Cheat Sheet for Hiring Awesome People

It’s not luck that allows you to source quality candidates for your vacancy, but strategy.

And as the person responsible for recruitment in your company, you know the importance of hiring the right people. After all, the impact is far-reaching if you get it wrong. From the time wasted training a member of staff who is not a good fit, to the negative impact on the morale and productivity of the wider team, the financial impact can reach into the £000s.

So how can you feel confident that you’ll find the best people that the current job market has to offer, while staying in budget, and feeling in control?

Our Ultimate ‘People Finding’

Cheat Sheet is designed to

ensure you’ve ticked off all the

essentials that influence the

success (and failure) of your next recruitment drive.

Which of these have you nailed, and which need your closer attention?

1. Get clear on what you need

Before you start looking for the perfect candidate, you must first get clear on what it is you need. For example:

• What tasks will this individual need to complete?

• Who must they get on with?

• What are the ‘nice to haves’ and ‘must haves’

Unless you know who it is you’re looking for, you’ll find it far trickier to hire successfully.

2. Create a recruitment process, which you regularly review

Whether you hire on a regular basis or you only need to fill a vacancy once or twice a year, it’s well worth designing a robust process that’s ready to go – whenever you need it.

Your process should detail everything including:

• The format of your job ad and where you’ll advertise it

• The stages candidates will go through from application to the final hire

• How you’ll make decisions (to keep your process legal)

• The roles and responsibilities of each person involved in the process

• How you’ll manage candidate applications, invitations to interview, and all the other paperwork

If you have a process that you trust and that works, not only will you avoid wasting time when you need to find more staff, but the process will be more slick and efficient too.

3. Design a strategy for candidate attraction

First and foremost, you need to ensure your recruitment strategy is set up to attract the best people (not just people) to your job ad.

It sounds obvious, but this intention is often skipped over. You see, unless your recruitment strategy is designed to attract top talent, you’ll undermine the quality of the applicant pool from which you’ll make your final choice. It’s a little like looking for a needle in a haystack – where the needle doesn’t exist!

Remember, the most successful recruitment campaigns begin when you’re able to screen and short-list from an applicant pool that has great potential. So, if you’re used to getting only a few serious contenders for each vacancy (and even then you’re compromising your standards), it’s time to review your candidate attraction strategy, to ensure you’re attracting the cream that the current job market has to offer.

4. Invest more effort in your job adverts

The first fundamental of an effective candidate attraction strategy is to write a job ad that will get found, that stands out on a busy job board, and attracts the attention of your perfect candidates.

This first step of the recruitment process is a highly skilled task, so you need to:

• Include words and phrases that your target candidate will be searching for.

• Think like a candidate.

If you pitch too much from the business perspective, you’re unlikely to tap into the emotions that get people applying. In comparison, if you pitch the position from the angle of ‘what’s in it for the successful applicant’, you’ll get more eyes on your ad, and entice better quality people to apply.

5. Ensure your job adverts enjoy high visibility in all the right places

The second essential of your candidate attraction strategy is the visibility of your ad.

Warning. You CANNOT run a successful recruitment campaign unless your job advert is posted on ALL the major job boards along with the right collection of niche and geographical sites.

Here’s why…

If your vacancy fails to show up where job seekers are searching, there’s a risk you’ll dilute the quality of your candidate pool. Remember, it’s not about the number of places where your vacancy is posted, but the quality of the boards upon which your opportunity appears.

If you post where no one is looking, you can’t expect to get the best people applying. So, if you’re serious about boosting the potential of your applicant pool, don’t cut corners on this crucial step. And remember, high visibility doesn’t have to cost a fortune, if you enlist the help of an accredited flat fee recruiter like eRecruitSmart.

6. Be realistic

The salary/hourly rate you’re prepared to pay will have a big influence on the number and quality of applicants you attract.

If you offer market rates (or more), not only will better people apply, but you could provide enough incentive to convince an individual who’s already in work, to consider a new opportunity.

In comparison, if you pay less than the going market rate you need to be prepared to compromise your expectations.

7. Take an objective view when making your final selection

Instinct will help you decide which candidates to take into the final stages of your recruitment process, but you need to be aware of what is influencing your decision and judgements. After all, it can be hard to be objective.

This is where psychometric profiling can be highly beneficial. That’s because these tests help you hire for personality and cultural fit, as well as aptitude. And if you remember the negative impact of making the wrong hire, a little more digging during the recruitment process could save you a lot of time, effort, and money in the long run.

Psychometric profiling isn’t necessary for every vacancy, but eRecruitSmart can help you take the time to explore where (and how) you could integrate this recruitment tool into your process.

8. Understand how you'll manage candidates and applications

With a compelling, highly visible job ad,

the applications will start flooding in.

And whilst this is good news, there’s also a downside – the paperwork!

When the process kicks off, it’s all too easy to get bogged down in paperwork and overlook important emails in your chock-a-block inbox. This is especially true when you’re receiving applicants from multiple job boards (which you should be) or hiring for more than one position simultaneously.

It’s for this reason that it pays to consider how you’ll manage the flow of applications. Ideally, you want to streamline the application and screening processes to ensure nothing gets overlooked or missed.

For example, we offer our clients access to an online award-winning Applicant Tracking System. This tool sits in the cloud, holds all applications in one easy to access location (so no overloaded inbox), and allows you to add your own notes.

9. Understand how you'll manage candidates and applications

When it comes to recruitment, there will be elements that you’re best placed to do. That said you don’t need to run every part of the recruitment process in-house. In fact, careful outsourcing can give you more flexibility, simplify, and even speed up your recruitment process, whilst allowing you to retain a tight grip over your candidate selection.

What’s more, as you claw back time, you’ll get more done. In fact, you could find that you save money too.

Two tasks in particular can be easily outsourced – without compromising on quality or adding unnecessary cost:

• Firstly, your candidate attraction strategy. Choose well and you’ll get a compelling job advert and the confidence that your job vacancy has high visibility – without the usual legwork.

• Secondly, consider outsourcing some of the more labour-intensive short-listing tasks such as suitability screening. Whilst this initial screening is pivotal to the selection process, it’s possible to get this task done with diligence and accuracy – out of house.