Hiring the wrong employee can incur heavy costs (between 5x up to 15x the annual salary of the incumbent). Make a poor hiring decision, and it may cost you more than that—your customers may start leaving you for good. A good hire starts with recruitment: which is often a time-consuming and process that requires strategic decision making and systematic selection.
Here are 5 steps to keep that process efficient:
1. Effective Candidate Sourcing
Effective hiring starts with a good pool of candidates, and that requires clever advertising, attractive job descriptions and a pleasant application process. It all starts with advertising the role: the job description needs to be accurate, attractive and informative to eliminate irrelevant applications. Use clear and inclusive language and promote your company and its values. Advertisements then need to be posts and disseminated on the right platforms and seen by the right in the industry. Enhancing the application process is essential, as applicants are much more likely to not complete the application if the process is complicated and take over 5 minutes to fill. A very important source comes from passive candidates, who may not be actively looking for jobs but are highly qualified and have high negotiating power. To engage this group of potential candidates, recruiters should build a talent pipeline with techniques such as employee referrals, networking events, connecting with past candidates and HR softwares.
2. Evaluate Candidates Effectively
An improved recruitment process revolves around screening methods that help you select the most qualified candidates. This process should be systematic and aim to quickly eliminate unsuitable candidates. Standardized skill or knowledge tests, for example, can be a good tool to evaluate candidates’ aptitude. Personality tests on the other hand evaluate their personality to see if they have personality traits that align with the job description. Referencing work samples from candidates’ portfolios or asking candidates to complete assignments should also give the recruiter a good picture of their skills. Most importantly, the recruiter needs to seek references and to review their work and experience history as it may predict future behaviour.
3. Streamline Your Referencing Procedure
Many companies are streamlining this recruitment process by shortlisting a list of candidates before screening the final candidates. This allows the recruiter to focus their job capabilities first, then further understanding their character and other soft skills. This order allows recruiters to reduce the amount of effort needed to reference candidates. The screening process also needs to be tailored to the needs of each position. For example, management roles often require meticulous screening procedures and extensive background checks as in certain roles soft skills are more important than hard skills.
4. Collect and Analyse Feedback from Candidates
After their interview, candidates may have a lot to say about their experience, especially the candidates you have turned down. Turn this into an opportunity to optimize your recruitment process! This will equip you with valuable insight into how applicants perceive your hiring process and tell you what needs to be changed and why. Automation tools such as online surveys can speed up this process. This also engages all past candidates into your pool for future hires.
5. Use a Recruitment Specialist
Recruiters know recruitment best: they do that for a living! In fact, most of the processes mentioned above are commonly used by recruitment specialists. Professional recruiters would know best how to advertise, scope and attract the talent you need with their extensive business networks. They would also have a systematic evaluation process to screen candidates efficiently. They have resources and expertise that will far exceed your in-house recruitment team as they are focused on one task. This is even more important when the company is going through major transformations, hiring a new higher executive or building a new team with new roles that even the organization may not know how to describe! A recruitment firm would be able to ensure a smoother and easier process, a wider pool of candidates and contribute to the success of the recruitment.
At WeLinkTalent, we believe in linking talent to the right organization. Our team is committed to sharing recruitment expertise and our market insights with you. We have designed a sourcing methodology that suits your search, to attract the talent that suits your project while ensuring that you attain the ideal match. This goal is based on the assessment of the skills, potential, and personal ambition of our talents as well as the mutual benefits of joining your organization. Besides looking for the right talent for your organization, we propose a genuinely consultative approach for organizations with a mid to long-term strategy. Our onboarding program is also guaranteed to maximize the positive impact of your new talent acquisition.
We link the right talent to the right organization.