While most growing companies and their management understand how important it is to find and retain the best talent, companies rarely spend enough time rooting out the core shortcomings of their hiring methods. They are slow to invest in recruiting best practices, and often fail to see good recruitment as a growth strategy that requires a long-term approach.
Too often, companies take an ad-hoc approach to recruiting, and treat it as a short-term chore to quickly fill an opening. Forward-thinking executives and their organizations, on the other hand, recognize that developing recruiting best practices is an ongoing task, regardless of how many positions you need to fill. It’s about building relationships and making the employer brand stand out, so that your organization is consistently attracting the caliber of talent your company needs.
Some of this is common sense – the right people will drive your products, services, and strategy forward. But other benefits of excellent recruiting aren’t as obvious. So let’s take a look at a few of these recruiting best practices. Why should you invest in improving your recruiting process?
Interviewing a long string of applicants and then processing new hires are costly activities. Initial training and orientation are also a huge investment of your company’s time and resources. Losing that new hire a few months into the job starts the money flying out the door all over again.
When you line up the right people, good hiring software and recruiting best practices to find the right person the first time, your new hire is statistically much more likely to stick around. Increasing retention means you get to maximize your investment, and avoid unnecessary losses. But this is so much more than a money problem, because…
Every point of contact you have with a job candidate affects your reputation, whether you hire that person or not. In fact, applicants sometimes get a much more up-close and personal view of your company than a customer ever will. Dropping the ball on follow-up emails, thank-you notes, and polite updates on your hiring progress reflects badly on your company. It’s better to invest in recruiting software that automates the implementation of many recruiting best practices, than to risk bad press by accidentally leaving somebody hanging. You can bet that the applicant will be talking about their interactions with you in the recruitment process, whether you like it or not.
Want to demoralize an entire team at the same time? It’s as easy as throwing the wrong person into the mix. Most of us know what it’s like to work with someone who is insufferably arrogant, unreliable, rude, or incompetent. It’s enough to make even the most loyal employee want to pack up and leave. Even if your best employees decide to stick around, you can bet they won’t be producing as well as they could be.
On the other hand, if you want to inject a fresh dose of energy and innovation right where your company needs it most, throw a well-chosen new recruit into the fight.
Excellent recruiting best practices are about keeping your current employees working happily, just as much as they’re about adding new talent. If you spend your resources on methodically sifting through applicants for gold, your people will reap the benefits (and so will your bottom line).
When an employee walks into a new job knowing that that position was carved out exactly for him, he is more likely to feel honor-bound to meet and fantastically surpass the expectations laid out by the employer. This is what the employee had trained and prepared for. He may have big shoes to fill but he takes ownership, works hard to demonstrate his capabilities and is excited about the long-term prospects of working in this company.
Following recruiting best practices can help you find talent that best fits your company needs and culture. It also increases the motivation levels within your workforce. The new employee who fits his new role to a tee is going to be a motivated and high-performing employee. That sense of ownership goes a long way toward powering the success of your company’s new products and goals. And this motivation can induce energy into existing employees as well.
Whether you create it with careful intention or by accident, your company has a culture. It’s your unique set of values, interactions, and methodologies. It comes out in the way you make decisions, eat together, chat between meetings, even take time away from the job. Your company culture can be just as hard to navigate as any dysfunctional family at the dinner table. Or it can be a welcoming, energetic, nurturing place where you make magic happen, together.
That’s why paying attention to key recruiting best practices is so important for your company’s long-term health. The people you hire today will shape company culture from the minute they arrive, and even more so as years wear on. Will your new hire fulfill your intentions for the way your company works, or will he drag you further from your vision?
Yes, it takes planning, work, and a stellar set of tools to get the job of recruiting done right, but anything worth having takes some kind of investment. Take the first steps now to start implementing the recruiting best practices to get your company organized. Make your next hiring ventures as strategic and successful as possible. Find the right recruitment software that will take you all the way from the very first job post to hiring — this will lift the busywork and organization of talent acquisition off your shoulders. Then line up your goals and hiring team, and get started. You’ve already got a better future ahead.
Interested in discussing recruiting best practices and these strategies with our team? Contact us and we will be in touch shortly.
Photo by Jessica Lewis on Unsplash