Fruitful recruitment is the quickest reflection of the professionalism and validity of your organization. Employing the right talent happens to be one of the most important aspects of your organization and it contributes toward speedy achievement of your end goal.
According to one recent report, top candidates stay available for a mere span of 10 days before getting hired. If you don’t hire quality candidates right away, your competitor will snatch them away from you.
In this piece, we will walk you through everything you need to know about formulating an exceptional recruitment process; one that can take your organization to greater heights. Let’s get started!
What is the Recruiting Process?
A powerful recruitment process is an organization-specific sourcing model that seeks to locate the right fit for the right job at the right time. It is a steady approach to reeling in talented individuals who can aid the company grow. An all-inclusive recruitment process has seven key stages but it may differ from company to company depending on the organizational structure, business vertical, nature of operations, size of the company, existing recruitment workflow and selection procedures.
Advantages of Having a Good Recruitment Process
A good recruitment process can drastically cut down the time involved in interviewing, searching, hiring and training. It can consolidate these processes and make your lookout for feasible candidates much more efficacious.
A few benefits that come alongside the implementation of a high quality recruitment process are:
1. A Robust Pool of Applicants
Prerequisites for a new position are required to be very specific at times and this means, as an employer, it’s critical to have a specialist on hand who contemplates your requirements and has access to a database of candidates in your niche. This is where recruiters step in.
A well-planned recruitment process identifies the best methods to connect with qualified applicants. Company websites, newspapers, job portals, broadcast media and career fairs are among the common recruitment methods. By putting your resources and time into the most efficient methods, you generate a larger and more qualified pool of applicants for your organization.
2. Proactive Strategic Alignment
Strategic human resources is a proactive approach to talent management when compared to traditional reactive or transactional HR systems, according to Forbes. Thorough recruitment and selection processes align with strategic HR.
Companies map out the types of workers and skills needed to fill vacancies. Open positions are established based on hiring plans and company goals to achieve them going forward. Planning out HR needs in advance enables more focused job screenings. Companies can establish training and development programs when they recognize the need to grow people into more elaborate roles after initial hiring decisions.
3. Reduced Turnover and Higher Morale
When an organization hires people with the right personality types and job skills, the end result often is happier workers. A culture that fits well with employee preferences and makes them happy, also leads to higher levels of retention, according to Forbes.
Lower turnover rates and more positive workplace morale ultimately contribute to greater efficiency and higher profits as well.
Steps to the Ultimate Recruitment Process
Now that you know what a good recruitment process can do for your organization, the question that lies ahead is – how do you create one?
We’ve broken things down into simple and actionable recruitment process steps for you:
1. Analyze and Classify your Requirements
Come up with a list of requirements from your end before you create a job posting. It may seem easy to spot the hiring need when you’re accommodating an employee’s position who might have left recently, but the task gets more arduous if you’re changing the responsibilities of a certain role or creating a new position.
Whether a job opening is just vacated or newly formed, you cannot find what you need unless you figure out what you need in the first place.
Hence, your recruitment process should start with identifying the vacancies that exist followed by analyzing the job specifications including the skills, knowledge, and experience required for the said position.
2. Formulate the Job Description
Once you know exactly what you’re looking for in terms of skills, knowledge and experience; it is time to decide the responsibilities and duties of the role. Developing a thorough job description (JD) will help you understand what qualities your potential joinees must possess in order to meet the demands of the role. More so, it provides your prospects with a checklist of sorts that they can compare themselves to before applying. It is an instrument to ensure that you get applications from only the right candidates.
A job description must include all of the following and can be as comprehensive as you want:
- Title
- Duties and responsibilities
- Qualification and skill set
- Location
- Compensation, benefits and perks
- A conversation CTA
3. Develop a Strategy
This step happens to be the most important one when it comes to developing an exceptional and highly productive recruitment process. Developing a competent strategy is easily the soul of any recruitment process.
Recognizing the right talent, engaging them and driving them to apply to your organization are the most important features of the recruitment process. The job listing should be advertised externally on popular social networking sites and preferred job boards, as well as internally within the organization to generate referrals. Recruiters can also promote openings in leading industry publications and conduct job fairs to cast a wider net.
4. Screen and Shortlist the Best
Next up is – screening and shortlisting the best candidates.
A recent survey of recruiters revealed that while 46% of them struggle to attract top talent in the current candidate-driven market, 52% confirmed that the most challenging part of hiring was identifying the right candidates from a vast pool of applicants.
In order to move ahead with the recruitment process, you need to screen and shortlist applicants accurately and efficiently. This is where the recruitment process gets tough and demanding.
Luckily, you can make this time-consuming, complicated task a total breeze with an applicant tracking system that is formulated to screen resumes in a jiffy. Using an ATS will ensure that you have an unbiased, objective filter that will smartly wade through the sea of resumes to narrow down your talent pool in no time!
5. Interview the Shortlisted Candidates
The shortlisted applicants will now move through the interview process prior to receiving a rejection note or bagging an offer letter. Depending on the hiring team’s unique recruitment needs and size, a series of interviews may be scheduled for every potential candidate.
The most commonly used assessment rounds for interviews include:
- Telephonic screening/ Video interviewing
- Psychometric Testing
- Face-to-Face Interviewing
6. Evaluate and Recruit
This is the last stage of the recruiting process. You should never take the fact that the candidate will accept your offer for granted. Nevertheless, if your potential candidate has completed all the paperwork and waited through the selection process with patience, the odds of him/ her accepting the offer are pretty high.
The recruitment process is not easy, so if you have a structured format to follow, you wind up with more time to stay focused on finding the right fit for your business.
A few things you can do in this stage include:
- Checking the references of the shortlisted candidate
- Making the job offer on paper
- Evaluating the process and optimizing it if needed
7. Set up an Effective Onboarding Process
When applicants accept the offer, they officially become employed with the company. The joining date and time is communicated to the employee.
Once that’s done, pre-employment screening that includes reference and background checks are conducted. Once the verification is done, the employees are then introduced to the organization.
Every new hire feels indifferent at first, but you can easily win some brownie points here by putting in a little extra effort and helping your new hire settle in while understanding the company’s culture. Instead of simply showing them around the office and making sure all the essential supplies are handy, make them feel welcomed by getting colleagues to talk about non-work stuff and making special arrangements for in-between breaks.
It is necessary to have a good recruitment process to attract the right kind of employees for your business needs. Your recruitment process should be cost effective as well as time effective. Remember, a business is only as strong as its employees. Hire the best possible people and your organization will do amazing things!
