Recruiting the right employees is crucial to any business in any year, but with the job market changing, recruiters must adapt with it.

Ian Moriarty, operations director of Cheltenham-based recruitment specialists Hooray  knows it's best not to hang around if you want to secure the top candidates.

Typically, the first couple of months of the new year brings a new pool of candidates to the job market. The start of the year also brings in a flood of new job roles with a lot of people adopting a "New Year, new job" mentality and looking for pastures new.

It may be that recruitment budgets have been reset and so now is the right time to bring in new team members.

Or now with the Brexit process now fully underway, businesses are starting to feel more settled and are ready to push on with recruitment plans for 2020.

Generally, this results in having more choice when it comes to picking the best candidate for your new job, but as with all markets, supply and demand dictate.

So, it's worth bearing in mind, when recruiting within your own organisation, that good candidates will always be in high demand and may have numerous opportunities on the go.

They could well get lured into staying with their current employer when it comes to the point of handing in their notice.

It is imperative to have your recruitment process mapped out before you start placing job advertisements or instructing a recruitment agency to start their search.

When you've pressed the 'go' button, do you know when you want the candidate to start?

What does the recruitment process look like? Are you doing a telephone interview first and then one face-to face or will you do two face-to-face interviews?

Who will the candidate/s be meeting and are they around? Have you pencilled in interview time slots already?

All these types of questions need answering before you start recruiting and your recruitment process needs to be slick, concise and as condensed as possible.

Otherwise you run the risk of losing your preferred candidate to another opportunity.

It goes without saying, that recruiting the right people within your business is absolutely paramount.

This comes down to not only having a robust recruitment process in place from the outset, working with specialist recruitment experts - like Hooray - but also looking at retention.

Because what is the point of spending all your time and resources on recruiting top talent from the market to only lose them six months down the line to a competitor? Catastrophic!

Employee retention and engagement is a seriously hot topic and rightly so.

Gone are the days where it would be all about putting candidates through their paces and them really having to persuade a prospective employer why they should be hired.

Of course, there is still an element of this, but businesses and interviewers need to be aware of the flipside.

They need to be thinking that if a fantastic candidate is presented to them, how do we go about getting them engaged and onboard with us ASAP?

Hooray offer free, no obligation advice and guidance and can be contacted by calling 01242 300228, emailing hello@hoorayworks.co.uk or visiting www.hoorayworks.co.uk.