The right employees are the gold mine for every organization, and a well-refined hiring process is a surefire way to hire the best talent. However, given the Hiring cost of a bad hire, a wrong hiring process can wreak havoc on your business. Hence, whether it’s your first time hiring or you need a better hiring process to succeed in hiring today’s best talent process, you need to know a few key fundamental steps to make your hiring process effective. In this article, we will outline the basic steps involved in the hiring process and offer some tips for navigating each step successfully.
The Importance of The Hiring Process
The hiring process plays a vital role in determining the quality and skill set of the talent you’ll be employing. With a well-defined and efficient hiring process flowchart, companies can attract, screen, and select the most suitable candidates for their job openings. Hence, helping organizations build a solid and capable team to help develop the company culture and employer brand, drive sales, and ultimately position the company as a leader in the industry. Moreover, a streamlined and effective hiring process ensures that the company’s workforce is diverse, values its employees, and is committed to providing a fair and equitable workplace, which brings in varied perspectives and ideas, leading to innovation and growth.
10 Effective Hiring Process Steps
Step 1: Have a Recruitment Plan and Set your hiring goal
It’s crucial to set clear goals and objectives for your hiring process. Your hiring process should start with setting clear recruitment goals that align with your organization’s goals to make new hires that will help your company reach its objectives. Your recruitment plan should include who your ideal candidate is, the specific skills they should have, how this fits in with its short- and long-term goals, channels for recruitment, the hiring process timeline, and the hiring budget.
Step 2: Perform a Job Analysis
Whether you’re looking to fill up a new or existing role, the second step in the hiring flowchart is to analyze the job to determine its requirements. This step in the hiring process involves determining the job duties, responsibilities, required qualifications, and experience to include in the JD.
It would help if you also decide what working conditions would suit this job role, the salary, benefits, and perks assigned to the job role, and even the critical aspects of your company culture. For example, Eleven Recruiting includes a paragraph at the end of each job description to emphasize how we value diversity and inclusivity.
Performing a job analysis will let you swiftly move to the next hiring process steps –writing and posting a job ad. You can also use an ATS that offers well-written job descriptions for various roles.
Step 3: Job Posting
Once you complete the job analysis and you have created a job description post, it’s left for you to post them on the various recruitment channels that suit your organization. You can either choose to advertise the position internally, externally, or a combination of the two. For example, advertise the job position internally first, then open it up to external applicants via the company’s website, job fairs, or job boards and sites like LinkedIn, Indeed, or Glassdoor.
Step 4: Sourcing Candidate
Finding great candidates can be tricky, so companies often use a combination of advertising and active recruiting during their hiring process. To recruit for the position, you must actively contact qualified candidates via LinkedIn, email, social media, or recruitment fairs.
To access top talents, you should consider reviewing past candidates’ resumes or using employee referral processes to tap into your existing worker network. Ultimately, some of the best candidates aren’t actively seeking a job but could be ready to jump ship for the right offer. That’s why you must go out there, physically or virtually, and contact potential new hires.
Step 5: Review Applications
This step in the hiring process is where you take some time to review the solid batch of resumes and cover letters from each application to decide which candidates meet the required qualifications listed in your job description.
If you’re advertising a sought-after role, you’ll likely get high application volumes, and you and your hiring team need help reviewing each resume. So, consider automating the hiring process by setting up keywords with applicant tracking software, so you only advance candidates with the necessary skills and experience.
To do a more in-depth resume review, consider checking for inconsistencies with your LinkedIn profile, unexplained gaps in employment, job hopping things, measurable accomplishments, increased responsibilities, etc. If all still looks good, schedule a brief phone interview.
Step 6: Conduct a Phone Interview
The recruiter usually does this step in the hiring process over the phone. The goal of a phone interview is three-fold; first, to know if the candidate is still interested in the role because it is likely that some applicants have either accepted a position somewhere else or have stopped looking for a job switch.
Second, a phone interview will help you gauge the candidate’s interest, verify their eligibility, learn about their personality and experience, and ensure they’re interested in the role before passing things to you for a more in-depth conversation.
Third, a phone interview will help your candidate know your organization’s culture and company values and give them a chance to ask questions, so they can decide if they want to work on your team. While a phone interview can sometimes be dynamic, you must ensure that it leads to some valuable information.
Step 7:Assess Skills
A skill assessment is essential in the hiring process, especially for technical roles that require hard skills, since it is the best way to see a candidate’s experience and skills in action. Skill assessment focuses on hard skills like programming, technical writing, presentation, or data analysis. These assessments can be a times-online assessment or take-home assignment. You may not need this step for roles that emphasize soft skills instead.
Step 8: Conduct Onsite Interviews
For hiring managers, an onsite interview is a time for you to critically assess a candidate’s strengths, experience, and background knowledge you have of the company. In the hiring process flowchart, an onsite interview can be either a virtual or in-person interview, a 1:1 interview, or a panel interview.
Whichever interview format you choose for your hiring process, it’s always best to remember that companies with positive interview processes lead top talent. That also means your interview process should be organized and scheduled appropriately with the right interview questions in line with the job role and company’s goals.
Read out more about interview questions.
Step 9: Complete a Background and Reference Check
After the interview process, you must run a background and reference check before you decide who to hire and make an offer. In the hiring process, a background check involves verifying the details and credentials of a candidate’s job application.
This often involves checking their employment history, educational history, and criminal history (if any) and verifying any certificate or credential they claim to have. Furthermore, the hiring manager or recruiter makes a reference check by calling former co-workers or managers to check if they meet the hiring career or if there are any red flags.
Step 10: Make a Job Offer and Negotiate
Once convinced about having the right talent, you can make an official job offer. In the hiring process, this step often includes negotiating factors like salary, benefits, perks, working conditions, and more.
During this stage, the hiring manager and recruiter should be ready for back and forths; however, make sure not to drag it out. A backup choice might also pay if the first choice doesn’t work out. Once the candidate has accepted the offer, let the other candidate know that the position is closed.
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Step 11: Onboarding
Even after you’ve hired the best talent, your hiring process continues. With onboarding as part of the hiring flowchart, the new hires feel comfortable and familiar with the job role, co-workers, your company culture, and goals. Working with the essential stakeholders to create a clear and concise onboarding strategy to make your new hire experience as positive as possible is vital.
To Sum Up
If done the right way, the hiring process will help you find, assess, and hire the most suitable talent for your company and the job role. Use these key steps to build a more personalized hiring process for your organization. In the end, there’s a compounding result of employee satisfaction, productivity, efficiency, growth, and success of the organization.
Frequently Asked Questions
How long should the hiring process be?
According to the Society of Human Resource Management, the average time for the hiring process is 42 days long. Other studies emphasize an average of 27-35 days, sufficient time for writing and advertising the job, screening resumes and applications, conducting interviews, completing any necessary background checks or assessments, and making a final decision.
The length of the hiring process can vary depending on the industry, organization, type of position, and the number of candidates. Nonetheless, your hiring process should not be unnecessarily long as the best candidates are often off the market within 10-15 days while waiting for your decision. At the same time, don’t rush your hiring process or give in to “panic hiring.”
Who should be involved in the hiring process?
The hiring manager and recruiter are prominent players in the hiring process. They make most decisions and should have a good working relationship. But, other stakeholders like the Head of the department, talent acquisition team and senior managers can also offer valuable input in the hiring process steps.
What steps in the hiring process do recruiters manage?
Recruiters or recruitment agencies take up a few stages of the hiring process, such as reviewing and posting job advertisements, sourcing candidates, scheduling interviews, and other hiring administrative tasks. Even more, they often conduct preliminary screenings to close candidates. And sometimes, they advise hiring managers and track metrics to improve the company’s hiring process.
What are some hiring and recruitment trends for 2023?
A positive candidate experience is one of the significant hiring trends since most candidates now enter interviews with the thought of “Do I like this company and is it the right fit for me?”. Even more today, 83% of employers say that employer branding plays a significant role in their ability to hire talent. Hence, it is another necessity for building brand awareness, contributing to a candidate’s interview experience in recruitment, and attracting a new workforce while communicating with current employees.
Another Hiring trend in 2023 is the hybrid work model that became the go-to option for top talents when looking for a job at an organization. Companies with a culture that embraces diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in their values tend to attract candidates and outperform other companies.
