Hiring can be a significant drain on your personnel’s time and morale. A hiring search can take weeks, even months, with employees giving hours each week to the process. Worse, at the end of it, you might end up without good candidates, someone who doesn’t take the job, or someone who doesn’t work out – and then you have to start again.
Here are some tips for streamlining your hiring practices to make them not only more efficient, but more effective. That way, you’ll spend less time to get better hires. For more involved help, consider our human resources consulting services.
Start right from the beginning by writing an accurate job description. When you’re getting ready to hire, prioritize your needs from the candidate, focusing on the work you need them to do, rather than on nice-to-haves. Come up with a prioritized list to put in the job description. Utilize keywords that candidates and recruiting software use to match applicants and positions.
Also, be clear about what’s absolutely mandatory for hiring. If you make it clear what’s a deal-breaker, you will reduce unqualified applicants and give yourself an easy way to weed out unsuitable candidates right away.
Many small businesses think they can get away with employing low-tech hiring tools, to the point of accepting applications and resumes on paper. While this can work when you’re hiring your first few employees, it doesn’t scale up very well. To streamline your hiring process, you want to deploy modern tools, including an applicant tracking system. An applicant tracking system will let you break down resumes by skills, experience, education, and more so you can more easily compare them. That way, you can more quickly sort candidates and find the most qualified applicants.
Prescreening candidates before an interview helps you avoid wasting time on candidates that aren’t going to work out. Send out prescreening questions electronically so that applicants can easily answer them on mobile devices or on their desktop.
Don’t burden potential applicants with a lot of questions you don’t want to sort through yourself. Instead, make this a place to focus on necessary qualifications including expectations for hours worked, travel, and other potential deal-breakers for candidates.
Some of the inefficiency in hiring is due to your managers. Since hiring is likely not their forte, they may neglect it or routinely push it to the bottom of their work queue. Make sure managers know how important hiring is to the company and prioritize their part in screening applicants.
Interviewing applicants is critical to finding the ones that will fit your organization. Make sure you do it right.
First, make sure everyone involved in hiring is at one interview. This can be a challenge for scheduling, but it’s worth it. You’ll all get to ask your questions and will observe the same interview so you can effectively compare candidates.
Go into an interview with a script. Divide up the questions so everyone gets a chance to talk to the candidates. In addition, give questions to people who are best qualified to evaluate the responses and form follow-up questions.
Finally, make sure you make any important caveats clear at this stage. If there are expectations of overtime (especially uncompensated overtime for salaried employees), for example, bring it up. There should be no unpleasant surprises when an applicant shows up to work for their first day. That can cause new hires to resign, forcing you to restart your job search.
Always let candidates know when they didn’t get the position. It doesn’t have to be much, just a simple, polite note letting applicants know that you hired someone else.
This may seem like a small thing, but it can make a world of difference when your first candidate doesn’t work out, a new position opens up, or some other reason why you might need to reconsider someone you rejected before. Your polite communication will make them much more likely to consider applying for or accepting a position at your company in the future.
Does all the above sound like a lot of work on top of what is already too much of a hassle for your company? If so, you should consider letting someone else take over the hiring duties.
At PassioHR, we are prepared to handle all your HR needs, including hiring. We can either offer HR consulting to support you or take over the process ourselves. With our unique Elevated Engagement Plus® Approach, we work hard to ensure we find the perfect people for your organization. We have the advanced tools that let us sift applicants quickly and effectively. You can choose how much you want to be engaged in the process, too. You can conduct interviews if you want or let us use our expert experience to do it for you, perhaps supplying you with recordings of each candidate.
Want to learn how PassioHR can help you find the best employees for your company? Please contact us today to inquire about HR consulting help with hiring or other PEO services you need.
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