A company’s recruitment process plays a pivotal role in success in both the long term and short term. Ideally, you want every one of your employees to be perfect in their position. To do that, you must have an excellent recruitment process that brings in only the best talent available.
In practice, doing this is quite challenging because of the number of steps involved in hiring suitable candidates. Preparation and execution make or break the recruitment and onboarding process, and all the steps work together. If one is severely lacking, that can also affect the performance of others.
This guide breaks down some of the predominant aspects you’ll have to pay attention to craft your ideal recruitment process. These aspects include advertising jobs, taking on applications, conducting interviews, and more.
Figuring Out Initial Steps
When beginning the talent recruitment process, the first step is to establish what kind of candidates you’re seeking and a system to help bring them to you as effectively as possible.
Identifying Where You Need Talent
Identifying the type of talent that your company is looking for can depend on several factors, such as your company’s field of expertise, size, and current staff. You may already have certain types of talent in mind. If you don’t, evaluate the jobs you’re offering and determine what kind of talent will best fit the roles.
Along with looking into recruiting insights, understanding the skills you want can help narrow your search significantly. You don’t want to get a range of candidates with too broad a skillset, even if you’re looking to hire a high volume. The more specific you can get with the types of candidates you attract, the greater your chances of finding your ideal candidate for a position.
Properly Advertising The Job
Consider utilizing a job advertising platform to increase your exposure level. It’s a highly proactive and effective way to put yourself in the proper position to reach your ideal candidate. You can get lucky and have great success letting candidates come to you. However, if you’re looking to get ahead of your competitors, taking active steps to reach your next hire is a must.
Developing a Job Description
The job description is typically the first impression any candidate will have of you and your company, so it’s one of the most critical parts of the hiring process. A good job description features all the essential details a candidate needs to know about the position.
The information can include responsibilities of the role, experience and skill requirements for qualification, working conditions, and other general information. Your job description has the highest chance of appealing to candidates if you construct it concisely. Avoid using complex language and attempt to explain everything in the simplest way possible.
The quicker and easier candidates can grasp the aspects of the job, the more likely they’ll be to apply.
Handling Applications
Upon making it past the initial setup phase of putting systems in place to attract the right candidates and crafting a successful job description, the next step is the applications. The main thing to be mindful of here is your job application form if you decide to make one.
Building an Accessible Job Application Form
Most companies use job application forms to great success. The key is keeping the forms as concise as possible, like the job descriptions. Most candidates go through multiple job descriptions and application forms daily when looking for work. So you don’t want to take up too much of their time going through a lengthy form.
Design the form to obtain all the essential information you need from a candidate. Hold off on asking for any additional information until the later steps of the recruitment process.
Accessibility is arguably the number one factor in keeping candidates engaged with you from the beginning of the process until the end. The job description and application forms are places you can lose engagement if they drag on. So, be sure to emphasize it in all the steps of your recruitment process.
Nailing The Interview
Without debate, interviews are the best place to gain all the finer details about a candidate. Unlike the job description, application form, and previous steps, the interview is the one step where you can afford to spend time without losing the candidate’s interest. However, this is only if you conduct your interviews effectively.
When hiring in high volume, ensure you have a solid interview style. You may even want to consider using a structured interview format if you’re hiring at volume. Structured interviews tend to work more effectively when conducting many interviews. They put the candidates through the same set of questions in the same order, which can prove very useful if you want consistent results.
When putting candidates through the same interview structure, you can more directly compare one candidate to another post-interview. In addition, it also keeps you from improvising too much during the interviews, as you’ll already know every question you want to ask.
Creating Strong Interview Questions
It’s essential to take the time to craft questions that are relevant to the position and the candidate. Doing this requires understanding the job you’re seeking candidates for, as asking candidates general questions about their interests, past experiences, and areas of expertise only tells you so much.
You also need to ask questions that test a candidate’s knowledge on a specific aspect of the job they will encounter in their work, should they earn the position. A basic example of this is bringing up a problematic scenario that can happen and asking a candidate how they see themselves solving it.
As important as it is to ask your questions, don’t make the mistake of not leaving room for candidates to get in a few questions of their own. Not only does this improve the candidate’s experience, it also gives you a chance to provide information that may significantly raise their interest in the job.
Using Assessments As Supplementary Tools
If incorporated properly, pre-employment assessments can bring nothing but positives to your employee recruitment process.
Where interviews are the primary source of information about candidates, pre-employment assessments are a supplementary source for gathering additional information. In particular, you did not have time to obtain information during the interview. This additional information can also vary depending on your assessment type.
Consider implementing personality, cognitive, and aptitude assessments, among others. You can then take the information you obtain from the evaluations and use them to help your final hiring decision. However, it would be best if you did not let assessments play the most significant role in your final decision.
Understanding The Use Of Pre-Employment Assessments And Standardized Tests
When it comes to pre-employment assessments, don’t make the mistake of overvaluing the information they provide. What you learn from interviews should always be the most significant factor in hiring a specific candidate, not the assessments.
The assessments provide only a small indication of how a candidate will perform on the job. In contrast, an interview can tell you much more if you ask the right questions. Also, keep in mind that the results of an assessment only apply to each candidate.
Suppose a candidate takes a personality test that determines the strength of their leadership qualities and doesn’t perform well. In that case, that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re less of a leader than a candidate that performs well on the same test. Some people are naturally better test takers than others, so you want to avoid putting too much stock in what the results tell you.
Making The Right Hire
It’s essential not to rush the hiring step of the recruitment process. You should take a reasonable amount of time to review all the information you learn about a candidate in a final review format. Doing this is especially helpful when considering many candidates, as it’s impossible to remember all the essential details.
However, you also don’t want to drag your feet here too much because keeping the candidates waiting too long is not ideal.
Generally, you can take two weeks at most to notify a candidate of your decision after the interview. Then, allow them a week to decide if they want the position. However, if a candidate is enthusiastic about a job offer, you’ll likely hear back from them within a few days.
Review, Reflect, And Put The Company First
After reviewing all the information about your highest quality candidates, it’s normal to feel hesitant to decide on just one. Sometimes, there is no standout factor to lead you to choose one candidate over the rest, and you have to rely purely on your judgment to make the right choice.
Your company’s future is critical to remember when this situation arises. What goals is your company aiming for, and can the candidate you hire actively impact helping the company reach those goals? Also, ask yourself which candidate best fits your company’s culture.
An individual can showcase all the hard and soft skills necessary to succeed in the position they’re applying for, but that’s only one element of their impact on the company. The ideal candidates have all the most desirable skills and fit seamlessly into the workplace.
By considering these aspects, you’ll more often than not choose the right candidate for the job, even if you still feel hesitant.
Keeping The Onboarding Simple
The recruitment onboarding process is equally important as the steps leading up to it.
Look at onboarding as your chance to put your new hire into a position to succeed right from the start. Depending on the nature of the job, there may be some situations that you cannot prepare your new employee for. Still, it’s best to prepare them as well as you can.
Getting Your New Hire Ready
You should strongly consider creating an employee training plan if you don’t already have one. With a training plan, you can provide all the most pertinent information your employee needs to excel and avoid giving too much information.
Regardless of how much you prepare your new employee, they’ll still have questions even after they begin working. So, don’t attempt to cover every minor detail in the onboarding process. For at least the first few weeks, be ready to address things your employee is confused about and take notes.
By documenting where your employee struggles, you can further refine your recruitment process to address those areas for future candidates.
Wrapping Up The Recruitment Process
Your corporate recruitment process will only be as good as the amount of time and effort you put into crafting it. While it is possible to bring in high-quality talent with lackluster recruiting, the chances of that being a repeatable process are slim.
You can save yourself a considerable amount of time by having a stellar recruitment process that brings you the best talent and analyzes what said talent brings to the table. However, maintain a healthy amount of patience while working on your recruitment process.
Don’t stop after developing the foundation for all the steps. Keep refining it while utilizing it to find quality candidates. It’ll take time to polish your process significantly, but there isn’t any reason to rush. There will always be ways to improve the recruitment process.
For now, start by following these steps, experimenting with some of your own ideas to make your recruitment process unique and engaging to all your future candidates.
