A company’s human resources are vital for its daily operations and successful financial performance. Regardless of the size of your business, employee recruitment is an inescapable function that has to happen. However, recruitment is not a simple process. There are many steps that need to be completed.
Furthermore, you also need to be aware that there’s a lot of movement across jobs within the global economy. So recruitment is not a static event, but rather it’s a dynamic process. You need to not only recruit the best talent but also keep and/or fluidly replace these persons to maintain your competitive edge. So let’s explore the stages of the employee recruitment process as well as the best strategies to get top talent.
Prerequisites for Effective Employee Recruitment
The best employee recruitment strategies will be useless if you haven’t done your homework in completing these prerequisites to hiring:
Identify Needs and Device an Action Plan
First, you need to determine the exact need within your business. You may find that you need to fill a vacated position, reallocate your team’s workload, or simply expand the range of your operations. You need to be sure which applies to your current labor needs.
Once you’re clear about your hiring needs then you need to establish a recruitment action plan. In the case of new positions, you need to identify how this role aligns with your company’s strategic goals and business plan.
You will also need to keep the relevant teams and employees updated about the various stages of the hiring process. It’s vital that persons involved in the hiring decision are happy with the hiring process, the stages, and the communication channels. You’ll also need to strategize the publication of position (internally and externally), the candidate screening criteria, the interview process and interviewing panel, and the assessment process.
Designing an Effective Job Description
A job description is a summary of the responsibilities, activities, qualifications, and skills for a role, as well as the type of work to be done. A good job description should have several essential elements:
- Job Title
A job title should be specific and use key phrases that accurately describe the position. Try to avoid internal terminology and use terms that are easily understood by all external to your company.
- Job Summary
The job summary should be attention-grabbing and give an overview of your company and expectations for the position. Share the unique story of your company, its branding, vision, and mission. You need to sell potential candidates on why they should want to work for you. Be sure to provide an exact job location as this will help your job posting to appear higher in online search results.
- Responsibilities and Duties
List the main responsibilities of the position. While you want this list to be concise, it should provide sufficient details. Also, be sure to highlight any duties that are unique to your business. You could share the daily activities of the role, as it will help candidates have a clearer understanding of the work environment and their duties. They can use this info to see if they’re a good fit for your company’s culture.
You should also indicate how the position fits within your organization’s hierarchy. The job description should state the role that the post reports to and how expectations about the way one would function within your company.
- Qualifications and Skills
You should include a list of the required education, work history, certifications, and technical skills that are needed for the role. You can also specify soft skills like communication and problem solving, as well as the ideal personality traits that would best fit the position. But, don’t give in to the temptation and list every requirement. You don’t want to put off good candidates and make decline the role without even applying.
- Salary and Benefits
No one works for free, so everyone is interested in the salary and benefits details. You can choose to specify a salary range and indicate that the final salary is dependent on the qualifications and skills of the chosen candidate. Giving some info about the relevant benefits will also help you in attracting top talent.
Advertise and Recruit for the Position
You should advertise internally as an initial step. First, look within to see if any of your current employees could fill the role. It’s possible that advertising could stop at this point. However, if you still need to, then advertise externally. If you’re also looking for external candidates, then let your internal teams know this fact as well.
You may want to publish the job description on your company’s website, social media platforms, as well as on job sites like LinkedIn. You can also participate in job fairs, and advertise in industry publications and local newspapers. The tried-and-proven word-of-mouth channel is also effective.
However, you can also actively recruit by contacting top talent as well. You can reach out to them via LinkedIn and/or their social media channels. Active employee recruitment will likely give you candidates who may be perfect for the role even if they are not in job search mode.
Review Applications and Conduct Interviews
Your HR personnel will review applications collected from the dedicated email or applicant tracking system. At this stage, applications that do not meet minimum requirements are eliminated and those persons are informed. Once the batch of qualified applicants is complete, then it’s time to decide on the interview list.
The initial interviews might be phone calls with HR representatives. These serve as a screening process to discover if applicants are fit for the role and align with your organization’s culture and values. This further elimination then provides the list of candidates to interview face-to-face. Be sure to let applicants know their status if you are not moving forward with them.
Then, considering the size of your company and hiring committee, several interviews are then scheduled.
The first round of interviews may include one-on-one discussions between each applicant and the HR manager. You’ll want to focus on the work experience, skills and job history, and availability of each applicant.
The second round tends to be interviews with management and other key company members. These can take the form of group interviews with a panel and visits to your company’s location for meetings with lead persons. In the case where a role reports to or aligns with several departments, then those department heads may also want to meet each applicant. These meetings can be done virtually via Skype, Google Hangouts, or other technologies. Of course, eliminated candidates should be informed of the fact.
The final interviews occur with the company’s senior members. Or, they could be more detailed discussions with persons who interviewed the applicants in the earlier stages. However, these final interviews are only given to the small group of the best candidates.
Applicant Assessment
At the end of the interviews (or close to their completion), you can assign applicants one or more standardized tests. These tests often evaluate a range of variables such as personality traits, emotional intelligence, problem-solving ability, reasoning, and reading comprehension.
Background and Reference Checks
Your job post should have indicated the need for a background check. This check covers applicants’ criminal records, verifies employment history, and also credit checks.
Depending on the role, you may also schedule drug tests.
Checking references means verifying that applicants were as good as they stated in their previous jobs. Contact these references to ensure that each applicant’s job performance, experience, responsibilities and workplace conduct were up to par.
Final Decision
After these checks are complete, then your hiring committee should select their top choice. But, also select a backup applicant in case the top choice declines your offer (or negotiations don’t result in job acceptance).
There’s the unfortunate chance that no applicant meets the stated criteria. You would likely have determined this from the early application review and interview stage. In which case, you will have to decide if you want to repeat the employee recruitment process. If you do, then you should also revisit the previous steps to ensure that you are using the best process for your company’s hiring needs.
Job Offer and Acceptance
As soon as the best choice is selected, you need to extend an initial job offer. Yes, we said “initial,” meaning you should expect some negotiation.
This job offer letter should indicate the following:
- Salary
- Benefits
- Paid time off
- Start date
- Potential severance pay
- Remote work policy
- Included equipment
- All other terms and conditions of employment.
You should decide which elements of the job offer letter are negotiable, and which are not. Generally, salary, a flexible work schedule, and remote working options are the most likely to be negotiable.
Once negotiations are complete, the applicant accepts the job offer and they’re hired! But, you need to ensure that all legally required employment paperwork is completed and filed. The exact nature of such paperwork may vary depending on where your company is located. In general, they include:
- Form W-4
- Form I-9 and E-Verify
- State Withholding and Registrations
- A checklist to ensure that all documents are completed by your new employee
- Your company’s Employee Handbook
Onboarding
Hold on, you’re not finished yet! You can’t just hire a new employee and leave them on their own. Good employee recruitment also means a professional and welcoming onboarding process. You want to help ease your new hire into your operations and personnel in a way to ensure their long-term productivity and wellbeing.
This means providing a welcome letter and ensuring that the supervisor/manager of that employee has an initial talk with them. Their workspace should be prepared, cleaned, and fully equipped to help them do their job well from the first day.
Does your company have an orientation process? If it does, that’s great! But make sure that your employee clearly understands the expectations and schedule of those events. You should consider assigning your new hire a mentor to help them settle into their new role and your company. All of these steps are critical to helping each new employee experience long-term growth and success.
The Best Employee Recruitment Strategies
Now let’s explore the strategies that can improve the outcomes of your employee recruitment process:
Establish a Distinct Employer Brand
Why should someone want to join your company? It’s important that you have a clear and positive employer brand that coincides with your company’s vision, mission, culture, and values. You want current employees to highly recommend working with your company even after they leave. Also, be sure to clearly communicate this brand on your company’s social media platforms.
Create Brand-Aligned Job Posts
All of your job posts need to promote this employer brand as well. You need to make a great first impression on potential employees. Not only should the copy be sleek, clear and error-free, but also let your company’s culture shine through.
Social Media is Your Friend
You should utilize your business’ social media platforms to recruit for your openings. These virtual platforms are quite vital in connecting with millennials. But, you need to first create a strong, branded online presence on all platforms. This will help you to effectively engage with your targeted talent pool.
Approach Talent That’s Not Job-Hunting
Like we said before, you should also contact top talent that is employed and not job-hunting. Personalized contact via any of the social recruiting platforms is likely to get a response. By leveraging your social media and connections, you’ll be in close proximity to persons who are a great fit for your company.
An Applicant Tracking System is Important
We know: you can use a dedicated email account. But an Applicant Tracking System (ATS) will make employee recruitment much easier. An ATS automates the publication of jobs and classifies applicants according to the criteria you set. Some options also offer a one-click multi-site job posting as well as interview scheduling. Simply do your research to find the best one for your company’s needs and budget.
Explore Unique Recruitment Avenues
You should consider niche job boards if the job post calls for specialized candidates. Niche job boards are often aligned to key industries. Furthermore, these sites will likely have a dedicated following, so you will quickly find the talent you’re seeking.
College recruiting is also a good idea if you want to identify and snag great upcoming talent. If you offer internships and mentorship programs, that will help you to mold your next batch of employees to fit and excel in your company’s culture. So take advantage of job fairs, participate in public speaking events related to your company, and even try to post on the college/university’s virtual job boards.
Conduct Effective Interviews
Interviews offer the chance to get to know candidates better. They will also want to learn more about your company and your teams as well. So create a comfortable environment for effective dialogue between the HR professional and/or members of the interviewing team and each applicant. Don’t just focus on their academic and employment credentials but also try to get a feel as to whether or not they would fit into your company culture.
Get Expert Employee Recruitment Services
As you can see, employee recruitment is a detailed process with many steps and strategies to consider. Do you feel like you don’t have the time to devote to searching for the best employees? Solvo can help fulfill all your recruitment needs. We offer a wide range of services in areas including HR management, front-office support, and more. So contact us to discuss how we can help you get top talent that will help your company grow and perform at its best.
