Going over your process is always a good idea for improvement. Here’s a quick read on what you can do to speed up your hiring when you’re in a pinch.
Create a plan for recruiting ahead of time
As soon as you find out there’s an opening coming up, you should start with the groundwork. It’s important that all who are involved in the decision-making agree with the process, steps and channels of recruitment. You should prepare a timeline, recruitment plan, criteria for screening, interview questions, etc. This will save you tons of time and unnecessary panic can be avoided.
Write a realistic job description
The purpose of a job description isn’t just to tell people about your vacancy; it’s your chance to attract and connect with the one(s) that you want. When starting you recruitment process, make sure you know exactly who you’re searching for; then write a job description that is relevant and describes the profile, not someone’s wishful thinking..
When creating a job description, think about the following aspects:
- What are the main responsibilities in this role?
- How would you describe the core skills needed for this vacancy?
- What are the competences learned while working in this role?
Extra tip – you may also consider adding the salary (range) to your job description, there’s a bigger probability to get candidates, whose salary expectations match your offer.
Set priorities on who you interview
You may be tempted to call everyone whose CV you liked, but that takes too much from your already limited resources.
Even be a bit merciless when you scan through your applicants and do not interview candidates “just for the sake of it” or “just in case” – if you don’t get a good gut feeling with a CV, it probably won’t happen during the interview either.
Only choose and interview your “top players”, and you’ll save yourself a lot of time!
Extra tip – if there’s more than one person making the decision, include them to the interview phase as well.
Build a Talent Pool of candidates
To build an effective recruitment process, you should invest in creating a stable pipeline of candidates, past, present and future.
It pays off to build strong relationships with candidates, because every time you need to fill a vacancy, you already have a pool of potentials to give a call to. So next time you recruit for a role, be sure to keep those CVs that don’t qualify at hand and do not lose their contact information (which is forbidden, anyways, according to GDPR).
Extra tip – keep your career page running! Although you find a suitable candidate, don’t remove the vacancy, keep them coming. BUT! Be sure to explain the situation to all the employees to avoid unnecessary confusion.
Consider In-house recruitment
Before you start looking for someone new outside your company, take a look inside. It is good for overall employee engagement to recruit from within the company.
Here are some of the pros:
- You save money – advertising the job ad, job ad social media boosts, new employee trainings, etc. can all be avoided, when recruiting from current employees.
- Not so risky – you know your employees and their fit to your company. You’re already aware of their skillset, experiences, know-how, attitude towards work, etc.
- Shorter adapting time – in order to properly welcome a new team member, you have to put your time and effort in it. Current employees are already settled in.
With recruiting from inside the company, you’ll be offering your employees the chance to step up in their career or even make a change in their career path – the idea behind it is that you wouldn’t lose your talent.
Simplify your recruitment steps
Having a clear and easy-to-understand recruitment process is not only important to the candidates but also for you as the recruiter. If your process is too much of a hassle, you risk scaring off potential candidates and you get overwhelmed quickly.
When evaluating your recruitment process, try to answer the following questions:
- How does each step contribute to your process?
- Where are the bottlenecks in your process?
- Where do you usually lose candidates?
It might be tempting to go for a longer recruitment process because then you have the time to really get to know the candidates. While this may be the “right thing to do”, the reality is that while you are contemplating, whether to hire a candidate or not, they are being made an offer they cannot refuse.
WRITTEN BY
Sirli Spelman
A recruiter and human resource manager. Sirli has many years of practical experience in hiring for the IT industry – excellent in both finding new talent and organizing existing talent.
