7 Tips for Improving Your Hiring Process

It’s surprising to hear when managers have a lazy and lackadaisical hiring process. If you are selecting candidates for healthcare, finance, etc., the recruitment part is the most crucial phase. You want to save resources and get the best of the lot that you have, rather than waste time picking the wrong recruit.

Managers and HR should treat the hiring process as one of the most important strategic moves that a company needs. Every new hire will either elevate your company or lend towards crashing it down. Here are x tips for improving your hiring process and how to make every recruit a great hire.

1. Get Rid of Weird Questions and Hiring Practices

One of the best ways to streamline employee onboarding for your business is to get rid of the weird “magic sauce” stuff. Don’t waste your time thinking about special questions that will “tell you something” about your would-be employees. It’s not that easy.

The entire hiring process is quite complicated and you can’t determine the right candidate simply from a magic sauce question. Professional HR teams and even hiring candidates, know that this is all nonsense, so any potential recruit should not get this level of treatment.

Rather than ask the basic trivial curveball question, ask their competencies and test their soft skills. If you think you have to do it, then by all means do it. Remember, however, that this has no bearing on your recruitment efforts.

2. Have A Hiring Pool Ready

The sudden departure of an important employee can push a company into a state of imbalance, even close to a tailspin. If you’re looking to hire someone to fill a gap, it’s important to have an existing crop of would-be replacements. This entails knowing how to manage information security effectively to have data on potential recruits.

Every HR needs to have a database of potential candidates for every role. This won’t take up too much space in your database, especially if you want immediate access for a replacement, HR must use good recruitment software to manage the database of potential candidates effectively. Having a list of names and potential candidates can help cut down the wait time for urgent hires.

If you don’t have a way to create a database of candidates, another way to do it is to take a step back and review your recent hiring issues. Ask yourself some tough questions that can determine how to better streamline your process.

Does the position need a quick fill? What’s the retention rate for the position? What choices do you have to fill the role in? Did you promote in-house or did you do an external hire? A quick breakdown should give you a good idea of how to speed up the hiring period.

3. Streamline Your Job Requirements

One of the biggest issues that many qualified candidates have a problem with is the list of job requirements for every role. In most circumstances, many of the requirements and qualifications work more as suggestions rather than requirements, which can be problematic as this alienates potential employees.

There are many ways to rewrite job requirements and they mostly boil down to a needs-supplies approach or a demands-abilities approach. The needs-supplies approach focuses on things that the company can provide the candidate in exchange for their skills. The demands-abilities, on the other hand, focus on what the company needs.

Most qualified candidates respond well to the needs-supplies approach and that’s mostly because employees want to feel valued by the company. You can always expect candidates to do the best for the business if they know that the company has its back.

4. Vet For Technical Skills

Whether you like it or not, one of the more important parts of the hiring process is testing your employees’ technical skills. If you’re looking for a role that needs to produce immediate results, you want a hire that will pass your technical needs.

For starters, most companies need to start asking potential teammates to perform a technical chat after an interview. These should run somewhere between 30 to 60 minutes, followed by a short collaboration exercise. Team members should then find ways to gauge the candidate’s interest in the work they are about to do.

Depending on the candidate and how the interview flows, you would want to ask which parts of the role they think will be the most rewarding. Knowing this would help you understand which parts of the work that your new hire would love, which would then help them for the long term.

5. Involve Future Team Members

As we note, it’s crucial that you involve others in the decision process, especially if it will be a technical position. Much like how you park a car, you need to involve other parts of the vehicle, like the mirrors, to make everything easier. If you’re looking to hire the best every time, you want the opinions of those who will interact with the hires.

A good way to do it is to maximize hiring panels, using one or two other people related to the department. If you’re hiring a customer service team member, for example, you want to have a CS supervisor and a CS rep to help with candidates. 

Involving other members makes the hiring process more rigorous, as these people will be dealing with the new hire. Their success or failure in the hiring process now may reflect the future. They would have to work with whoever gets hired, so everyone will likely make sure that they can collaborate with the hire.

6. Consider A Personality Fit

The right skills for the job are mostly the most important factor that most companies consider. However, fewer companies consider the right personality for the job. As the old adage says, hard skills are easy to acquire on the job but personality is forever.

Before you start the recruitment process, consider what characteristics you want in your new hire. You want their personality to fit the daily tasks that they will be doing. If you’re hiring for a job that involves a lot of mundane work, you want someone who doesn’t mind the mundane tasks. For customer-facing roles, you want them to have empathy and social skills.

Make sure you hire people who fit the culture of the organization. You can’t hire a neurotic worker into a laidback organization or a lone wolf into a collaboration-oriented team. A great personality for one job does not always fit well for another role, so be specific.

7. Always Ask For Writing Samples

Most recruitment teams don’t ask for writing samples from their candidates and it’s understandable why. Not all candidates know how to write formal essays and it can be a daunting task to perform. Regardless, every recruitment process should collect a writing sample before and after an interview.

By asking for an unguided writing sample, you gain insight into the thinking process of the potential recruit. You see how they think, how they process thoughts and ideas, and how they communicate their thoughts. You can even turn the entire process into a task that will evaluate if they’re the right fit.

Create scenarios where they need to provide a good writing sample like responding to an angry email or performing requisitions. Ask them to mimic the company’s voice and respond in a way that is expected from employees of the business.

Final Thoughts

The key aspect of improving your hiring process is focusing your attention on what your company needs the most and using the interview process to find the best fit. You want someone who has what it takes to be successful in the role they need to fulfill, as well as fit the culture you want them to join.

Following the tips we gave will give you a formalized and more systematic approach to hiring. This will save you more time and money down the line while increasing retention rates and helping the company perform better.