7 Steps to a Scaleable Recruitment Plan in 2025

85% of leaders lack confidence in their hiring decisions when they make them. Implementing an effective recruitment strategy can flip that stat on its head.

Bad hires cost companies thousands of dollars (and that’s without the invisible burden of frustrating rehiring timelines and a hit to team morale). The good news is this is avoidable. A good recruitment plan aligns with your company’s goals and effortlessly identifies candidates who will propel the company forward while thriving in their own right.

Our seven-step plan helps you build your own rockstar recruitment plan and reveals the five most common mistakes we’ve seen in our decade of experience. Make sure you read to the end!

TL;DR — Key Takeaways

• A good recruitment strategy is a vital investment. Done well, it lowers hiring costs, attracts top talent, closes skills gaps, and future-proofs your company.
• Your recruitment strategy will look different depending on your overall business objectives for the near future.
• After defining your goals, improve your hiring process by nailing the sourcing and selection parts. This will save you time and keep your hiring fair.
• Some common mistakes are eliminating the salary in the job description, focusing on the wrong goals, writing vague job descriptions, and using painfully long hiring processes.
• A plan is only as good as the tools that execute it. Lean on technology like Toggl Hire to help with the heavy lifting and build your recruitment strategy.

The importance of a recruitment strategy

Having a solid recruitment plan for each job opening — and a go-to hiring strategy for your company overall — will make your life soooo much easier. Not only does it standardize and streamline hiring, but it also aligns it with your company’s priorities and goals.

Nail your recruitment strategy, and you’ll also:

• Attract skilled talent: Becoming crystal clear on your objectives means your job descriptions get sharper and attract the exact candidates you need.
• Boost retention: If you do a better job of identifying and hiring the right people (thanks to your fool-proof strategy), the likelier they are to feel fulfilled and stick around.
• Lower recruiting costs: A systemized process = more efficient = cheaper to run.
• Improve employer branding: A slick, efficient, and organized recruitment plan is a good look and could go a long way to enhancing your reputation as a desirable employer.
• Close skills gaps: By analyzing your recruitment needs, you’ll identify the skills your organization needs but doesn’t yet have. Bake this into your recruitment plan, and you’ll stay ahead of the competition.
• Future-proof your team: A good recruitment strategy anticipates upcoming industry and recruiting trends, challenges, and technologies and builds them into the plan. Think of your hiring plan like a roadmap that looks 6-12 months into the future. Being proactive means you’ll have a steady pipeline of talent — the right kind of talent — which reduces the risk of skill shortages in the future (something 74% of companies struggle with in 2025).

While this is all fine and well, before actually creating your strategy, it’s important to note that there’s a difference between a recruitment strategy and a plan, though! 👇

	Recruitment Strategy	Recruitment Plan
Description	An overarching approach or method an organization uses to attract and hire new talent, focusing on long-term goals, types of roles to fill, ideal candidate profiles, channels for reaching these candidates, and employer branding.	A detailed, step-by-step roadmap for implementing the recruitment strategy. It outlines specific tasks, timelines, responsibilities, and resources required to execute the strategy.
Focus	Long-term goals, the ‘what’ and ‘why’ of the recruitment process.	Short-term objectives, the ‘how’ and ‘when’ of implementing the strategy.
Components	Employer branding, sourcing strategies, candidate profiles, diversity goals, etc.	Job posting schedules, resume screening criteria, interview timelines, assigned responsibilities, etc.
Purpose	To define the overall approach and objectives in attracting and hiring talent.	To detail the exact steps and resources required to implement the strategy.
Flexibility	More adaptable to changes in the market, industry, or company objectives.	Less flexible due to its task-oriented and time-bound nature.
Outcome	Establishes the direction and focus of the recruitment efforts.	Facilitates the successful execution of the recruitment strategy.

7 steps to build a recruitment plan

We’ve put together a broad brushstroke plan so you can build an effective recruitment plan from scratch. Each step comes with various sub-steps based on your hiring needs and goals.

For example, if you’re a tech company hiring a ton of developers, you might focus more attention on the sourcing and selection processes. If you’re a newer company that just closed a funding round and is doing a big hire for the first time, you might want to put extra time into thinking about your goals and needs.

Finally, accept that your first draft will suck. The important thing is to refine it over time based on what works and what doesn’t.

1. Define your hiring goals

If you don’t know the destination, how can you chart a course to reach it? Every successful plan is built on the scaffolding of relevant goals. You want to make sure your recruitment efforts align with company goals in a supportive way.

For example, if you plan to grow revenue by 5x over two years, your recruitment focus might be attracting and retaining top sales and marketing leaders. If you want to build and launch a new product, you might focus on reducing your time-to-hire to snag the best product manager out there — FAST.

Some other goals could be:

• Reducing cost-per-hire
• Automating more HR admin tasks
• Increasing qualified candidates per open position
• Boosting candidates from an internal referral program
• Reducing employee turnover
• Improving diversity hiring
• Building a strong talent pipeline

Whatever goals you land on, they’ll guide the recruitment plan you build. A strategy designed to retain talent will look different from one made to minimize time-to-fill.

2. Figure out your hiring needs

After determining your goals, figure out the skills your team needs, both now and in the future. The best way to do this is with a skills gap analysis.

This process anticipates future hiring needs and workforce requirements. It can also help you understand which departments need extra support and why. In a nutshell, you’ll need to:

• Identify required skills for the roles you’re hiring for: Consider critical, non-critical, hard, and soft skills for each position.
• Assess current skill levels: What skills are already present in the team, and to what degree?
• Analyze gaps: Compare the required skills with the current skill set. What’s missing? Is hiring new people or upskilling existing team members the best course of action? Considering emerging technologies, industry trends, or upcoming projects, do you anticipate any new gaps arising soon? Plan for those, too.
• Develop an action plan: How will you address the gaps you’ve identified? Targeted training programs, mentorship, or recruitment are all equally valid choices.

This exercise highlights where recruitment has the highest potential to make an impact. It’s best conducted with HR and team leaders — that way, everyone is on the same page and can align on resource allocation and strategic approach early on.

3. Set a sourcing strategy

Now you know what roles you’re hiring for and why. Next, hiring managers should design a multi-channel approach to sourcing potential candidates. This goes beyond copy-pasting the same job postings across five job boards and LinkedIn. Social media, employee referrals, niche industry forums, newsletters, and even specific job boards should ideally work together to pull in the right candidates.

Of course, your approach to candidate sourcing should still be strategic. You want to be where your ideal candidate is. For example, a healthcare organization looking to hire graduates for their NGO will likely attend university job fairs, advertise within student job boards, and post flyers around campus. A tech company might focus on remote job boards, LinkedIn, and employee referrals.

4. Refine your selection process

Picture this: Rather than sifting through thousands of resumes, you send all your candidates a skills assessment. Now, you can sort them by competence with one click, based on their score. Toggl Hire’s skills tests let you do exactly this (yes, really).

Data-driven recruitment methods like these save time, deliver better-quality hires, and improve diversity by stamping out bias. Follow up with your top scorers to schedule an interview. Then, follow a structured interview process to fairly evaluate candidates and, again, reduce bias.

Gather feedback continuously from candidates to improve their experience as much as possible. It builds your employer brand while also revealing blind spots you may have in your recruitment strategy.

We can speak from experience — at the end of a Toggl Hire skills test, we ask candidates about their experience. Most provide long-ish texts of feedback we collect over the full recruitment cycle and revise before launching our next job openings.

5. Don’t forget about the candidate experience

Your candidates are your currency for attracting top-tier talent. Treat them well, and your reputation will blossom. One of the candidates’ biggest complaints is the lack of timely and clear communication. 47% of surveyed candidates admitted that a lack of status updates or slow email replies would cause them to quit the recruitment process entirely.

Anyone candidates you don’t move forward with post-interview deserves at least a few lines of personalized feedback. This helps them feel valued and maintains the rapport you’ve worked so hard to build. Achieve this by using templated emails for common milestones in your recruitment process. Many applicant tracking systems tools allow this functionality to maintain a personal touch at scale.

It also makes asking for feedback on the process easier if the relationship is still warm despite an unsuccessful application. Encourage candidates to fill in feedback forms or leave a review of their experience on platforms like Glassdoor to build your employer brand.

6. Invest in the onboarding process

Joining a new team is disorientating and overwhelming. Help make your new hires’ integration as smooth as possible with a sleek onboarding process that includes:

• A personalized orientation, ideally from your direct manager or a peer. Start by showing your new hire how to set up accounts, where to find essential documents, and how internal communication is handled.
• Structured training on any standard procedures, company policies, and organizational values
• Set up any standing meetings required to mentor and supervise your new hires in their first weeks. This gives them a structured space to ask questions as they arise.
• An intro to the culture from your peers

You might find it tempting to skip this part — the candidate’s already through the door, right? Wrong! You got ‘em, now you gotta keep ‘em. That’s how to hire employees 101. Good onboarding prevents high turnover while also boosting productivity and job satisfaction.

7. Use tools to support the entire recruitment process

Let’s be real — it’s 2025. You don’t need (or want) to be drowning in endless, manual tasks. But many recruitment tech tools are equipped with AI functionality to speed you up and keep brain rot to a minimum.

Many different kinds of recruitment tools exist to automate repetitive tasks like email communication and interview scheduling to streamline the candidate experience, then conduct skills assessments. (Hint: You’ll want to use Toggl Hire for these core tasks). Sourcing tools are also great time savers — HireEZ and Recruit ’em come to mind.

Common mistakes businesses make when creating recruitment plans

…according to our hiring managers, fresh off the heels of a hiring spree!

In all seriousness, we’ve been in the recruitment tech game for over a decade (did you know Toggl Hire started as Hundred5 back in 2013?), and we’ve learned a thing or two along the way.

Here are the five most common issues we consistently hear when candidates discuss Toggl’s hiring process compared to other companies.

Focusing on the wrong recruitment goals

A house can’t stand on a wobbly foundation. Setting the wrong goals loses top talent, wastes resources, and leads to poor hires. Aligning recruitment goals with business goals means you’re actually going after the right and best person for the job to drive the business forward. This can look like hiring bilingual candidates to support expansion into new markets or reducing bias to build in diversity and culture add.

Making the hiring process too long or complex

Candidates hate long hiring processes. Their time is precious, and let’s be honest, you’re not the only company they’re talking to. This can deter top talent, who have the privilege of being spoilt for choice.

As with most things in life, less is more. Streamline and simplify your recruitment journey to keep candidates engaged.

You can do this by introducing skills testing to speed things up, being upfront about compensation in your job descriptions (we always share the salary for Toggl’s job openings), or giving prompt candidate feedback.

Writing horrible (or really vague) job descriptions

If you try to appeal to everyone, you end up appealing to no one. Be detailed, descriptive, and clear as a bell. “But…but…I won’t attract as many applicants if I’m super specific!” I hear you tremble.

Maybe not, but the ones you do attract will be muuuuch better suited for the role. Candidate quality just shot up, thank you.

Before hitting publish, check your job description for these common pitfalls we see all the time:

• Vagueness — signals to the candidate you don’t know what you want
• Excessive jargon — it gives people the ick
• Neglecting to talk about company culture — you’re people, not robots. Show your personality and values!
• Unrealistic expectations — you know those job posts that expect a social media manager to also be a photographer, videographer, SEO whizz, producer, graphic designer, content marketer, and campaign manager? Yeah, no….
• No salary in the description — 👏 this 👏 is 👏 a 👏 non-starter. Respect candidates’ time by letting them know your pay package upfront (and we don’t mean “between $30,000 – $150,000.”) This saves you from wasting time on people who aren’t aligned on price.

Forgetting about their employer brand

A strong brand attracts talent by showcasing what makes your workplace awesome. Share authentic employee stories, highlight your values, and stay active online to build trust. When your brand resonates, the right candidates will see you as the place they want to be.

Focusing on the wrong aspects of candidates

Focusing too much on the wrong traits (like obsessing over technical skills while ignoring cultural fit) can backfire big time. The key is balance. A well-rounded approach helps you hire people who thrive and contribute to your team’s success.

Collaborative hiring across 2-3 rounds of interviews can be useful here to get a 360 view of your candidates and make the best hiring decision for the company.

Use Toggl Hire for consistently successful recruitment

Even the best recruitment plan isn’t helpful if you lack the tools to execute it. Toggl Hire was built to make hiring as easy as pie, regardless of your recruitment goals.

Toggl Hire simplifies every stage of recruitment, making it your companion to the perfect recruitment strategy — without the steep learning curve of traditional, bulky recruiting tools. It’s best for:

• Speeding up the engine with skills assessments: Cut through time-wasting resumes and evaluate candidates based on merit in just one click.
• Fast-tracking to the shortlist: Automated screening workflows save time by filtering out unqualified applicants, allowing them to focus on the candidates who truly fit your needs.
• Standardizing for simplicity: Toggl Hire’s centralized platform ensures clarity and consistency across the team.

To top it all off, Toggl boasts a fantastic candidate experience — it’s one of the things we’re most proud of. Create a free Toggl Hire account and see what all the fuss is about.