A good hiring process is a must for any growing company. When new employees are regularly joining an organization, the quality of those employees will dictate the future success of the business. You can standardize your process to ensure that you get great results with each new hire.
The hiring process is a long one and each step has its nuances. Hiring managers need to have a plan for each part of the process in advance. Making it up as you go along is a recipe for failure.
It takes a certain amount of experience to become comfortable with the hiring process. By understanding the full scope of what it takes to hire somebody, you can improve the way your company functions.
The Five Common Steps of the Hiring Process
1. Search for Candidates
The first goal of the hiring process is to obtain a sufficient number of resumes from qualified candidates for the job. To do that, you need to distribute a job description that clearly outlines the job expectations.
Post an adequate job description everywhere that you can. Look to job listing and social media sites, such as Facebook, Indeed, and LinkedIn, and share the job description with your employees so they can refer qualify individuals from their personal networks.
2. Compare Resumes
It shouldn’t take long to start receiving resumes from interested people. Once the application deadline is up, you can analyze these resumes to identify the best candidates. The first step is to filter some applicants out.
In the first pass of looking through resumes, take a quick look to remove the unqualified candidates. These are the people who lack the necessary experience or training for the job.
On the second pass, read the cover letters and resumes. You can sort resumes into different categories such as “yes” resumes, “maybe” resumes, and “no” resumes. By the end of the second time looking through resumes, you should have a good idea of who you want to bring in for an interview.
3. Interview Process
Now is the first part of the process that involves directly contacting your possible hires. Reach out via email or phone to schedule an interview with everybody in your “yes” and “maybe” piles of resumes.
Remember that it’s as important for you to make a good impression on the candidates as it is for them to impress you. If you want to get a dream employee, you should make sure to treat people well in the interview process.
It is usually best to reduce the element of surprise. Questions should be prepared well in advance and interviewees made as comfortable as possible throughout the interview process. Give people a real chance to express themselves and you will have the best shot at picking the right hire for your company.
4. Check Out Employee
After the interview process, there will hopefully be at least one candidate that you are interested in hiring. The next step is to do your due diligence to further screen the candidate to make sure there aren’t any disqualifying factors.
Always contact references. This is the fastest way to do a common-sense check on any potential new hire. If a reference has something bad to say, be wary. The employee-to-be provides these references so they should all be saying good things.
Verify other information about the candidate with background checks and drug tests. These are common sense measures you can use to screen out candidates who won’t be a good fit for your organization.
5. Make Offer
Once you want to make a job offer to somebody, you have another set of decisions to ponder. The big one is figuring out how much compensation to offer. You can also offer vacation time and potential for career advancement as ways to entice people to come work for your company.
Move quickly when making a job offer. The best candidates for employment are often interviewing at several companies in rapid succession, hastening their chances of getting a job. If you wait too long, the employee may leave the job market before you make an offer.
Actions to Improve the Hiring Process
Third Party Integration
The hiring process is a long and sometimes convoluted series of tasks that can be hard for one person to keep track of. A lot of factors are out of your control and for larger organizations because there will be several simultaneous hiring processes playing out at the same time.
Many companies find that it’s best to outsource some of the logistics of the hiring process. Third party integrations have become commonplace across nearly every industry in the world to facilitate this.
Credentialing and background screening are examples of tasks that can easily be automated through third party systems. In these kinds of systems, applicants can agree to background checks in advance. The background check occurs without any actions needed by the hiring manager, who is notified when the process is completed.
It’s possible to automate other repetitive tasks too. Posting job listings can easily be automated, distributing your listings to dozens of sites with a single click of a button. Resumes can be filtered in advance to get rid of unqualified candidates before you ever see them. The savvier a hiring manager becomes with the digital resources available today, the more time they can save.
These kinds of digital integrations can save more than they cost. It’s worth it for any growing business to consider investing in the tools that are out there for improving the hiring process.
Managing Technology
Digital integrations come in many shapes and sizes. There is no one-size-fits-all type of solution for the myriad of different business applications needed by companies around the world. Each company needs a customized system that fits their needs.
It’s best to work with a single system that houses all of your needs inside one interface if at all possible. When working with different systems that have overlapping functionalities, the data can become fragmented and bloated very quickly. Tools that were meant to help can start to hinder.
A single system avoids all of these problems. When using a single system, all of your data will be in one place. There won’t be partial duplication of data or unnecessary siloing of information.
This does not mean you will be limited to a single vendor. When working with the right business advocates, it is possible to access many vendors for all kinds of business needs. The right credentialing and background screening company can ensure that, as a company’s needs change over time, they can easily switch between vendors to try new options. This is all doable inside of a single system.
The key is to keep your technology as simple as possible and make sure you know how to use it. When set up properly, a third-party integration will run smoothly and consistently.
Background Checks / Drug Screening
It’s a great idea to use background checks and drug screening as a part of your verification process for potential hires. These checks are a way to avoid possibly dangerous situations for your business.
For example, driving history and drug screening are two ways to check a potential hire for any position that involves driving to different locations on behalf of your company. Since a person in such a role represents the company while on the job, it is critical to ensure they will be safe while doing so.
Background checks are customizable and access to many vendors is possible. You can verify educational credentials, do criminal history checks, and much more. It all depends on what you need to know to verify a candidate for your job.
Push notifications are available for these processes to save you from checking up on them manually. Rather than refreshing the page to see when results have arrived, you can receive email or phone notifications as soon as new results are ready. This can increase your efficiency in the hiring process.
Tips for Implementing Changes
The most important part of implementing new changes in your company’s hiring process is to have a clear idea of your goals. Know what you are trying to accomplish with the new tools you will be using.
If a company needs to get better at creating and distributing job listings, there are tools for that. If the problem is storing and sorting resumes, there are tools for that. There are ways to streamline the interview process as well as the post-interview verification process. Whatever a company needs to address, there’s a way to do it.
Knowing what you need makes it a lot easier to do the research and figure out how to proceed. You can identify the third party you’d like to work with to set up a digital workflow for your hiring process.
After that, figure out the first step to make it happen. There will be somebody to contact or something to do to start moving towards using these new digital tools to enhance your business. Take that first step quickly and keep moving from there.
Conclusion
There is no way to get around the need for a great hiring process. Even the best company in the world is dependent on their hiring process because their newest employees will eventually become their oldest ones. With unproductive employees, a business becomes unproductive.
Great employees will always make for a great business. After all the hard work of setting up a top-notch hiring process, your company will have a critical advantage for the long term.
Use every tool available as you strive to improve the hiring process at your company. Third party integrations are the key to making your life easier in this respect. With the right process, your company can make high-quality hiring decisions every single time.