Finding and retaining talents is a vital part of any successful business. However, companies often do not know how and where to find the right candidate that is a good fit to their organization.
Asamby uses a process derived from the book “Who – The A method of Hiring”, that we adapted for small business. When we work on clients’ recruitment processes, we strive to create a team of “A players” for our clients to scale and optimize their business.
Recruitment Process
A good recruitment process can help cut time in the searching, interviewing, hiring and training process. It streamlines these processes and makes searching for viable candidates much more efficient.
Every company recruits candidate’s differently because their efforts are affected by geographical location, industry, company culture and recruiting teams.
Rather than defining a specific path to follow, companies should consider the basic principles and adjust their own toolbox.
In this blog post, we will explain the recruitment process, how and where you can find the talents, and how to keep track of the ROI.
Proactively Build a Talent Pool
A proactive recruitment strategy is actively seeking candidates that may be suitable for roles within the company even when there are no roles to fill.
Planning ahead for the eventuality that someone at some stage will leave the company or the company decides to create new departments or expand existing ones.
By proactive recruiting, we give the recruitment team enough time to find good candidates that fit with the company instead of putting unnecessary pressure on them and asking them to find good candidates in a short space of time, which often results in having talents that do not have a good fit with the company.
Our recommendations
A recruitment process basically consists of four distinct phases. We would suggest small and medium size businesses that want to build their own talent pool and a good HR recruitment process with the following steps.
1. PREPARING PHASE
- Take an overall view of your organization structure/team and determine whether your organization needs new talents.
- Talk to the manager of the team that needs new talents and the person in charge of recruiting to specify the qualifications and requirements of the ideal candidate.
- Set a schedule to keep track of the recruiting process and rolling wave planning if necessary.
- Post job ads on online job-platforms or other platforms that you are comfortable with.
2. SCREENING & INTERVIEWING PHASE
- Follow a structured approach for screening CVs and running interviews.
3. EVALUATION & OFFERING PHASE
- Choose the ideal candidate that has the best fit with your organization and give them a job offer.
4. AFTER HIRING PHASE
- Arrange on-the-job training sessions or designate an employee to be the mentor of the newcomer. Use a formalized onboarding plan.
- Keep track of the newcomer’s performance and satisfaction of both newcomer and team manager.
Read more into the details below and on how to find new talents in our blog post- Hiring Roadmap.
Recruitment process in details
FIRST – PREPARING PHASE
Preparing phase consists of the followings
- Identify your needs
- Create a job description
- Create a Job Scorecard
- Create a job advertisement
- Create recruitment plan
Identify your needs
Create a list of needs before hiring any people and talk to managers or supervisors to identify the role that the company really needs.
For example, an employee just left and the workforce needs a new talent to replace its position; the company is scaling and the team is short of hands, which the company will need to bring in new talents to the team.
Read more about how to create a list of needs in our blog post- Hiring Roadmap.
Create a job description
Based on the identified needs, the hiring manager should create a job description that has information of the position, including its roles and responsibilities, its place in the organization, skill sets required for the position, and range of salary. Job description is used for external use.
Create a job scorecard
A job scorecard is used internally for interviewing candidates and coaching existing employees. The job scorecard sets expectations around KPIs and results expected of the position. This is not necessarily to be used for small companies, however, they can consider using it as they scale.
Create a job advertisement
Based on the job description, the hiring manager should then create a job advertisement. Job advertisement allows an organization to inform the market with vacancies they have and who they are to attract applicants.
A job advertisement can include an introduction about the organization and should include the basic roles and responsibilities, minimum requirements needed for the position, and an overview of the compensation and benefits of the open position.
Create recruitment plan
After preparing the job description and job advertisement, the hiring manager should continue with creating a recruitment plan.
A recruitment plan should include the duration of the recruitment process, the budget of the recruitment process, and the recruiting channels.
The duration of the recruitment process means how much time you want to fill in the open position, it could be one month, three months, six months or even more.
A recruitment budget is an estimate of the total cost of hiring at the organization consisting of internal (e.g. recruiters’ salaries) and external (e.g. advertising expenses) costs.
Recruiting channels can be categorized into internal and external. Examples of internal recruitment methods are promotions, transfers, part-time workers to full-time employees, and employee referrals.
| Internal Recruitment Process | |
| Advantages | Disadvantages |
| Employees know the business | Lack of fresh perspectives |
| Reduce time to hire | Limits the pool of applicants |
| Low cost | Leave a gap in your existing workforce |
| Strengthen employee engagement, Employees grow within a business | Create resentment among employees and managers |
| Hiring managers know the employee | Result in inflexible culture |
Examples of external recruitment methods are job advertisements posted on a company’s own website, online job boards, job fairs, staffing agencies, and social media.
| External Recruitment Process | |
| Advantages | Disadvantages |
| Fresher skill and input, gain new perspectives | A limited understanding about the company |
| Larger candidate pool | Time consuming |
| Lesser internal politics | High costs |
| Ideas from other industries | Internal disputes with existing employees |
| Increase branding | Question of fitting the company |
| Internal Recruitment Methods | External Recruitment Methods |
| Advantages | Disadvantages |
| Promotions | Company Websites |
| Transfers | Job Boards |
| Employee Referrals | Job Fairs |
| Temporary to Permanent | Staffing Agencies |
| Social Media | |
| On-campus college recruiting |
Depending on the duration, budget, and channel of the recruiting process, the cost and the chance of finding the right employee can vary a lot. Hence, it is crucial that the hiring manager make a sophisticated recruitment plan with the above mentioned criterias.
SECOND – SCREENING & INTERVIEWING PHASE
In the second phase, the hiring manager starts to screen the CV and cover letter and arrange interviews after receiving applications from the talents.
The purpose of the screening process is to remove unqualified candidates, leaving companies with only the best of the best.
If the hiring manager are having difficulties screening the applicants or they have received many unqualified applicants, it is likely that something is wrong in their job description or job advertisement, they should take a look at it and revise it if necessary.
In the screening process, the hiring manager should evaluate the candidates based on how well they fulfill the criteria being defined in the job descriptions or scorecard.
After the screening process, the hiring manager should invite candidates that are potentially a good fit to the company to an interview in order to know more about them.
During the screening interview, the hiring manager should ask some baseline questions to the applicants, which the answers to these questions will help them in determining whether or not to move forward with an in-depth interview.
The following are questions that are commonly asked:
- What are your career goals?
- What are you really good at professionally?
- What are you not good at or not interested in doing professionally?
- Who were your last five bosses, and how will they each rate your performance on a 1-10 scale when we talk to them?
The process is continued with Who-Interview, which is the in-depth interview that focuses on past job success of the candidates after the screening interview.
The purpose of the interview is for the recruiter or the team manager to understand more about the candidate, to see whether the candidate has a good fit in the position and the team.
We recommend focusing heavily on past job success, going through the two to three last roles the applicant has held.
The interview also allows the candidate to understand more about the company and the workforce in which he or she will be possible working with, along with the offered salary and beneficial package.
Last but not least is to check the references of the candidate to verify the information he or she has provided.
THIRD – EVALUATION & OFFERING PHASE
In this phase, the hiring manager should have finished interviewing all the candidates and come up with a conclusion of which candidate they would like to hire and what kind of package they would like to offer.
Normally, the hiring manager will write an offer letter, which is detailed in the description of what the job entails and what the employee can expect from the job.
Following with a contract that outlines the full role and responsibilities of the position and provides a timeline of employment.
FOURTH – AFTER HIRING PHASE
This is the phase after the candidate has signed the contract and successfully joined the company. In this phase, there are two criteria’s that the hiring manager should pay attention to.
1. Onboarding
During onboarding, the goal is to create a seamless transition from the recruiting process to the new job. Employers train new employees for several months to familiarize them with their roles and the company.
By putting in some extra effort in helping new employees settle in, it creates a good onboarding experience for the employee and allows the company to win some good loyalty points.
In addition, a good onboarding experience for the employee increases their performance, retains them and reduces the turnover rates.
Without a good onboarding experience, the new employee might have a difficult time in joining the team and feel lost, which they will leave the company in one or two months after joining. And the position is opened again and the recruiter will have to start the recruiting process all over again.
Read more about onboarding in our blog post- How to Onboard Remote Employees.
2. Evaluation
Evaluation here means the recruiter should look back and examine the whole recruiting process.
Examples of the metrics are time to fill, time to hire, source of hire, quality of hire, hiring manager satisfaction, candidate job satisfaction, cost per hire, and offer acceptance rate.
| Time to fill | This is measured by the number of days between publishing a job opening and hiring the candidate. |
| Time to hire/accept | This reflects the time it takes for someone after they’ve applied to pass through the recruiting process. |
| Source of hire | This measure also helps to keep track of the efficiency of multiple channels of recruitment. |
| Quality of hire | This is measured by the employee’s performance rating, which gives an indicator of the first-year performance of a candidate. |
| Hiring manager satisfaction | When the hiring manager is satisfied with the new candidates in his team, the candidate is likely to perform well and fit well in the team. |
| Candidate job satisfaction | This is used to track whether the expectations of the candidate match reality, which helps to present both the positive and negative aspects to improve the recruiting process. |
| Cost per hire | This is the total cost invested in hiring divided by the number of hires. |
| Offer acceptance rate | The number of candidates who received an offer is divided by the number of candidates who successfully accepted a job offer. A low rate is indicative of potential compensation problems. |
PLAN YOUR OWN HIRING PROCESS
A detailed HR recruitment process is a necessary element for organizational success.
Making and implementing a recruiting plan can facilitate your ability to identify the best candidate. It also creates a transparent understanding of your hiring process when you need to improve it.
With our recommendations, we hope you recruit the best talents!