Updated: May 24, 2023
To boost the efficiency of the hiring process, it’s essential to optimize its every step. In this article, we’ll share smart tips on creating an ideal job vacancy and advanced methods for conducting interviews.
Determine Your Needs
Clear goals are vital for the successful recruitment process. To better understand whom you need, ask yourself these questions:
- What will be their position?
- How will it fit into the department?
- Which skills, experiences and qualities do your team members lack? Can one person fill in all the gaps or will you need to hire several specialists?
To make your life easier, you can rely on the organizational chart of your company — or compose it if you lack it. The org chat reveals the hierarchy of your business in a visually comprehensive manner. It will help you detect at a glance what you miss.
Draft a Job Description
To create successful process of hiring staff, it’s crucial to avoid a common mistake. Don't simply copy and paste the same job description each time you need an employee for a particular vacancy! Your industry, market, organization and staff change over years. Make sure to review your demands and align them with the current situation.
When composing a job description, include these details:
- Job title and department;
- Address (it’s important even if the work will be remote — the candidates need to know about your jurisdiction);
- Full-time or part-time;
- Duties and responsibilities;
- Key requirements;
- Skills, qualifications and experience;
- Salary and benefits.
The job description will serve as your company’s business card for people who’ve never heard about you before. Briefly mention your mission, core values and achievements. Avoid providing too much information because the description should be concise. Many people will be reading it from their mobile devices with compact screens.
Stick to Your Recruitment Plan
Think of where you can look for people with the necessary characteristics:
- Job boards (generic and industry-specific);
- Social media, especially LinkedIn;
- Job fairs and campus visits;
- Careers section on your website.
Most important, don’t forget about your own staff. Think of whom you could promote to the position in question. Internal recruitment will motivate your team members to perform better. You won’t need to spend time and funds searching for specialists outside your company.
When talking with your staff face-to-face, it would be smart to inform them about the potential career paths. Plus, you can regularly send out emails to all your employees with the details of your new openings.
Moreover, it would be great to establish a referral program. Let your employees know that you’ll pay bonuses to them if they recommend top-notch professionals to you.
Resort to Automated Questionnaires
What are the main weak points of your process of hiring staff? One of the primary pitfalls of traditional recruitment is the amount of resources necessary to find and select people. An automated questionnaire in the recruitment process can help you save time and nerves. A short test will let you check the coding or language skills of each candidate. Such questionnaires are indispensable for pre-screening but they can’t substitute face-to-face in-depth conversations. Besides, you might want to automate the recruitment satisfaction survey, following the same template.
Review Applicants
After you've collected a sufficient number of resumes to choose from, sift through them to detect those candidates who genuinely meet your requirements. This will be the first step in narrowing down your search.
In the second step, check how long each candidate stayed in their previous roles. People who don’t skip from one employer to another every couple of years should be your priority.
Arrange phone calls with the candidates who seem the most worthy. This stage will let you pre-screen those professionals whom you’d like to invite to a face-a-face interview or a lengthy video one. During the phone conversation, make sure the employee is available and you meet their salary expectations.
Invite People to Face-to-Face Interviews
To ensure a candidate-friendly recruitment process, stick to these tips:
- Explain to each candidate in advance how the interview will unfold.
- Book a quiet room for your conversation, even if it’s a video call.
- Invite a second HR specialist to the interview — they might ask additional questions and turn your attention to some of the candidate’s merits that you may fail to notice.
- Glance through the candidate’s resume beforehand to avoid losing precious time during the meeting.
- Ask each candidate an identical set of questions to assess them more impartially.
- At the end of the selection process, ask all the candidates to provide feedback while their memories are still fresh.
Find time to answer people’s questions about your organization after you’re done with all the questions that you prepared for them.
