Your hiring efforts are often the very first interaction you have with prospective employees, and getting it wrong can have harmful effects on the long-term relationship. A solid recruitment process addresses top concerns and ensures that you attract and find the best people for the job. Without it, time is wasted, and you could onboard new employees who don’t fit the culture of your company.
What is the Recruitment Process?
The recruitment process is the entire lifecycle of hiring. It includes identifying the work that needs to be done, analyzing the requirements, sorting through applications, screening candidates, and selecting the right hire from your shortlist of applicants. As you learn more about what works and understand your company’s unique hiring needs, it is assumed that you will make changes to your recruitment process over time.
Related: Calculate the candidate pipeline to keep the top of your recruitment process operating efficiently. IQTalent Partner’s calculator helps you break down your funnel.
What Goes into a Perfect Recruitment Process?
According to a study by Glassdoor, 6 out of 10 employees say that their new job didn’t match the expectations set by the hiring manager during interviews. This hints to a gap between what employers want their job candidates to know about the workplace and what they are communicating during the hiring process.
To avoid miscommunication, confusion, or even resentment by new employees, employers should be truthful about how hiring works, including how long candidates will wait between phases in the recruitment process. If anyone asks, “What does the recruitment process involve?”, communication should be at the top of the list.
The Importance of a Strong Recruitment Process
Without a worthy recruitment plan, you’ll miss out on the best talent available and could end up degrading the quality of your workforce or even suffer from shifts in attitude, culture, or performance. To keep your teams focused and happy, it’s essential to only bring on workers who can add to the mission of the company. Other benefits of the recruitment process include a better understanding of your internal processes, lower turnover costs, and a healthier brand reputation.
Recruitment Process Steps
Each of the recruitment process steps is vital to bringing the best talent on board, but not all of them will take the same level of resources or time. They include identifying the job vacancy, preparing the job description and tasks, searching for the best talent, and narrowing down the best from carefully-screened applicants to make your final selection.
1. Identify the Hiring Need
The first step is the one not everyone is aware that they do. Knowing that you need to hire may seem like common sense, but it’s not always as simple as replacing a worker who has left their job. If you’ve expanded operations, have seasonal increases in sales, or experience a dip in quality or worker morale, it may be time to bring on new talent. Knowing you need help is the first step in getting it.
2. Planning
Recruitment planning may seem like a simple step, but it can involve many tasks. One task that is central to your success is the creation of the job description. Since this is often the very first thing that job seekers see and is ultimately what they will respond to, it should accurately reflect the job you are hoping to fill. Make sure your job description includes:
- Company name, location, department, and industry
- Benefits and pay
- Job title and description of work to be done
- Requirements, including physical asks and trade-specific certifications
- Nice-to-haves, such as additional skills that will help the ideal candidate stand out
Make your job description conversational, and be sure to use keywords and scannable text for easy reading on phones and tablets. Speak directly to the candidate.
3. Talent Search
Are any of your current employees the best person for the job? They might be. Start from within by looking for associates that you can promote, transfer, or even demote—if warranted. For external searches, it’s essential that you tap into new sources of talent from time to time. Don’t neglect the most common tools, including online job boards, career fairs, industry trade shows, and college campuses. Feel free to use your social media accounts to boost your message signal, even using paid tactics when appropriate.
4. Screening and Shortlisting
The interview, screening, and shortlisting may be the most time-consuming of the recruitment process steps, but that’s because it’s so important to get right. While the questions you ask and methods you use are important, it’s also smart to streamline when you can. Chunk up screening tasks when possible. You can filter out all non-qualified applicants at one time, for example, or identify those who will need additional background checks and have them done concurrently.
How to Improve the Recruitment Process
You should treat your recruitment process like project management. Using metrics to measure what you did well can be beneficial for future hiring efforts. Monitor these metrics and use them for a data-driven plan to manage candidate expectations—and your workflow.
One way to do this is to create and send surveys to your candidates. Ask simple questions about the hiring experience, focusing on their perception of the most important steps. A simple 1-10 scale based on the recruiting process and interactions with recruiters or the hiring team can give you valuable feedback for doing better. It can also help you identify potential future brand advocates for upcoming talent needs.
Productivity Tools to Improve the Recruitment Process
Do you want to ensure that everyone on the hiring team is on the same page? Using Comeet lets you manage your relationship with candidates the right way and helps you avoid the most uncomfortable situations that can happen when a candidate feels misled.
The system makes it simple for all appropriate team members, from recruiters to hiring managers, to see who has done what tasks and when the next tasks are set to happen. It prevents the painful and embarrassing consequences of a candidate getting lost in the shuffle or experiencing unacceptable delays between communications. With your company’s reputation so dependent on what candidates think of you, it’s essential to use every tool at your disposal to get recruiting right.
Are you looking to start your hiring process today? Comeet can help. Check out to our pricing plans learn more about how we can redefine the way you recruit new talent. Or just drop your details below and we'll get back to you promptly.
