Your company hires people all round the year almost and they invest hundreds of dollars on this. But all this investment will go for a toss if you hire the wrong people.
After the recruitment and selection process is over the training period starts where you will get to know whether your choice was perfect or not.
If they fit the bill, then it is alright otherwise you are stuck with a bunch of people who are not right for the job. What do you do then?
This is the reason it is important that you improve the interview process and make it much more organized so that you select the right candidates.
There are several things that you have to take into account when you are starting a recruitment procedure and as a hiring manager, it will be your responsibility to see to it that everything is going according to the plan.
All these will only be possible when your company follows the best talent selection procedure, but in most cases, the companies lack consistency and are not thorough with the candidate selection process.
Due to this, the end result becomes a complete disaster. The recruitment strategy is a process and not an event and it should be treated that way only.
Definition of Recruitment & Selection Process:
The recruitment and selection can be defined as a process through which hiring is performed for employing workforce for the organization. It is an employment opportunity or procedure where employees are hired in to the company based upon the requirement.
The process of good recruitment and selection plays a vital role in the success of the organization as the right set of employees impacts the growth and development of the business.
Evolution of Recruitment & Selection Process:
The evolution of recruitment and hiring process has been done almost several years ago. But as time passes by, many changes in the recruitment sector have taken place and adopted by most of the industries.
Development of technology and the need of the employer are the primary reasons for bringing change in the hiring sector. With the advancement of modern techniques and strategies in the recruitment industry, best of talent can be employed by the employers.
Moreover many businesses have given up the old age methods of recruitment and have taken up the help of modern techniques and recruiting software that help them hire the better workforce for their organization.
Also these days, organization are not focusing only on their needs but also focusing on providing best candidate experience that help applicants get a good idea about the job role and organization. The role of hiring manger is to make the hiring process candidate driven and make the process efficient enough to hire best employees.
Objectives of Recruitment and Selection:
The primary reason for crafting objectives for recruitment and selection process is to achieve the organizational goals and mission. The objectives help in making sure that all the processes are executed in a proper way.
Irrespective of any process, the objectives of hiring sector directly implies to the employ best candidates for their organization. Some of them are enlisted below,
- Build a talent pool
- Attract best applicants for their organization
- Enhance the hiring quality
- Assess the candidates well
- Make sure they fit the work culture
- Organize the hiring steps efficiently
- Create a good candidate experience
Things to consider for creating an effective hiring process:
The recruitment and selection process need to be done in a proper and right way to get productive and effective results. To make sure everything works fair, here are few things to take care of creating a constructive hiring process.
- Enhance the recruiting quality
- Overcoming the hindrances that arise in hiring
- Employer branding
- Assessing and finding right talent
- Recruiting best candidates in short period
- Engaging skilled candidates
Here are some pointers that will help you in improving the hiring process and recruitment methods of your company –
Tips to Improve Your Recruitment and Selection Process:
The following mentioned are few tips on hiring procedures and the importance of recruitment and selection process.
1. Come up with a proper job description:
The job description is the first step towards the successful process of recruitment. You need to provide proper information about the requirements of the job and the skills that are important for the job position.
If you come up with too little information about the job position, then you will be flooded with applications that are not even worth taking a look and in case you come with too many accountabilities then there are chances that you will be losing out on deserving candidates as well.
Therefore, you need to be accurate and concise while writing the job description. The perfect job description will be the one that will explain the expectations that you have from the candidates and also the mandatory skills for the job position.
2. Asking the perfect questions in an interview:
When you are conducting an interview it becomes very important that you select the right set of questions for the candidates to figure out how talented they are.
If you keep on asking irrelevant questions, then you are wasting your time and the candidate’s time as well.
Moreover, you will not be able to gauge whether the candidate is fit for the job position or not. If you are in search of critical information about the candidate, then it becomes all the more important that you evade an unstructured interview.
In order to avoid premature decisions in favor or against the applicant, it becomes necessary that you chalk out specific questions.
3. Maintaining a timeline:
In the beginning of the interview, if you can convey the time period of each stage, then it will be better for your company as well as the candidates who are appearing in the interview.
If you have any written test mention the time that they will get in order to complete the test in the timeline so that the candidates are aware of the time limits.
The main objective of this is to maintain the timeline that you have set for yourself to wrap up the whole interview process.
The time consumed during the interviewing process may differ a bit, but do not stretch it too far by asking questions that are not related to the job position.
4. Coming up with a response:
If you are saying that you will inform the candidates later then make sure that you do that.
The candidates will be waiting for your response, therefore you need to set a goal for yourself that you have to follow stringently.
If you think that it will take some time before you can start responding to the candidates then communicate that to them.
Tell them that you will contact them after 3-4 days so that you have the time to go through the list of the applicant and make your pick.
5. The end result is important:
When you are conducting the interview then what is the thing that you are looking for – is it hiring rapidly or is it hiring correctly?
If it is the latter, then you have to organize everything accordingly.
You must keep on reminding yourself that you are there to select the right candidate for the vacant job position and you will see that your work has become much easier.
6. Jot down the key elements:
In order to make the correct decision, you will have to create a scorecard where you can score your candidates based on the educational qualifications, certificates they have, candidate experience, training and work expertise he possesses.
The standard should be equal for everybody and it will help you in avoiding the biasness as well.
7. Train your interviewers properly:
Conducting the interview correctly is not everybody’s cup of tea, therefore it is important that you train your interviewers properly.
If you want to get the best possible result by ensuring a consistent structure, then you need to go for the training.
If you have someone in the office who is an expert in this and he is responsible for taking all his interviews, then it is different, but if you are looking for assistance then training interviewers becomes a must.
It will help you maintain the standard and the end result will be exactly what you wanted. The interview will be conducted in a consistent manner and it will remove all kinds of ambiguity too.
8. Looking for references:
Do you think the candidates will provide you with contact information about their previous boss when they know that they might speak ill about them?
No is the answer, then why bothering them with that.
Instead, you decide who you want as a reference and ask for the same in the interview. This will also help you to study the body language of the candidates.
You can either go for the former colleague or the professor or even the friends who will be able to give you some solid information about the candidate.
9. Checklist prepared beforehand:
It is always better that you prepare the checklist beforehand so that in case someone questions you about how fair you have been in the interview process, then you can show them how they were scored in each round as per the checklist.
In the list, you can also come up with a bunch of questions that you need to ask the candidates during the interview.
It will also help if someone challenges you as they will see for themselves that every candidate was asked the same question and they are scored as per their answer.
Asking the same questions to everybody only if they are appearing for the same position will help you in assessing who the right one is.
It will be even better if you can take a memo on how the candidates replied in bullet points.
10. Staying connected with the candidates:
Now with the presence of social media networking, everybody is using the platform to the optimum level.
As a company, you can also use the platform of LinkedIn, which is the professional networking media to keep in touch with the candidates who have appeared in the interview even when they haven’t got selected.
In the future, if there is a requirement of staffing then you can call them back. It is also nice to stay connected with the professionals who have left your company and also with the people with exceptional talents so that if required, you can utilize their talents in the future.
11. Take the help of the software:
You will find recruitment software too, so if you think that you are not equipped properly for organizing the interview in a structured manner then it is best to take the help of technology.
It will help you in simplifying the workflow for you moreover if you are using the system for applicant tracking then nothing can get better than that.
It is highly effective and is a perfect solution for any type of company.
12. Have a hiring team prepared:
When the requirement for a particular position has surfaced, then from day one you need to start working together to hire a perfect candidate for that job position.
In order to do that, you have to sit down with the team members with whom the candidate will be working after getting hired, and they will be able to tell you what the requirements are in that position, the top managers will tell you what they are looking for in the deserving candidate.
Apart from these members, the hiring team will naturally have the HR and the hiring manager.
13. Being flexible is the key:
There is no hard and fast rule that you have to follow in order to select the right candidate for the job.
But that doesn’t mean if you are not getting the perfect candidate, then also you will have to continue with the same structure.
Instead, try and be flexible so that you can adapt to the changes that is required in order to make the process of selecting an effective one.
14. Test your candidates:
Even when you like to believe what is written in the resume is absolutely correct, the fact remains that mostly the candidates exaggerate the truth.
Therefore, there is only one way of testing whether they are lying or not and that is through written tests or maybe role-playing in case the candidate is appearing for a PR job.
You can either ask them to write down a press release to know whether they have done that prior to this or not. Within minutes you will know whether they are lying or telling the truth.
15. Mention the salary on offer:
In order to attract the best candidates you have to lure them with something and in this case, salary is the key.
When you are coming up with the job description make sure to include the salary.
Even the benefits will also work just fine if you are curbing down the salary, but remember as a recruiter you need to have something extra in order to attract the most efficient candidates towards your company.
Now if you are a small company who is not in the position to offer big money then you need to work on other things that you can offer like the opportunity to work from home may be.
Think about the opportunities that you can offer in order to stand out in the crowd and make the applicants take notice of your company.
