12 Ways to Help You Find the Right Staff for Your Job During Recruitment
Here are our 12 ways on how you can recruit the right staff. It’s a challenging process, and hiring the wrong employee can cost a lot.
When you hire the wrong employee, it costs your business money, can negatively impact the work environment and more-over just make more work for you!
By contrast, hiring the right employee pays off instantly, with better productivity, a happy employment relationship and a greatly positive impact in your work environment.
This list certainly isn’t the ultimate complete guide to hiring, but following each of these steps will help make a tangible difference to your hiring process. You can even use these steps as the foundation for your recruitment strategy.
1) Before You Hire, Define The Job
Finding the perfect candidate actually starts with looking at the job, not the candidate. Doing proper job analysis helps you collect the information about the role that will be pertinent to the candidate.
You’ll collate the duties, the responsibilities, what skills are required, the outcomes expected and the environment within which they will work.
This information then feeds into the job description that will be seen by the new employee. The job description will then influence the type of candidate you attract as well as helping you to determine whether you’ve found the right person or not.
2) Get Your Recruitment Strategy Sorted
Now you’ve got your well formulated job description, the task turns to setting up your recruitment strategy. Gather all the key employees who are involved in the process of hiring the new candidate and set a meeting. Clearly it’s vital that the hiring manager is in this meeting.
During the meeting you’ll formulate the strategy for recruitment and if you’ve got time even commence the execution of the strategy. Whilst this step is vital, if you have done it a number of times before, commonly the communication can be done via email instead of a meeting.
3) Make a Checklist and Use It
The checklist you create becomes your systemised process for hiring a new employee. It doesn’t matter whether it’s your first employee or you’re a seasoned veteran, the checklist ensures you stick to your process for hiring a new employee.
Using a checklist also helps you track your efforts to see what works and what doesn’t. This then helps communicate the progress of your process to both interested employees and the hiring manager.
4) Create a Candidate Pool
Sure, you might be hiring for one particular role, but when you’re in the process you’ll come across other potential candidates for future roles. You won’t need them at the time, but these ideas will help you create a pool of candidates that you can call upon when a new position becomes available.
Over time, the more well qualified candidates you have, the quicker you’ll fill future roles with better employees.
5) Read Applications Closely
The work of reviewing resumes, cover letters, job applications, and job application letters starts with a well-written job description. Your bulletted list of the most desired characteristics of the most qualified candidate was developed as part of the recruiting planning process.
The flood of applications, resumes and cover letters that you’ll get can become overwhelming to review. Reading each one closely is nearly impossible. This is where you call upon your well written job description that you developed at the start. The check list of criteria and characteristics that you created is used to assess each application.
Use this list to screen each candidate for skills, experience, qualifications and general characteristics.
6) Filter Your Candidates
Filtering and pre-screening will save you time. Having Candidates answer a series of pre-scripted questions or maybe fulfilling some sort of pre-screening test will auto-qualify candidates, thus saving you time.
Sure a Candidate may look good on paper, but the pre-screening will quickly tell you whether they are in fact a good fit, despite the qualifications.
If you choose to do the pre-screening as an interview, you can also put in additional questions such as salary expectations. Such questions will help work out whether they are in alignment with your job. Similarly, a skilled interviewer will also be able to tell whether the candidate is a good cultural fit or not.
7) Right Questions, Right Answers
Usually the job interview is the primary method used to determine whether you wish to hire a candidate or not. Thus, asking the right questions in an interview is vital. Used like a magnifying glass, the right interview questions will help immediately highlight a candidates fit for a role, or not.
Similarly, Interview questions can be used to help separate the more desirable candidates from the more average ones. This is pretty fundamental when it comes to hiring an employee.
8) Reference and Background Checks
Checking the background listed by a new candidate is important, you need to ensure what they’re saying matches reality. It can also be worthwhile to check credentials including any qualifications with universities or schools (if it’s important to your role).
References are also important to check, but not for the obvious reasons. References listed by candidates will always be people who say kind things about the candidate, that’s not what you use references for. A reference check is used to determine the type of job that the person was doing before. Do they actually have the experience to match what you’re looking for them to do? Do they have the skills? Prior managers and colleagues can verify this for you.
9) Don’t Hire Yourself
When you consider hiring an employee, it’s tempting to offer the job to the candidate who is most like you. The candidate feels as comfortable as a well-worn shoe. You won’t get very many surprises once you make the job offer, and your gut is comfortable that your favorite candidate can do the job.
It’s very tempting to hire someone who is most like you. It feels good and it feels easy. Typically, there’ll be nothing surprising when you make the job offer and everything in your stomach and your head tells you they’ll do the job.
Be very careful of this practice, as when you’re hiring you’re actually not looking for someone like you (that’s your job) you’re looking for someone who can do the job. If you are currently doing the job, you wouldn’t need to hire someone would you!
10) Make a Job Offer
Once you’ve decided who it is you want to hire, you need to make an offer. Typically the negotiation has been done verbally prior to the formal offer being made, the job offer letter simply confirms the verbal agreement regarding the salary and associated benefits.
As usual, when hiring a more senior position, the job offer letter can actually turn into a legal contract that will take longer to negotiate, going back and forth on salary, benefits, severance pay, stock options and the like.
11) Standardise your Employment Letters
Have a standard set of letters that form the the basis for communications with candidates. These include rejection letters, offer letters, welcome and induction letters. Using these letters will ensure solid recruitment branding and good experience for all candidates, successful or otherwise.
12) Leverage Referrals
Don’t underestimate referrals from staff, colleagues or even partner businesses. Candidate referrals can cut down the effort required for hiring, speeding up the process and bringing a higher quality candidate from the start.
If you want to jump right in and start using expanded crowd sourced referrals, try JobScouts today.
