How To Improve Your Hiring Process?

Hiring new employees is something you’re bound to do sooner or later - it just goes with the territory. 

Unfortunately, it’s often more difficult than it seems. This is mostly because making mistakes during recruiting can deter new talent from seeking employment in your company. 

However, if you manage to improve your hiring and onboarding practices, you’ll be able to attract and recruit, hire, and retain employees of the highest quality. 

Here are just a few ways you can overhaul your entire hiring process.

Finding new employees is a challenge in itself. But when you also consider that the top professionals are passive candidates that aren’t looking for new opportunities, the difficulty is cranked to ten. 

It’s even worse if you’re trying to attract top tech talent. 

The solution is straightforward - strengthen your employer brand. 

This helps attract passive candidates to your company and drastically reduces employee turnover. Proactively working on your company’s profile, sharing updates, and giving an insight into your work environment and work culture will do wonders for your recruiting efforts. 

Soon, you’ll see more respondents applying for a job in your company, but you will also be able to minimize active recruitment - a win-win situation for both you and your new employees!

Improving the speed and efficiency while recruiting can make a world of difference in the success of your hiring process. This is because, according to relevant statistics, the best candidates stick around in the job market for 10 days only.

If you’re interested in a particular client don’t lose any time. Follow up with them often, discuss additional details of the position they are applying for, and address any questions and concerns right away to stay on top of their mind.

If you emphasize the responsibilities and requirements of the position in your job description, you run the risk of alienating highly qualified applicants. This was standard practice in the past, but in the digital age, it’s quite outdated.

To update your hiring process, you should also update the way you write job descriptions. The best way to do so is to leverage the needs and supplies approach - emphasizing what your company can do for the candidate, instead of the other way around. 

While it might seem counterintuitive, this approach will help you attract candidates who are a better fit for your company.

Standard background checks can only get you so far. To go a bit deeper, you can use the public social media profiles of your candidates to do further research. This might give you insight into the personality of the individual and help you gauge if they’re the right fit for your company.

Additionally, you can look up their personal and professional connections on social media to deepen your pool of available talent.

The way you interview candidates can have a massive impact on the quality of your hiring process. One way to shake things up is to have multiple interviewers present. This might shorten the interview process and might make it easier to give candidates the necessary feedback. 

Another thing you can try is giving the candidates a chance to interview you too. That way you can receive an insight into what matters to them and cross-check if their values align with your company goals. 

More importantly, it also lets potential employees learn if the position in your company is the right fit for them.

Top-tier candidates will look beyond competitive salaries when choosing who they want to work for. This is why you should offer more benefits and perks to attract a larger pool of qualified professionals. 

For starters, you could offer your employees flexible work schedules and remote-work abilities. Some employees prefer working remotely, some may prefer a hybrid approach, and some might be at their best when they’re at the office.

By covering all bases, you can appeal to modern workers and you can also increase retention rates.

You may also have a lot of success from offering creative and unusual perks such as bike share, yoga classes, and massages - the sky’s the limit.

Depending on your current financial situation or the size of your organization, you might not have the necessary funds to update your hiring process. The cheaper and more effective alternative may be outsourcing.

By partnering up with a staffing agency, you can solve the inherent challenges of hiring new employees and unlock some additional benefits.

Here are just a few things a staffing agency can do for your hiring process:

With a staffing agency, you don’t need to worry about finding a perfect candidate, they do it on your behalf! An agency has an extensive talent pool, but to connect you to the perfect hire, they may go through social media networks and a wide variety of online job boards. 

They can also find passive candidates if needed.

Advertising

A huge part of the hiring process costs usually goes to advertising job postings. By outsourcing, you don’t need to worry about budgeting for advertising as agencies may take those costs on themselves.

Resume reviewing

Reviewing hundreds of resumes takes a lot of time, especially for smaller companies without enough resources. A staffing agency will take on this task and they’ll ensure all the candidates they find match the job description perfectly.

That way, you can focus on the core processes of your business instead of wasting time reading candidate histories.

Interviewing

After reviewing resumes, your new staffing partners will come up with a short list of candidates that can enter the next phase - interviews. The agency might first complete a short phone interview to ensure all the candidates are still interested in the position.

In the face-to-face interview phase, the staffing agency will leverage expert reviewers who know exactly how to weed out the candidates who aren’t a good match.

Once they narrowed the candidates down to a few people, they’ll send their applications to you for approval and further interviews.

The hiring process is one of the most important things for a company, especially if the business is entering a stage of growth. After all, employees are the lifeblood of any company, and without the right people, all growth efforts would screech to a halt.

Improving your hiring process will require a step-by-step approach that involves updating your company practices from the ground up. 

This is the only way to ensure success in times of employee shortages.