Improving your recruiting process involves crafting clear job ads, enhancing candidate sourcing, building talent pipelines, increasing recruitment efficiency, effectively evaluating candidates, and enhancing candidate experience. Each step contributes to a more efficient, productive, and pleasant recruitment process for both candidates and hiring teams.
Nikoletta holds an MSc in HR management and has written extensively about all things HR and recruiting.
Refined recruitment processes are efficient, productive and pleasant for both candidates and hiring teams. Here are a few ways to improve your recruiting process:
Finding and hiring top talent is one of the most important responsibilities of any HR manager However, many companies still rely on outdated, inefficient hiring processes that result in mediocre hires and poor cultural fits
To build a world-class team, you need a world-class hiring process. Follow this 8-step guide to dramatically improve your recruiting and selection process.
Step 1: Define Your Goals
Before you can improve your hiring process, you need to have a clear understanding of your end goal. Here are some examples of potential hiring goals:
- Hire candidates with the right skills and competencies for the role
- Ensure new hires are a strong cultural fit
- Reduce time-to-hire
- Lower recruiting costs
- Increase quality of hire
- Improve candidate experience
Once you’ve defined your goals, you can design a process focused on achieving your specific objectives. Be sure to get alignment from other hiring managers and senior leadership on your targets.
Step 2: Identify Your Ideal Candidate
Now it’s time to get crystal clear on the exact type of person you want to hire. This goes beyond just hard skills – really define what a top performer looks like including soft skills, culture fit, and potential.
Here are some tips
- Review employees who are already excelling in the role
- Conduct internal interviews with managers to define success criteria
- Create a detailed profile highlighting must-have qualifications, preferred skills, and ideal attributes
Having a strong sense of your ideal candidate will help ensure you build an effective sourcing, screening, and selection process.
Step 3: Find Your Target Audience
Once you know who you’re looking for, you need to figure out where to find them. Leverage these tactics to research, identify, and engage with your ideal candidates:
- Visit niche job boards or forums related to your function or industry
- Attend relevant conferences, networking events, and trade shows
- Search LinkedIn for profiles matching your criteria
- Ask current employees for referrals from their networks
- Promote open positions on your company’s social media accounts
- Advertise in publications or websites your targets frequent
Taking the time to understand your ideal candidate’s habits and haunts will allow you to proactively engage and recruit the right people.
Step 4: Write a Clear Job Description
Your job description is one of the first impressions candidates will have of your company. To maximize applications, ensure your description includes:
- A summary of the role and responsibilities
- Must-have qualifications and skills
- Preferred credentials or experience
- Details on salary, benefits, perks, and location
- Information on your company culture and values
- Excitement about your mission, products, and impact
Your job description also needs to use clear, consistent language free of typos to convey professionalism. Lean on your ideal candidate profile from Step 2 to craft an engaging overview.
Step 5: Establish a Process for Reviewing Applications
Use a standardized process to fairly and efficiently screen all incoming applications. Here are some tips:
- Create a simple scoring grid to rate applications based on required qualifications
- Use structured interviews with consistent question sets for initial phone screens
- Develop criteria for advancing candidates to the full interview stage
- Provide guidelines, training, and calibration for interviewers
Equipping your team with the tools to effectively evaluate candidates will help surface more top talent during the initial application review process.
Step 6: Keep Interviews Consistent
Conducting organized, consistent in-person interviews will allow you to accurately assess candidates against the role requirements. Best practices include:
- Using a structured interview guide with preset questions
- Incorporating competency-based questions that evaluate hard and soft skills
- Offering candidates time to ask questions of their own
- Concluding with next steps and timeline expectations
- Gathering feedback immediately post-interview while details are fresh
Maintaining a standardized approach will help remove bias and personal agendas from the decision-making process.
Step 7: Employ Selection Testing
Supplementing interviews with job-relevant testing mechanisms provides additional data points to ensure candidates have the abilities to succeed. Options include:
- Skills-based assessments to test hard skills and competencies
- Cognitive ability tests to measure problem-solving skills
- Personality tests to evaluate work style and cultural fit
- Sample work tests to examine candidates’ work product
- Reference checks to gather feedback from past managers
Testing candidates allows you to look beyond impressions and make data-driven decisions.
Step 8: Automate the Hiring Process
HR technology can help automate time-consuming administrative hiring tasks. Solutions like applicant tracking systems, video interviewing, skills testing platforms, and more can enhance efficiency.
Benefits of automation include:
- Reduced time-to-hire
- Lower manual workloads for hiring teams
- Improved candidate experience through faster responses and updates
- Better pipelines by automatically sourcing and nurturing talent
The right tools can empower your team to focus on high-value recruiting activities like candidate engagement and selection.
In Summary
Evolving your hiring from a reactive, ad-hoc process to a strategic, automated approach may take time. But the long-term benefits are enormous.
Top talent is the engine that will accelerate your company’s success. Investing in improving your systems for recruiting, assessing, and selecting employees is one of the highest-impact activities an HR manager can undertake.
Use this 8-step guide as a roadmap to analyze, optimize, and transform your hiring. With a laser-focus on bringing in ideal candidates, you’ll propel your organization to new heights.
Craft clear and attractive job ads
Effective job ads help you evaluate candidates on job-related criteria. Work with your company’s hiring managers to create job descriptions that:
- Provide useful and specific details about open roles. When listing job duties, mention projects your new hire may undertake or teams they will work with. Distinguish between “must-have” and “nice-to-have” requirements so as not to discourage candidates who could learn secondary skills on the job. As a general rule, keep your list of “must-haves” to around 6 bullet points.
- Choose straightforward job titles. Be clear about roles you’re hiring for. Avoid using words like “rockstar” and suspect or clickbait titles and text (e.g. “Great opportunity for recent graduates!”)
- Promote your company. Describe what makes your company unique to give candidates compelling reasons to apply. Be specific: “We opened three new branches recently” is more precise than “We are growing fast.” Also, outline benefits and perks your company offers.
- Use clear and inclusive language. Avoid jargon and complicated sentences and speak directly to candidates (e.g. use “you” instead of “the ideal candidate.”) Avoid discriminatory language (e.g. “salesman”, “young and energetic.”) And if your company actively supports diversity, let candidates know.
Boost your candidate sourcing
Most people who are employed still want to hear about new job opportunities. Discover passive candidates with these sourcing techniques to increase your chances of making great hires:
- Source on social media. Follow conversations and people on popular social media like Twitter and more niche platforms like Reddit. Look for people with interest and expertise relevant to positions you’re hiring for (e.g. if you’re hiring for a data scientist, look into threads or conversations on big data or machine learning on StackOverflow or GitHub.)
(To source EU candidates, please refer to guidance on using social media for recruiting and collecting candidate information as per the General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR.)
- Attend events. Expand your sourcing by going to industry events, conferences and meetups that professionals you’re hiring for might attend (e.g. a UX Meetup to network with UX designers.)
- Use Boolean search. Boolean search helps you discover candidate resumes. Use Boolean strings on Google to find profiles on social media.
- Get referrals. Referrals are often a good way to find high-quality hires. Create and promote a referral program with incentives. Referral software can also help you use gamification methods to drive more referrals.
- Invest in sourcing tools. Sourcing tools help you find qualified candidates for your open roles fast. For example, People Search builds complete profiles, often including an email address, resume and other social networks where your prospect is active.
Workable helps you build and promote your brand where your next candidates are. You’re always top of mind, whether they’re actively looking or not.
Talent pipelines are groups of candidates who can fill future roles. By sourcing candidates before roles open, you have ample time to engage them early so you can reduce your time-to-hire when a suitable role opens up.
Here are four main steps to building talent pipelines:
- Determine what roles need a pipeline (usually roles with high turnover or roles that are hard-to-fill.)
- Look to past candidates, former employees and interns to build your pipeline.
- Source passive candidates by combining various sourcing techniques (e.g. Boolean search, events.)
- Reach out to candidates to engage them and stay in touch until you have an open role for them.
Related: Recruitment process effectiveness metrics FAQ
How to master recruiting | Mads Faurholt-Jorgensen | TEDxWarwick
How to improve your hiring process?
Most hiring processes include basic steps like recruiting, interviewing, screening, hiring and onboarding employees. If you already have a hiring process in place, there is a good chance it can be enhanced to better serve your business needs. Here are 13 tips to improve your hiring process. 1. Build a strong employer brand.
How can you improve your recruitment process?
Refined recruitment processes are efficient, productive and pleasant for both candidates and hiring teams. Here are a few ways to improve your recruiting process: Effective job ads help you evaluate candidates on job-related criteria. Work with your company’s hiring managers to create job descriptions that:
What is a good hiring process?
A good hiring process, though, will help you attract and retain great employees. What is the hiring process? This is a step-by-step method for finding, selecting and recruiting the best new employees. Every company will have unique elements to its process, but generally, recruitment steps will be the same across similar industries.
Why is a successful hiring process important?
Establishing successful hiring processes can help you improve your new hire searches, find the most qualified candidates for a role and fill your open positions quickly and effectively. Optimizing your hiring process can help you find qualified candidates more easily and build successful teams.
