Services
Vacancy Design
Vacancy design changes how teams think about the importance of planning a job, hiring process and career path. It removes an administrative burden on hiring managers and aligns all recruitment activity with organisational brand, vision and strategy. After researching associated competitor hiring, market for talent and current talent structured, we identify a singular target hire and create job description, advertising content, hiring process & post-hire L&D with them alone in mind. Vacancy design is absolutely proven to reduce agency spend and time to hire while driving up retention & brand perception. Once created, you own all material and can use it over & over to make unlimited appointments.
Selection Process Design
Typical recruitment strategies focus on pushing high volumes of applicants into a “funnel” yet put little to no focus on how all but one of these individuals leaves it. True recruitment branding is about creating positive hiring experiences for every single potential employee, a goal best achieved by considering all entry and exit points to a hiring funnel with the focus on applicant experience. From public-facing content and advertising, through ATS administration, equipping Talent teams with meaningful pre-selection process and minimising bulk interviews, we design optimal, integrated processes that make every job seeker feel great about your brand while ensuring high-value talent are seen, screened and engaged quicker.
Post-Hire Support and Retention
Organisations put so much cultural emphasis on the challenge of finding applicants - at times spending years hunting unicorns - only to leave eventual hires with no defined role, career plan or L&D goals. The single simplest way to reduce recruitment spend lies not in creating a talent team capable of finding the unfindable, but to provide existing staff with the personally tailored, organisationally-aligned career paths needed to retain them. Our job descriptions consider typical career goals for a given employment market against each employee’s capabilities to create unique L&D plans with promotional targets that reflect organisational and departmental goals. All of this is produced in clear, simple language employees buy into and is accompanied by systems for positive appraisals that ensure mutual support for career goals.
Hiring Strategy Design
For start-up businesses little is more important to successful growth than that small group of initial hires. These individuals have the power to make or break a CEO’s vision, yet with choice so limited it’s easy to let culture fit take a back seat in selection. Hiring for growth must consider where a business’ roadmap puts leadership careers over time, the growth of departments around them, and their role in embedding organisational values in subsequent hires. Salt & Water can create short or long-term hiring roadmaps that consider business goals, departmental goals, typical career paths, budgets, and culture to shape vacancies that greatly reduce risk in this key phase of growth. Our systems have been the anchor behind growth from two to over 300 heads.
Culture-First Hiring
By getting to the heart of an individual vacancy and creating attractive L&D goals, Salt & Water can replace a significant proportion of any selection process with potential-based criteria centred on values. The critical long-term impact on organisational unity of purpose and staff retention cannot be underestimated. If you are yet to formalise your values, we can work with your leadership team to develop and embed them in hiring; and where you do have them we can investigate their viability in target job markets then adapt to make hiring achievable.
Managing and Vetting Suppliers
While useful in increasing coverage for vacancies, agencies are expensive and frequently mismanaged. Salt & Water have created numerous cost-effective supplier lists, embedding systems that shifted agencies from outsiders cut off from meaningful contribution to a fundamental and beneficial aspect of attraction and selection process. We ensure agencies are accountable for selection decisions that become completely visible, intelligible and part of standard organisational data capture. We equip them with processes that make managing regrets positive as part of a holistic contribution to recruitment brand.
ATS Review/Setup
The manufacturers of Applicant Tracking Systems like automation. The more information applicants can provide upfront, the easier it is to administer their journey through a selection process. The more they can be pre-screened without human contact, the smaller the number of “CVs” an employer needs to review. What’s typically missed, though, is that in-demand applicants rarely engage in impersonal, prescriptive hiring processes where the administrative burden is placed on them. Salt & Water are experts in configuring digital and non-digital selection to deliver a personal, positive approach for every applicant without burying talent teams in excessive administration. We have also helped organisations select and configure the right Applicant Tracking System where none existed.