teams, considering today’s competitive talent market and that recruiters manage more technology, and sift through hundreds more candidates than ever before, the following generally applies:

A recruiter can be responsible for anywhere from 50 hires per year (Executive or Senior IT roles) to 350 hires per year for high volume minimally skilled roles.

Digging into how recruiting teams are set-up, how they deliver to their clients, and then using data, workforce projections and the talent marketplace are all elements of determining what your organization needs for recruitment support.