Through experience, research and the ever increasing availability of data – along with the ability to process it – hiring has become a bit of a science. With the right platform and a properly trained recruitment team, your likelihood of successful hires becomes infinitely greater. However, be wary of platform developers that attempt to dazzle you with highly complex software and processes. While your hiring process should always be well designed, the most effective results invariably come from those that are also simple and straightforward. Unnecessary and outdated functionality may make for an impressive feature list, but will disrupt the flow of the recruitment process, making it both longer and less effective. Here are the key characteristics of a highly effective yet simple hiring process.
Even before beginning the job posting process, you should take a careful look at your company’s strategic objectives. Be sure to understand where are the most critical resource gaps that must be filled. Be clear about the cost of hiring and more importantly the costs of not filling these critical positions in a timely manner. Once you know what its costing your company to operate without filling these critical roles, make sure that the urgency to fill these positions is understood and acknowledged by your organization. And remember to take into consideration the additional costs of hiring. Never go into a hiring process financially blind.
You’ve got a position and a title, but what does the job entail? The more detailed you make this description, the easier it becomes to hire the right person for the job. The specific skills and experience necessary become clearer, as do less tangible attributes such as personality. This will also help you avoid costly mistakes such as overlooking a skill set that will require an otherwise qualified hire to receive costly training.
There are many avenues through which job postings can be advertised. Career sites such as Monster, Glassdoor and Indeed.com have greatly widened the talent pool. SaaS recruitment software can often provide auto-post features that dramatically streamline the process. General and specialty job boards of all types are excellent resources as is social media, whether career specific (LinkedIn) or the all-round behemoths such as Facebook and Twitter. Though often ignored these days, print media should certainly be considered. Never forget, however, that employee referral is one of the best sources of new talent. As a result, make sure the job isn’t simply posted internally in a minimal way to meet requirement; actively inform employees of the open position and encourage them to act as talent scouts. An Employee Referral program that rewards current employees for bringing in successful hires can yield excellent results.
Ensure that there is an effective process for the receipt and organization of resumes as they come in. This is an important part of any simple hiring process that is also effective, and is another area where SaaS recruitment platforms can be invaluable. As resumes are received, they can be added to a database and sorted by any number of categories. Once stored, pertinent information such as contact info and links to applicants’ social media pages is easily accessible. Special tags can be added for later use as well. Confusion about whether an applicant has previously applied or whether the applicant has been contacted is avoided as well; the information is all there in black and white.
One of the most tedious parts of a hiring process is sifting through the countless applications. To simplify recruitment, it’s necessary to invest in a modern recruiting system that eradicates manual processing and streamlines the tracking and management of applicant information. This goes hand in hand with the aforementioned candidate profile management. Your candidates have already been added to the job database. Now, your SaaS platform will allow you to search for specific keywords along with attributes such as minimum experience. This, of course, includes the tags added by you and your HR team which can greatly speed up the screening process; you will now rapidly be able to see which candidates have and lack the absolute requirements. Beyond simplification of screening, this also makes it easier to identify candidates that may be suitable for another position and place them in that database for later perusal.
After you’ve whittled the field down to the most promising applicants, the next step in your simple hiring process is scheduling and performing interviews. Scheduling each candidate’s time slot is simple enough, but we are all familiar with the challenge of matching the face (or resume) to the candidate when dealing with large groups. A simple hiring process doesn’t mean less functionality. In fact, its the rich, yet easy-to-use functionality of a modern recruitment platform that makes the hiring process simpler. Easily schedule and organize interviews. During each interview, you will have in front of you all the key statistics about the applicant. You can pull up their full resume only when it suits you. As always, ensure the right people are conducting the interviews. Should the process require multiple interviews, your SaaS platform helps you quickly and easily record and then retrieve the results of previous interviews and make side-by-side comparisons.
Thanks to your simple hiring process assisted by an effective SaaS recruitment platform, you will arrive at an efficient decision which will bring you a valuable new team member. With an acute awareness of what you can afford due to your initial financial study and a clear picture of what this candidate can bring to the table, you will be able to make an offer that will please the applicant yet won’t have a negative effect on your organization. And what if your dream hire is weighing his options? Such a situation highlights the need for communication with applicants or ‘candidate engagement.’ Random calls and emails are not only ineffective, they give a poor perception of your company and its standing. More advanced and structured candidate engagement techniques made possible by candidate relationship management (CRM) systems for recruitment management keep in-demand applicants engaged, interested, and in the end, coming to you as their final choice.
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