Hiring top talent isn’t all there is to recruitment. Sure, it’s a great end result, but there is an entire recruitment process that needs to happen both before and after you decide to hire a candidate. Building an effective recruitment process will help you to streamline your future hiring, saving both time and money.
Having an effective recruitment process can also help build a strong retention rate within the team and increase engagement. Developing a recruitment process that works for your organisation isn’t always easy, and that’s why we’ve put together a list of top tips to assist you.
What is the Recruitment Process?
The recruitment process involves everything from attracting talent, collecting and filtering applications, interviewing, selecting the right candidates, reference checking, onboarding and beyond. Everyone from managers, HR, Talent Acquisition, and even other team members can be involved in the process at various stages.
While the finer details may differ from organisation to organisation depending on industry and resources, the objective of recruitment remains the same. To find, recruit and retain the best candidates available.
What are the Benefits of a Good Recruitment Process?
An effective recruitment plan will help you to accomplish your hiring goals. Even more, it can allow you to do so at scale and with a shorter time to hire. This in turn supports your organisation in many other ways, such as cost-saving and increased productivity. Each day that a position remains open at your organisation means potential revenue lost and employee productivity lowered as team members cover the workload of the empty seat.
Your recruitment process should also ensure you maximise hiring potential by finding the best candidates available and gathering helpful information to further refine the process going forward.
9 Steps for a Powerful Recruitment Process:
1. Identify your needs
Think about what exactly you need your new hire to accomplish. Are they replacing someone who left, joining a growing team, or will they have a new role entirely? This will inform what sort of person you are looking for, which in turn guides the rest of the recruitment process.
What tasks will they need to achieve? Have the job requirements changed since you last hired for this position? Is there someone internal who’s deserving of promotion and would be better suited in this role than an external candidate?
2. Create a recruitment plan
A recruitment plan outlines who you’re hiring and how you’re going to hire them. Recruitment planning should be done by every organisation to predict and manage future hiring. If you haven’t got one yet, now is the time!
3. Write a job description
The job description should cover all of the responsibilities, goals, requirements and other details of the role so that you know who to approach, and potential candidates know if they are the right fit. While you want this to be in-depth and comprehensive, you should also take care to ensure your job description is inclusive.
4. Begin the search
You should have decided how you’re going to reach your candidates in the recruitment plan. Now it’s time to do it. Think about the different channels you can use depending on the target and get your job opening out there!
One of the best ways to find the right candidates is to partner with a specialist recruiter that can access the candidates that aren’t actively applying for jobs.
TalentVine enables you to compare the best recruiters across Australia with in-depth performance metrics, reviews, recent role history and more.
Learn More5. Create a shortlist
Once you’ve started to receive applicants, it’s time to narrow them down. Create a candidate shortlist based on their CVs and cover letters to decide who you’d like to consider for the role. How long should your shortlist be? It depends on how much time you have for interviewing, but try to keep it around 3 to 5.
6. Interview
One of the most important stages in the recruitment process is the interviews. While the candidates will be very keen to make a good impression, it’s important that you and your hiring managers do as well. This is your best chance to evaluate a candidate and decide if they’re the right choice, so make it count!
You might need multiple interviews with different stakeholders before making a decision to proceed. Whatever decision you make, ensure that you keep the candidates and your recruiters up to date throughout the process.
7. Reference check
The reference check serves to confirm the past employment, skills, and education of a candidate. It’s also a good chance to learn how to manage them from someone who’s done it before. Keep in mind that many past employers will share limited information in a reference check, so it’s important to ask the right questions.
8. Hire the best!
You’ve got all the information you can, and now it’s time for the big decision. Which candidate are you going to hire? There’s not too much we can help with here, it’s up to you to decide what you value more in each of them. You might have a focus on technical knowledge and experience, or you may be looking for a good culture fit who can learn and grow into the role.
Hire the best. Even in a candidate-short market, making the wrong hire will cost your business more in the long run.
9. Onboarding
The final step in your recruitment process is to get your new hire up to speed and delivering value as soon as possible. A good onboarding process sets your hires up for success, creating a solid platform for their continued growth and productivity.
In Short...
Having a strong recruitment process is essential for any organisation, especially in the current market. Ensure that you have an efficient process right from the initial role identification right through to onboarding the new hire. Doing so can not only cut down costs and time-to-hire, it can help you to scale hiring efforts and produce better candidates overall.
