What is a recruitment process?
The process of finding, vetting, shortlisting, and employing potential resources to fill open jobs in a company is known as recruitment. It serves as a fundamental part of human resource management.
The act of selecting the best candidate for a position at the ideal time is known as recruitment. To fill the organization’s resource needs, the process of attracting, choosing, and appointing potential applicants is referred to as recruitment. Candidates may be hired either internally, that is, from within the organization, or from outside sources.
Related: Process of Recruitment: A Complete Guide
How to build a recruitment process
1. Recognize your needs
The first stage in any recruitment process is to ascertain exactly what you require… Which candidate traits and skills are essential? Nice-to-haves? Do you have a thorough understanding of the role?
You will benefit from it by:
- Create a unique job description that engages and excites the right talent.
- Source qualified candidates proactively
- Discuss your recruiting manager’s expectations with realism (because no candidate is perfect)
- Sell potential hires at every opportunity
- Pass on qualified prospects to onsite interviews to save your team’s time.
- Lastly, shorten the hiring process while improving the quality of the hires.
2. Compose a position description
Only 36% of applicants agree that job descriptions are clear, compared to 72% of hiring managers. Job descriptions as impact descriptions should do more than merely solicit resumes. They should be instruments that pique prospects’ interest in a position and serve as sales tools for recruiters throughout the remaining stages of the hiring process.
The typical job description is a collection of abilities without distinction. Effective impact descriptions, on the other hand, should be particular to your business and emphasize results and impact rather than requirements to pique the interest of the best candidates for the role’s challenges.
Remove arbitrary prerequisites (including pedigree, years of experience, and abilities that can be learned on the job), paint a picture of what the role requires, and what success will look like. Also, don’t be afraid to strike a casual tone so that prospects see you as approachable and human.
Related: 20 good signs you got the job
3. Establish a talent pipeline
Your talent pipeline can be built in a variety of ways. Traditionally, recruiters have attracted candidates by posting job openings on job boards or their corporate careers page. Companies have increased their investment in proactive candidate sourcing and employee referral programs as the competition for top talent has grown.
Employment page
Do your careers page present itself well? Every conversation you have with a candidate, including those that take place before a recruiter contacts you, is an opportunity to persuade them that your business is the one where they want to work.
Hiring procedure
Here are some ideas for how to use your careers website as a recruiting tool for top candidates:
- Optimize it for mobile. Nine out of ten job seekers say they’re likely to use a mobile device to look for work.
- Make applying simple. Does your application tracking system require applicants to pass through a seemingly endless series of hurdles before submitting? The best candidates, in particular, can become impatient and leave your process.
- Present your culture. Candidates are interested in learning more about working for your business. Aid their understanding using images, films, details about your vision and core principles, interesting employee data, etc. Here’s where you can get inventive! We enjoy the career pages for Cloudlock, Eventbrite, and Lyft.
Job boards
Companies list job openings on job boards to attract more people. There are dozens of job boards, including specialized ones like Dice for IT expertise or eFinancialCareers for positions in finance, banking, accounting, and insurance. The two most well-known are Monster and Indeed.
Discovering the finest employment boards for your business requires some investigation and testing. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that more is better. If you use job boards that don’t produce quality prospects, all you’ll end up with is more noise.
Program for employee referrals
Employee recommendations are frequently cited as the best hiring source due to their quicker hiring times, lower cost per employee, and higher retention rates when compared to other sources. It is realistic to anticipate your offer and offer acceptance if you invest in creating a powerful employee referral program.
Related: 7 steps in the recruitment process
Candidate sourcing
The act of actively seeking and contacting qualified candidates for a position is known as candidate sourcing. Today’s top talent is less frequently “actively” searching for work and applying for positions, but they are still quite likely to be receptive to talk if contacted, which makes sourcing a crucial part of any effective hiring strategy.
You’re losing out on a sizable portion of possible employees if you aren’t sourcing applicants. Even though only 36% of the workforce considers themselves “active,” 90% of global professionals are open to learning about new employment openings.
Candidates can be found primarily in two ways: online and offline.
- Online sourcing is the process of locating candidates through online resources. For instance, you can look for talent on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter.
- Offline sourcing entails going out into the world and meeting possible employees face-to-face, for as at conferences, meetups, or other business networking functions.
4. Conduct interviews
The interviewing procedure will differ from business to business and job to job. Candidates go through a phone screen, in-person interview, reference check, and offer stage in a typical interview process.
Here is a guide to using each.
Phone conversation
Usually, the recruiter for the position conducts the first phone interview. However, having the recruiting manager answer the phone can be beneficial for candidates who are of high priority. To ensure that you forward the right and qualified candidates to the next level, conduct a phone interview. Are there any obvious warning signs? Do they possess the proper motivations? Do they satisfy the fundamental requirements that you and your hiring manager established at the start of the process?
Local interview
Perhaps the most crucial stage of the hiring process is the on-site interview. This is when you learn enough about a candidate to decide whether to reject them or make them an offer to join your team. Therefore, structuring your interview process is essential. Observations are as follows:
- Establish your hiring criteria before potential candidates arrive. The advantage: By using a neutral framework for comparison while choosing between two candidates, you can lessen the impact of unconscious bias.
- Request evaluations from interviewees in various areas (culture fit, behavioral fit, skills fit, etc.). The advantage: You’ll obtain the data you require to make an informed choice, and the candidate will have a satisfying, professional experience.
- Make your queries uniform. The advantage: By asking each interviewee the same or comparable questions, you can compare candidates more fairly. Wiggle room here. Running through a list of questions rather than allowing a discussion to flow spontaneously can prevent you from learning important details and developing a deep connection. Ensure you act morally.
- Utilize a system for tracking applicants. The advantage: A technology like Lever helps you develop scalable, repeatable processes while saving you time. From within Lever, schedule interviews on an interviewer’s calendar and set up automatic reminders to ensure that no interviews are ever forgotten. guide interviewers on what they should look for, and even give them the right questions to ask.
Interview feedback and decision
It’s important to collect interview feedback quickly. Right after an interview is when information is freshest in everybody’s mind, and the ability to make a quick decision and get an offer out is a competitive advantage. Ask interviewers to take notes during their interviews and submit feedback via your chosen tool.
Checking references
You’re prepared to provide. Delay till you’ve thoroughly checked your references. It is expensive to bring on board a performance who is only average, thus it is ultimately in the best interests of your team to take reference checks seriously. But make sure you’re asking the correct questions to make reference checks worthwhile. Read our post on sample reference check questions for questions that will help you learn more about a candidate’s genuine abilities because it might be difficult to obtain the entire picture from references without doing some research.
Offer
Once you’ve decided to make a candidate an offer, you need to act quickly. Moving swiftly shows the prospect that you are thrilled to have them join the team and reduces the chance that another company will step in with a counteroffer.
Don’t speed through the details when you make the offer. Take breaks to observe their response. Instead of making the offer right away if you know the candidate needs a strong argument, try starting the conversation with questions to learn about any remaining doubts they might have.
5. Manage talent relationships
A modern recruiting process has to be agile and flexible enough to adapt to non-linear events. For example, you may source a candidate who won’t be ready to think about new opportunities for another year, or turn a candidate down but find a new role they’re a better fit for a few months down the line. How are you keeping tabs on those candidates?
Top talent isn’t knocking on doors, so recruiters today have to be smart and strategic, taking advantage of, and nurturing, the relationships they already have. Here are a few tips for building strong relationships with candidates who need the long sell:
- Set up a Google Alert for the candidate’s name so you can reach out at meaningful times. Keep close tabs on why you archive a candidate (compensation, timing, seniority, etc.) With a system like Lever, you can track and customize archive reasons easily.
- Set reminders to follow up with candidates at a later date, when their circumstances may have changed. You can also achieve this easily in Lever with the “snooze” function. Snooze a candidate to receive an email reminder to follow up, along with any note you left yourself.
6. Assess your progress
What steps are you taking to ensure that your procedure is always getting better? Increasingly, recruiters are turning to data and analytics to find out where and how they can do better. Important recruiting metrics to track include:
- Source of hire
- Candidate to hire ratio
- Conversion funnel
- Time to hire
7. Make the candidate experience positive.
A great candidate experience is essential at every stage of the hiring process and can influence a candidate’s decision to join your team.
Anything that can influence and inform a candidate’s perception of your organization, such as press mentions, Glassdoor reviews, your careers page, word of mouth, and the application process, is referred to as the “pre-candidate experience.”
How long does it take you to get in touch with a prospect after they are in your system? When a candidate visits the site, does he or she feel welcomed? Are you conducting organized, professional interviews?
Making the candidate experience a priority is crucial because top candidates are evaluating you just as much as you are evaluating them. . To ensure that you’re continually improving your process, consider asking candidates informally, or more formally via a survey, for their feedback.
Stages of the recruitment process
The following stages of the recruiting process for employees may be included:
Stage 1: Planning the hiring process
To fulfill the long-term goals and objectives of the organization, the recruitment process begins with an examination of the numbers and sufficiency of personnel.
The importance of recruitment planning can be justified by the fact that the company’s long-term growth potential may be jeopardized if it is not handled properly.
Once the number of positions to be added to the firm has been determined through recruitment planning, a precise and unambiguous job description and person specification for the role must be created.
Stage 2: Finding sources for hiring
There are two categories of recruitment sources: internal and external. Simply said, internal recruitment refers to the selection of individuals from within the organization, whereas external recruitment is the selection of people who are not already working for the organization.
Educational institutions, information in job centers, employment agencies, and even rival businesses can all be considered external sources of hiring. Employee databases and files, on the other hand, are examples of internal sources of recruitment. Finding a reliable source for hiring is crucial since the kind of source chosen will determine how well-suited the candidates are for the position.
3: Creating candidates
A sufficient pool of candidates must be created once a reliable source of hiring has been found. Candidates from external sources of hiring may be produced through media advertisements, campus recruitment, or with the help of pertinent agencies.
On the other side, internal announcements and newsletters can help with the generation of applicants from internal recruitment sources.
Stage 4: Filtering Application Forms
After the necessary number of applicants have been drawn in the earlier phases, the application materials need to be screened based on how closely they adhere to the essential qualifications for the position. These fundamental prerequisites could include prior work experience, academic credentials, software program competence, etc.
Stage 5: Conducting tests and evaluations
At this point in the hiring process, only applicants who match the minimum qualifications for the position will be kept in mind. To choose the individual best fit for the position to be filled, the remaining candidates are put through a variety of tests and evaluations at this stage, including interviews, role-playing, job simulations, focus groups, etc.
There are two types of factors that influence hiring new employees: external and internal. The rate of unemployment, the supply and demand for the position in the industry, and the nation’s general macroeconomic status are examples of external factors that influence hiring.
On the other hand, internal factors that affect hiring employees include the size of the business, the nature of the hiring policy, and the amount of money set aside for hiring.
Stage 6: References Verified
Before having an accepted offer with all requirements satisfied and a start date (salary/schedule accepted, references reviewed, background check/drug screen finished), don’t rule out top candidates. Recognize that anything is possible and frequently does. Candidates will withdraw their application, accept a counteroffer, or perform poorly on the pre-employment test. You’ll want to have your backup candidates warmed up and prepared for when that occurs. Keep in touch with them, even if it’s only to let them know that you’re still considering them even though there aren’t any changes just yet. It’s more difficult to accept them once you’ve rejected them.
Stage 7: Onboarding
And finally, onboarding! This is your biggest chance to let all your hard work go to waste because it is commonly ignored. The handoff between Recruiting and Operations resembles a hazy grey area. If you don’t ensure that your onboarding program is effective and includes training, mentorship, knowledge, and the appropriate resources, you risk having new workers who don’t feel welcome or trained in the position for which they were hired. All onboarding processes should be digitized, especially given that the majority of employees now work from home.
You can evaluate and continuously improve your hiring plans by having a recruitment process that is well thought out to meet the unique needs of your organization and structured on a measurable platform. You can also eliminate or revise time-wasting steps that could potentially weed out qualified candidates. Additionally, it will guarantee that all crucial processes are done, establishing a uniform applicant experience and minimizing the possibility of prejudice.