6 STEPS FOR A SUCCESSFUL HIRING PROCESS
To ensure a successful hire, it's crucial to plan ahead.
According to the United States Labor Department, a bad hire can cost up to 30% of the employee's wages for the first year. Therefore, establishing a reliable recruitment process is essential to avoid cognitive biases.
If you aim to make objective hiring decisions and create a fair recruitment process that enhances the candidate experience, follow these six steps.
1 - Define the Hiring Need
With each new fiscal year comes a fresh budget, along with identified vacancies in your organization and teams.
For each new vacancy, define the role and responsibilities of the future employee, taking into account the skills required for optimal performance within the organization.
Anticipate future needs and identify complementary skills that would add value in both the short and long term.
Involve key stakeholders from the organization, including hiring managers and potential colleagues of the future employee, in the process. Some of them will be part of your interview committee.
Determine the compensation budget.
Now, you have a grasp of the rarity of the sought-after profile, of the time, skills, and resources available within your organization to find it. You can define a recruitment budget based on that knowledge.
Also, you may know if you can fill this vacancy with internal applicants, thanks to your talent acquisition team or if you will need external help to find a skilled professional.
2 - Prepare Skills Evaluation
Once you have set up the profile you're looking for, you will need to implement an objective assessment process to guide your hiring decision.
You will design structured interviews focused on the required skills, whether they are know-how or interpersonal.
Think about every step to maximize the candidate experience while effectively evaluating their abilities. Optimize your team’s and candidates’ time.
With a reliable process, two to four interview steps are enough to predict your future employee’s performance.
Google’s research suggests that our interviews can predict a qualified hire with 86% confidence. Above that number, the improvement in the confidence rate is not significant enough to justify allocating time to it.
Select interview committee members carefully to ensure a balanced and inclusive evaluation. The hiring manager must be there, colleagues and sometimes, subordinates, might be great to include in the process.
However, keep in mind that too many interviewers at once can intimidate a candidate, which can affect their interview performance. Thus, please keep it simple and inclusive.
Creating the scorecard is very important. This document will contain assessment criteria that may be linked to the job itself or the cultural fit, the required skills for the role, and the objectives that must be achieved by your future employee.
Thanks to the scorecard, you can track data, remain objective when assessing candidates, and provide constructive feedback to candidates. You will also use it once the person is hired.
3 - Write a job posting and share it
Based on your defined needs, craft a compelling job posting that accurately reflects the role and work environment.
Feel free to share testimonials from current employees within your organization, or from the same team or department, to showcase your employer brand.
Being transparent about the work conditions makes a difference: hours, work location, work model and compensation.
A recent Gartner study found that nearly half of candidates (44%) decided not to apply to a job because the job description did not include salary information.
Last but not least, you need to choose the distribution channels that best suit your budget to reach relevant applications (specialized job boards, professional associations, universities and schools' employment portals, etc.).
However, your first thought should go to your team. Share your job posting internally and offer a referral bonus to incentivize your employees.
Also, make sure to continue thinking about candidate experience and so, to respond to all applicants. A good practice is to craft answers for each step of your hiring process.
4 - Prepare Your Sourcing Strategy
Now, you want to work on your sourcing strategy. Research the profession you are recruiting for, ask your employees about it, and identify the communication channels your persona uses.
While a job posting is an inbound strategy, as you will attract active candidates who apply to get the job, sourcing is an outbound strategy. You will identify and try to attract profiles suited to your needs, including passive candidates who are not necessarily looking for a job.
Sourcing is a proactive approach.
This method requires discipline, specific skills to identify and attract talent and of course, time.
You may tend to outsource this step more than all the others if you are running out of time and expertise. Make sure to choose a sourcing expert from your industry to maximize your candidate experience and efficiency.
First, you may be interested in completing those two simple steps:
When sending the job posting internally, ask your employees who have a LinkedIn profile to perform a straightforward search in their first relationship network and to send you the profiles of the people they would like to work with.
Do the same research but with your second degree relations if you are connected to your employees on LinkedIn. You may give them referral ideas.
5 - Make your final decision and negotiate your compensation
After interviewing several candidates, only a few of them made it to the final stage. As you are about to make your final decision, stay close to your scorecard to compare candidates with the job expectations. Analyze your interviewers' reports.
To stay objective, you want to avoid the contrast effect which means comparing candidates to each other.
During your interview process, you gathered candidates' salary expectations. Thus, you can make an offer that matches or exceeds their expectations. Invest time in explaining the compensation package to the chosen candidate.
A Bamboo HR study from 2023 shows that employees who receive a highly effective offer letter are more than 17x more likely to feel emotionally connected to their organization.
View the offer negotiation as a collaborative effort and ensure candidates feel valued and respected.
6 - Employee onboarding: welcoming, training, feedback and employee-experience
Your onboarding process is critical for integrating new hires smoothly into the organization. The employee-experience starts now.
A Bamboo HR study found that 31% of employees have quit a job within the first 6 months.
Provide a warm welcome and clear expectations to reinforce their decision to join. Offer training and support to facilitate their transition and ongoing development within the company. You will continue relying on your scorecard along their career development.
Last but not least, ask for feedback. You will gather valuable information from new hires and candidates to improve your hiring process.
Conclusion
A thoughtful plan maximizes your chances of choosing the right candidate for your company. You will save time and money and your employer brand will grow stronger!