As a recruitment professional, achieving a better hiring process is perhaps one of the most integral goals of your profession.
It’s fair to say that a company’s hiring process sets the course for its future. An excellent hiring process attracts and acquires the best candidates, while a bad process will only result in flawed hiring decisions and missed opportunities.
Due to this, it’s important to design the best procedures possible for your company — but how can you do that?
In this article, we’ll talk about the most useful tips and tricks that you can use to create a better hiring process.
Best Tips and Tricks for a Better Hiring Process
1. Polish your employer brand
In today’s job seeker-biased labor market, you need all the edge you can get to attract the best candidates to your camp.
One of the best edges that you can have is your employer brand. 96% of companies believe that employer brand affects revenue, and even 84% of candidates attest that a company’s employer brand affects their application prospects.
Glassdoor’s research reveals that as high as 83% of potential applicants check the company brand before they apply, so it’s always better to create and maintain a strong image that will give a good impression of your organization.
2. Maintain a dynamic careers page
Your company’s careers page falls under creating a shining employer brand. However, it’s important enough to warrant its own section.
Research has revealed that 66.7% of passive job seekers stated that a good careers page is important in their search. 82% of applicant respondents also stated that an active careers page could positively influence their decisions to apply to that company.
Thus, the importance of a well-kept careers page can’t be underestimated. You can immediately improve your careers page by being:
- Personalized. Replace your unimpressive general content with personalized words that speaks your ideal candidate’s language.
- Informative. Your careers page needs to have all the information that job seekers need, arranged in a user-friendly fashion.
- Engaging. When applicants visit your website, it’s your chance to advertise to an interested audience. Don’t pass up this opportunity and create expertly-made content that will hook them in, while displaying the best aspects of your company culture.
3. Write engaging job descriptions
It’s general knowledge that job descriptions should be simple and easily understandable.
However, this doesn’t mean that you have to be monotonous and uninteresting. It might just be a small detail to some, but every little bit of advantage counts.
According to a Wall Street Journal article, one way you can do this is by using the Needs-Supplies Approach, an industrial-organizational psychology concept of making an offer that emphasizes what the company can offer the candidate.
This is in contrast to the Demands-Abilities approach, where the job offer focuses on whether the applicant can meet the demand of the organization.
4. Embrace the social media trend
The majority of the recruitment efforts today happen on social media.
A 2017 report by SHRM revealed that about 84% of organizations surveyed said they are using social media in their recruitment efforts. Applicants are also using social media to find a new job, with a report by Glassdoor indicating that about 79% of their respondents are doing so.
Everybody is already on social media, and if you’re not using it for your recruitment process yet, you have to play catch up to your competition.
More than that, using social media in your recruitment effort is also a statement that your company is modern and up to date. In general, people want to work for a company that moves with the times, compared to one that is stagnant.
5. Make your interviews a priority
A landmark study conducted by Leadership IQ has revealed that about 46% of new hires will quit within 18 months, with only 19% of them succeeding in their new positions.
The more astounding thing is: about 82% of the 5000 hiring manager respondents noticed red flags that indicated the employee was going to fail, yet they still hired them anyway.
The reason?
Most hiring managers stated that they were distracted by other work matters, didn’t have enough time, or weren’t confident enough to bring up the issue during the assessment.
This raises a possible solution. By making job interviews a higher priority in the hiring process, hiring managers can take their time and make the right decision.
6. Prioritize soft skills
The same landmark studies by Leadership IQ also revealed the reason why such a high number of new hires fail within the first 2 years, and it’s not because they didn’t have the right skill.
Instead, 89% of the failures were because of an error in character, not technical ability. Specifically;
- 26% of new hires were not coachable
- 23% lacked the emotional intelligence to manage their own and engage with others’ emotions
- 17% were unmotivated
- 15% did not have the right temperament, and
- Only 11% did not have the technical skills to adequately fulfill the job
What you can do to improve your hiring process immediately is to give more weight to soft skills. Of course, this doesn’t mean that you should ignore technical skills; just that it’s not as all-important in the grand scheme of things as we once thought.
7. Communicate with candidates clearly and often
Candidates report that communication is a big plus when it comes to their application decision.
A 2019 survey from Talentegy revealed that as much as 63% of candidates were not impressed by their company’s communication initiatives. The survey also noted that over 69% of candidates that had a bad experience with their application are likely never to apply again.
This is a huge blow to your potential talent pool, especially in a very job seeker market, so you have to communicate with your candidates frequently.
8. Don’t let sourced talent go to waste
Even if an applicant doesn’t do well in the role they were interviewing for, it doesn’t mean that they can’t be perfect for other positions in the future.
In a scarce, competitive market, every connection with a potential talent should be maximized. You can do this by designing a “talent pipeline.” Your talent pipeline is an internal process that allows you to funnel current applicants to future roles.
You can create a talent pipeline by doing these four steps.
- Keep a record of current applicants in an accessible database.
- Identify future roles that will need a pipeline.
- Look to your talent database for the ideal candidate.
- Communicate with your identified talent and notify them of future positions.
- Create a recruitment checklist
Creating a checklist doesn’t just mean writing a bunch of to-dos on a sheet of paper and posting it in a place where everyone can see.
Designing a checklist for your recruitment efforts means that you standardize the process; with every step, each member of your team knows what needs to get done and what to expect.
9. Standardize your hiring process
As an extension of the previous tip, standardizing your hiring process makes it much easier on you, your team, and even your employees. Aside from the checklist, this includes creating standardized interview priorities, questions, rubrics, and more.
This doesn’t just mean that you have a uniform process. With a more standardized process, you can also facilitate better collaboration between departments or focal persons.
10. Use reliable recruitment tools
The advent of big data and analytics allowed the recruiting industry to be refined as the cutting-edge, data-centric machine today.
There is a host of software and systems that you can use to revamp your recruiting process completely.
As an example, a report by Jobscan indicated that about the vast majority (98.2%) of Fortune 500 companies use an ATS. If the biggest names are using an ATS for their recruiting, that’s a sign that you should too.
HireNest is a great example of a user-friendly tool that can help improve your recruitment process. It has tons of useful analytics and automation features that you can use to streamline your recruitment process.
11. Create a better screening mechanism
Much of your recruitment needs rely on a competent screening mechanism.
Sure, you can do all of this stuff by hand, especially if you’re interviewing for a specialized, high-level position. You can screen applications through their portfolios, sample work, technical exam results, and preliminary interviews.
However, one of the best things that you can do to improve your applicant screening is by using a recruiting software such as HireNest.
As mentioned above, HireNest provides cutting-edge analytics and employee-matching algorithms that will help you objectively screen hundreds of candidates in the blink of an eye.
12. Coordinate with your hiring team
One of the most basic mistakes that a hiring manager can commit is not involving their team members in all the crucial details of the hire.
Your team members and collaborators shouldn’t just be present in the interview portion. Actually, they have to be engaged from day one.
You should all be on the same page regarding your priorities, and tasks should be adequately delegated from the start of the recruitment process.
13. Aim to enhance candidate experience any way you can
Candidate experience is crucial when it comes to securing top-quality hires.
According to a 2017 IBM report, candidate experience goes beyond the immediate candidate-recruiter experience. About 60% of the respondents share their experience with your organization, so you can expect your reputation to spread far and wide among your applicants’ networks.
Plus, a bad candidate experience can even affect your company’s bottom line. Since candidates talk, this negative image can spread to customers and affect their buying choices.
This all goes to show that you need to prioritize improving candidate experience any way you can.
14. Work towards perfection, but never expect it
Perfection is an ideal, not an actual state of affairs. As much as you polish your recruitment process, remember that you will never be able to get every single thing perfect.
Being too preoccupied with perfecting your process might lead you to miss the most important: finding and securing the right candidates for your company. Remember that an imperfect but working process is far better than a perfect but hypothetical process.
Achieving a Better Hiring Process
At the end of the day, most of improving your recruitment revolves around focusing more on your candidates and what you can do for them. As long as you keep this in mind, you can better implement the tips and tricks in this article, and the better your process becomes.
