One year review – 6 tips for a great recruitment process

One year review – 6 tips for a great recruitment process

As AJ Connect celebrates its one year anniversary this month, we want to share the key strategies that will help you have a great recruitment process. If you are a small business or are a small recruiting team like us, then these tips will come in handy. 

The recruitment process includes six core steps from having a job opening to hiring a candidate. These are planning, sourcing, screening, assessing, connecting and providing an offer. Let us briefly go through each step of the process before providing our tips to improve your recruitment process.

The planning stage involves identifying what human resource gap the company has, selecting a hiring manager and recruiter that is internal or external. Then drawing up the hiring process and researching so that the company’s needs are in line with the industry standards and job market. 

The next step is sourcing candidates from the market. This begins with a short and sweet job description that has the core relevant information and attracts the best talent to apply for the job. This means the job ad will need to reflect a good employer brand, how the role will be exciting for candidates, help them grow and provide them with benefit options to choose from. 

After crafting a great job ad, you will need to post it where it matters most. This includes the company career website, recruiters websites, popular job boards, professional communities and social media. 

During the screening phase, you will need to have a system that helps you filter out candidates who are unqualified or do not meet the requirements to be considered for the application. This is key as you may receive many irrelevant applications which end up taking time away from finding the qualified candidates.

Then you will carry out an assessment of the screened candidates in which you can rate candidates based on their experience, qualifications and skills. Here you need to get through many CVs while making sure you have captured the best candidates from the pool of applicants. 

Next you will connect with the top candidates you have screened with the company for interviews. Here you will work with the hiring manager and those involved in the interview process to ask insightful questions that will help validate the candidate’s experience and skills as well as character and culture fit. 

Finally an offer is provided to the candidate who is found to be the best fit for the role after going through the interviews. At this stage you may find candidates who change their mind or have to negotiate on better salaries or benefits to make the hire. 

So what can you do to improve your recruitment process?

Here are six great tips we believe help you find the best talent in a shorter time given our experience. 

1. Consider hiring within the company. After having an opening within your company, your first best source for finding a hire might be right in front of you. If there are qualified employees that you can promote within, this may help you save costs, time and resources. If the qualified personnel may not be there, you can also still involve your employees to help you refer qualified applicants.
2. Write great job descriptions. Although this has been said a lot, it cannot be undervalued. A good job description can make a huge difference in finding the right person for the job. If your company and the benefits you provide could be great, but if your job ad does not accurately reflect this, the more qualified candidates will simply skip to the next job ad in the field they are interested in.
3. Focus on a great candidate experience. As applicants go through your hiring process, all but one will be hired. Yet making sure each applicant has a good experience through the process will help you in growing your network. These connections will help in providing you with a talent pool when you may need it as well as in growing your employer brand. 
4. Embrace social media and professional platforms. Nowadays job seekers have job postings at their fingertips and are able to sort through the jobs that appeal to them relatively quickly. Being accessible over relevant social media and professional networking platforms will help you unlock wider job markets and find diverse talent that may be a great fit to the position and your company. 
5. Have great onboarding and offboarding. Similar to having a great candidate experience, well done onboarding as well as offboarding of your employees will help improve your employer branding. A good onboarding will ensure that you retain your employee for longer than if your onboarding was not a good experience for the new hire. A good offboarding will in turn help you in retaining a good professional connection which you may refer back to if you consider rehiring that employee in the future.
6. Don’t rush or procrastinate in hiring. Our last tip is that you take into account your needs and timing as you make your hire. Rushing to hire a candidate may land you with a bad hire that will cost even more to replace. At the same time, you do not want to wait too long, if you had a thorough recruitment process and found a relatively good fit, it is better to make the offer than wait so that the candidate does not feel left in limbo and move on to another offer. 

Time has flown by since we started our business and we have learned many things in just one year. We are thankful to our clients and candidates we have worked with and hope to continue delivering excellent service in the years to come. Cheers to our team for a great first year and thank you, our readers, for being here and reading our content, we hope we have helped you in your journey. 

If you enjoyed this article check out our bespoke 6 step hiring process and feel free to contact us if you would like more information from one of our industry experts. AJ Connect is a people centered recruitment agency providing first class services to businesses in the UK.