2024

What is Full Life Cycle Recruiting?

Recruiting process act as a backbone for the progress of an organization. Without new talent, it is challenging to grow and maintain an innovative environment in a company. However, attracting talented and skilled candidates takes a lot of time and effort.

Numerous companies struggle to hire skilled employees that are the right fit for their teams. Finding new employees is not easy, especially when employing a traditional recruitment process. The traditional requirement process is not so effective as it involves a lot of paperwork. That is where full recruitment life cycle recruiting comes into play.

What is Full Life Cycle Recruiting?

Full life cycle recruiting is a process that allows you to find the top-notch talent in the industry that matches your organization’s needs. Not only does it saves time and effort for companies, but it also provides a healthier environment for new employees to work in.

This article covers some exciting information about Full Life Cycle Recruiting and how it works. Let’s start.

If you’re interested in learning via video, watch below. Otherwise, skip ahead.

Full life cycle recruiting refers to a recruitment strategy that includes all aspects of hiring a new employee for a company. The entire recruitment process covers everything from creating a job description to onboarding the new employee.

Recruiters play an essential role in the full life cycle recruiting process. They help companies find people to hire, interview them and perform reference checks. This type of recruitment strategy also includes training new employees hired by using this way of recruitment.

In a small organization, full-cycle recruiting is supervised by an HR professional. A whole team of HR professionals is assigned to perform full-cycle recruiting in a larger firm. In such firms, each HR professional specializes in a particular recruiting process and the whole process is overseen by an HR leader.

For example, one professional looks for prospective employees while another is responsible for a reference check. The responsibility to train the recruits may fall on a third HR specialist.

What are the 6 Stages of Full Life Cycle Recruiting?

The full life cycle of recruiting is a comprehensive process. It is comprised of six main stages. All six stages are important and work together to ensure a successful hire. Let’s take a look at the stages of the full cycle recruiting process.

Also, if you’re willing to master human resources full life cycle recruitment process, then have a look at some of our top-rated HR certification courses. Don’t forget to check out the syllabus before enrolling so you’re aware of all course learning outcomes:

Human Resources Certifications

1. Preparing

The preparation stage deals with planning for hiring new employees. This stage begins with creating a plan on how to go about hiring. You define what type of candidate you want to hire at this stage. You also determine the skills and experience level that your new hire should have.

To define the ideal candidate, you need to consider the post you want to fill. You should think about responsibilities for the new hire and the skills required to accomplish assigned tasks. You need to consider the company culture and values, too.

Though this stage is quite simple, you need to consult your team members to ensure you are on the right track. Your team will help you set the best criteria for the recruitment process.

Full lifecycle recruitment roadmap

Once you define the ideal and passive candidates, you create a job description. Keep the description clear and compelling. Include all your requirements and expectations.

Let the candidate know what he or she can expect when working for your company. You can also use job description templates to create a professional job description.

2. Sourcing

After the preparation stage is over, comes the sourcing stage. In this stage, you need to start sourcing candidates. The entire process involves posting the job description you have created in the previous stage on the job boards. You can search for candidates from the following sources:

  • Job Posting Websites. You can attract talented candidates for the job you offer by posting your job openings on popular job websites. You can place the job details on such websites as Monster, Ladders, Indeed, and many others. Make sure to post the job opening on various websites.
  • Social Media Sites. You can use social media sites to attract new talent to your job openings. Social media sites are also great for recruitment purposes. Place the job details on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Make sure you promote it on regular basis.
  • Recruitment Agencies. You can use recruitment agencies to hire the most talented candidates out there. Most agencies have access to a wider talent pool, and they can help you find the best employees in a short amount of time.
  • Employee Referrals. Employee referral is another good way for searching for new talent. Let your current employees know about the job opening to get some talented people to apply for your job.

3. Screening

In this stage of full-cycle recruiting, you check all the applications you have received. You will get a big pile of resumes from sourcing which you need to screen to choose the best candidates. It is the most time-consuming stage of the recruitment process.

While screening the applications, you need to look through all the candidates’ resumes, qualifications, and good qualities. You can decide about the screening methods with your team members and recruitment agency.

Some organizations conduct phone interviews for screening purposes after shortlisting the candidates that stick out from the pile. Once you have chosen a few candidates, you can also conduct in-person interviews.

4. Selecting

After screening all the applications, it is time to choose the best candidate. Make sure you compare all candidates and select those most likely to succeed in the new position. Do not base your decision on one or two criteria, as this may not be fair. You can make a list of the capabilities and incompetences of each candidate along with your team members.

Also, conduct interviews of candidates you have shortlisted by the above three stages. For carrying out interviews, prepare interview questions that are relevant to the job position. You can also get help from reference assessments and background checks.

5. Hiring

In this stage of the recruitment process, you hire the candidate who you think is most suitable for your company. Follow through with all employment interviews and prepare a solid offer for the candidate. You can share the job offers by sending a formal offer letter.

Make sure you include all the details in the job offer, such as working hours, salary, and benefits. You may have to negotiate the terms of the offer with the candidate if he or she wants to change something for successful job placement.

6. Onboarding

After the new employee starts working at your company, you need to begin the onboarding process. It is an important stage of the recruitment process because it determines what success the new hire will bring to the organization.

Onboarding is a vital stage of the hiring process. It aims to make the new hire productive at work. It makes it easier for the onboarded employee to adapt to the working environment.

It starts with arranging a meeting between the recruit and HR manager where the onboarding process is explained in detail. Onboarding also involves introducing the new hire to the company, conducting a training session, and introducing the new employee to other employees in the office. You may also provide information to new employees about the culture of your company, benefits, policies, and other tasks they will need to perform.

What are the Advantages and Disadvantages of Full Life Cycle Recruiting?

Below you can find a list of pros and cons of full life cycle recruiting.

Pros and cons of full lifecycle recruitment

Pros

Following are the benefits you get by employing full life cycle recruiting:

  • Greater Success Rate. The success rate is high with full-cycle recruiting, as you can find your perfect candidate with the help of recruiters and in-house recruiters. You can also assess your employees with this process.
  • More Accountability. The HR professionals are responsible for conducting all stages of the hiring process. It makes them accountable for the hiring outcomes.
  • Cost-Efficient Hiring. Full life cycle recruiting is beneficial because it ensures that the company gets qualified employees for open positions. Employers can save a lot of money by avoiding the costs of hiring employees who are not eligible to do the job.
  • Lesser time for hiring. You can save a lot of time by going through all the stages. Lesser time is spent on hiring as all the steps are done systematically.

Cons

Following are the disadvantage that comes with full life-cycle recruiting:

  • Not Applicable for All Types of Companies. Full life cycle recruiting is suitable when there is a limited number of applicants. In general, a single person takes care of the entire hiring process. However, when the applicants exceed a certain limit, a single HR professional can’t handle everything. In such conditions, this process becomes cumbersome and requires more HR professionals. It, in turn, increases the cost of recruiting. Also, it affects the quality of hiring as multiple professionals are involved in one stage of recruiting.
  • Requires Multiple Professionals. This hiring process requires a large number of people to work on it. Each hiring stage needs certain skills to handle it in an efficient manner. As a result, you need to hire an HR professional for each step of recruiting.

Conclusion

We can conclude the details with the saying that full life cycle recruitment is a process that involves finding the best talent that fits perfectly according to your organization’s needs. The full cycle recruitment process generally comprises 6 stages and has its own list of merits and demerits that we have already discussed above. The process is crucial for the organic growth of an organization, thus it must be carried out with a strategical approach.

 


If you are new to Human Resources and are looking to break into any HR Operations position, we recommend taking our HR Certification Courses, where you will learn how to build your skillset in human resources, build your human resources network, craft an excellent HR resume, and create a successful job search strategy that lands you a sought-after HR Operations job.

author-image
Josh Fechter
Josh Fechter is the founder of HR.University. He's a certified HR professional and has managed global teams across 5 different continents including their benefits and payroll. You can connect with him on LinkedIn here.