How to Build a Scalable Full-Cycle Recruiting Process

Efficiency is a big deal in recruitment. However, a lot of recruitment processes are severely under-optimized. 

We can see this in the symptoms of inefficient recruiting.

For example, 54% of candidates have abandoned a company’s hiring process due to poor communication. A further 62% of candidates wish interview scheduling was automated—which makes sense when you realize 25% of candidates feel their time isn’t respected in the application and interview process.

If you face any of these issues, your recruiting process needs a revamp. There are plenty of ways to go about this, but in this Willo guide, we’re focusing on one of the most compelling—implementing a full-cycle recruiting process.

A full-cycle recruiting process is a scalable approach to hiring that covers all stages of the recruitment journey. It minimizes inefficiencies, streamlines communication, and ultimately leads to better candidate experiences.

Now, let’s dive into the process.

What Is Full-Cycle Recruiting?

At a basic level, full-cycle recruiting refers to a company’s entire recruitment process—from prep and sourcing to hiring and onboarding. It’s also an alternative approach to recruiting where one team or person (a full-cycle recruiter) is responsible for managing this entire process.

In a traditional recruiting process, a recruiter might handle prep, sourcing, and screening before handing candidates off to a hiring manager for selection. Then, there’s typically another handoff to HR when it’s time for hiring and onboarding.

With full-cycle recruiting, there are no hand-offs. One person or team is responsible for prep, sourcing, screening, selection, hiring, and onboarding. The result? A more streamlined, candidate-friendly recruiting process.

Why Should You Care About Full-Cycle Recruiting?

Increased efficiency

Traditional recruiting is often siloed. What we mean by that is there are typically different teams (or even departments) handling different parts of the process. That typically leads to:

• Repetition (e.g., asking for the same info over and over)
• Lag time (e.g., delays in responding to candidates)
• Miscommunications (e.g., giving candidates conflicting interview instructions)

With full-cycle recruiting, information is centralized, and the individual or team in charge acts as the main point of contact for everyone else involved in the process.

Better candidate experience

All of the issues we covered above can significantly impact candidate experience. Plus, at a higher level, a siloed recruiting process risks making candidates feel like they're starting from scratch at every stage.

Full-cycle recruiting gives candidates a single point of contact for their entire hiring journey. This means candidates get to build a relationship with their recruiter, who can provide timely updates, answer their questions, and guide them through each step of the process.

It’s important to understand just how much candidates value this stable connection. For example,  81% of candidates still think a human touchpoint is very important to their experience with a company.

Faster time-to-hire

Every handoff in a traditional recruitment process means a potential delay. With full-cycle recruiting, these delays are minimized.

How?

You can implement a full-cycle recruitment process where a single, unified team handles every stage of the process. With this setup, there are fewer (or no) handoffs. This leads to faster decision-making, fewer delays, and a more streamlined process overall.

How to Build a Scalable Full-Cycle Recruiting Process

We’ve covered the benefits. Now, let's look at some tips on how to build a scalable, full-cycle recruiting process.

1. Map out your recruitment process

Full-cycle recruitment is all about building a streamlined process. This starts with mapping out each step of the recruitment process—from sourcing to onboarding.

During this exercise, make sure you map out your recruitment process from both the candidate’s perspective and your team’s perspective. Be detailed, but try to avoid getting bogged down too much in the specifics.

Here’s a great example of what this looks like from Smaply.

Source: Smaply

Once you have your map, you should start identifying the elements of the journey:

• Touchpoints: These are points in your recruiting process where candidates interact with the company somehow. This interaction can be inbound (e.g., when a candidate applies for a job) or outbound (e.g., when you reach out with an offer).
• Bottlenecks: These are points in your process that are operating at less than 100% efficiency for some reason. Bottlenecks are relevant to full-cycle recruiting because one of the primary goals is to make sure each step of the process is as efficient as possible.

What’s the overall goal here? To get a detailed understanding of what your full-cycle recruiting process (and full-cycle recruiters) will need to deliver.

This brings us to…

2. Hire or train a full-cycle recruiter

Building a strong, scalable full-cycle recruitment process starts with the person (or people) who will manage it.

You have three routes to choose from when hiring a full-cycle recruiter:

Internal promotion

This is the quickest, cheapest, and often best way to fill the full-cycle recruiter role. Why? Because your employees are already very familiar with your processes. Plus, they already work for you, which means no additional hiring costs.

However, this method isn’t necessarily easy—there are three important considerations here:

• Training: Full-cycle recruiting can be very different from siloed recruiting roles. Some training may be required to ensure your internal candidate is ready for the role. Think about how you’ll manage this (e.g., in-house training or consultants) and its costs.
• Succession: Promoting someone to a full-cycle role means taking them away from their current role. Create a succession plan well in advance to minimize issues and have the soon-to-be full-cycle recruiter train their successor before taking on new responsibilities. This is especially important given the final consideration…
• Seniority: A full-cycle recruiter you promote will likely need to be one of your more senior recruiters. This isn’t a given, but experience with all of the recruiting stages will help them pick up the new role quickly.

External hire

External hiring may be your best bet if there are no internal options for the roles(s) or if you’re struggling with one of the other considerations. If you take this route, make sure you target your recruiting efforts by looking for full-cycle recruiting candidates with experience in your industry.

Also, screen (and test) for skills like:

• Communication
• Time-management
• Tech savviness (more in this in the next step)

Outsourcing

Your final option? Outsource full-cycle recruiting to a third-party agency or freelancer. Lots of recruiting teams are made up of both in-house and outsourced recruiters. It can be a great option if you need to scale up quickly.

3. Get your tools in order

Technology and full-cycle recruiting go hand-in-hand. 

Once you have a full-cycle recruiter (or team), you’ll need to organize your tools. The specific tools you need will depend on your process. However, we can offer guidance on what to look for in great full-cycle recruiting tools.

We recommend choosing tools that…

Increase recruiter capacity

Recruiting can be a very workload-intensive job. 

Some reps may spend hours sifting through resumes, scheduling interviews, and following up with candidates—all while trying to meet their own performance metrics. Traditional recruitment solves this problem by siloing the process. Full-cycle recruiting needs to solve it by implementing tools that increase recruiter capacity.

A great example of a tool that increases recruiter capacity? Async video interviews.

The beauty of async interviews is that one recruiter can set up an interview and send it out to hundreds or thousands of candidates. That potentially means hundreds of hours each month that your full-cycle recruiters can reinvest into reviewing responses.

But don’t take our word for it. MyTutor increased recruiter capacity by 75% by incorporating Willo’s async interviews into their process. That’s equivalent to adding 27 interviewers to MyTutor’s existing interview team.

Source: How MyTutor Increased Recruiting Capacity And Reduced Overheads

AI is also a powerful tool for increasing recruiter capacity. 

It can be used to:

• Screen resumes (e.g., AI-enabled ATS)
• Summarize interview transcripts (e.g., AI meeting assistants)
• Generate recruiting assets (e.g., AI writing tools)
• Answer candidate questions (e.g., AI chatbots)

We cover this topic extensively in our Hiring Humans ebook if you’d like to learn more.

Streamline knowledge transfer

One of the main benefits of full-cycle recruiting is improved information transfer.

 Since one person or team owns the entire process, they act as a single source of truth for all information related to candidates and the hiring process. That’s why we recommend adopting tools that align with this goal. 

Once again, video interviews are a great example. In a traditional interview, recruiters typically share information by either:

• Taking notes to share with stakeholders

…or:

• Recording and sharing the entire interview

The former is very unreliable—notes are typically short and incomplete. The former is very inconsistent—live interviews can vary wildly, making comparing one recording to another pretty difficult.

Async interview tools typically offer a bunch of features to streamline the flow of information. For example, Willo offers:

• Standardization: Every candidate gets the same set of questions, the same prep time, and the same response time, making direct comparison simple.
• Showcase: Invite stakeholders to view promising responses, discuss via comments, and minimize repeat questions.
• Scorecards: Our scorecards make it easy to track and compare candidate performance fairly and collaboratively.

Integrate with your tech stack

Full-cycle recruiting involves juggling many tasks and data points. To scale efficiently, you need hiring tools that integrate seamlessly with other tools in your tech stack.

The last thing you want is for your recruiters to manually enter the same candidate data repeatedly across different platforms. It’s the definition of a thankless task—there’s no upside, but there are potentially major downsides, like:

• Wasted time
• Errors
• Missed opportunities

With integrated tools, you can avoid most of these downsides entirely.

The first tool you’ll typically consider in full-cycle recruitment is your ATS or recruitment CRM. Every other tool you use—from sourcing to onboarding—needs to integrate with this for seamless data transfer. This includes your application forms, job boards, career page builder, onboarding software, and interview platform.

At Willo, we understand the importance of seamless integration. 

That’s why we integrate with popular tools like Greenhouse, Lever, and Workable. These integrations allow you to send interview invites to candidates at scale by pulling their data from your ATS and bulk sending invite links.

You can also store responses and evaluations in your ATS for easy access.

4. Explain the shift to your team

Next, it’s time to involve your team in the project and explain the shift.

Specifically, they need to know what’s changing in areas like:

• Hierarchy: Who do they report to? Are there new team leads or managers?
• Workflow: Will there be changes in the way tasks are assigned and completed?
• Communication: How will communication channels change?
• Roles and responsibilities: Do their roles and responsibilities change with this shift?
• Tools: Will there be new tools or technology to use? How will this impact their work?

Create a document or database for resources related to changes. Then, plan workshops or record async videos to train your team on the changes and provide them with resources. Finally, make sure they know who to reach out to if they have questions.

5. Build a highly qualified talent pool

A talent pool is a database of potential job candidates that you can access whenever you have an opening. Having a talent pool saves your recruiter a lot of time on sourcing, making full-cycle recruiting much easier to scale.

Here are three savvy ways to grow and nurture your talent pool:

• Create an "A-Team" ATS: Maintain a list in your employee or candidate CRM that includes profiles of your top-performing employees across the different roles you hire for. Then, when you need to hire for this role again, you can mine these profiles for details like source, communication channels, etc.
• Build a career page with open applications: Develop a user-friendly career page on your company's website. Include a section where candidates can submit their resumes and express interest in future opportunities, even if there are no current openings.
• Proactive referral network: Contact your professional network and request referrals for potential candidates. Build relationships with recruiters, industry leaders, and colleagues to expand your talent pool beyond your immediate circle.

6. Invest in your full-cycle recruiter development 

Investing in your recruiter's development pays off big time. 

With training, you can help them enhance their skill set and stay ahead of the curve. In turn, they’ll help you make the right hiring decisions. Plus, 92% of employees believe that growth opportunities improve their motivation to work. Full-cycle recruiters want growth opportunities, too. 

What are some development opportunities to consider? Here are some options:

• Training and development programs: Offer access to training programs that cover recruitment best practices, recruitment technologies, and legal compliance. Ask if recruiters want to attend conferences and workshops.
• Industry resources: Pay for subscriptions to industry publications, research reports, and online recruitment communities. This helps your recruiters stay current on industry trends and network with peers.
• Mentorship programs: Pair new full-cycle recruiters with senior recruitment leaders in your company or the industry. A mentor can provide guidance, share best practices, and offer support in tackling complex recruitment challenges.
• Cross-functional collaboration: Encourage collaboration with other teams involved in the hiring process, like HR, marketing, and hiring managers. This cross-functional approach fosters a more holistic understanding of talent acquisition.

Build a High-Performing Full-Cycle Recruiting Strategy

Full-cycle recruiting is a holistic approach to recruitment that helps you cover every base in talent acquisition. This approach brings benefits like faster hiring time, improved candidate experience, and a smoother overall process. 

Want to build a process that scales? Consider scalable tools that integrate well with your ATS. For example, with Willo, your recruiters can manage as many interviews as they need without breaking a sweat. We also integrate with popular ATS to ensure a smooth flow of data. 

Sign up for a free trial to see for yourself.