An effective recruitment process is the bedrock of building a thriving workforce that can accelerate your company down the path of success, giving you the edge over the competition.
Not only does it help you pick the best candidates effectively, but it also builds a strong reputation for your company that makes it highly desirable for candidates. That kind of reputation will naturally make high-quality professionals gravitate to your company, as they’ll have proof of your professionalism and effectiveness throughout the hiring process.
With a properly structured and effective recruitment process, you can significantly improve those tedious processes from rooting through dozens of CVs to organising quality interviews that frictionlessly help you pick the best talents.
Furthermore, it helps:
- Cut hiring costs;
- Cut down on long and tedious tasks within the recruitment process;
- Save time;
- Use less time and resources to train new employees;
- Fill a vacant place faster, and;
- Create and nurture a powerful employer brand.
Here are five critical steps to create an effective recruitment process that boosts your HR efforts and skyrockets candidate experience.
Switch to recruiting agency software
One of the best ways to improve your recruitment process efficiency is through dedicated software that enables automation and better data handling.
The concept is comparable to how CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software takes care of customers’ journeys while giving a structured and analytical overview of all accompanying processes and interactions.
Similarly, recruitment CRM software takes care of your candidate database, their experiences, and your company’s recruitment process. It provides a 360 view of your candidate data and tracks & analyses all of your recruiting activities like sourcing, meeting management, scheduling, etc.
Recruitment CRM can also generate rich reports that show the recruitment process performance and help identity room for improvement.
Recruitment CRM software works in a way that automates most of the redundant recruiting tasks (sending emails, scheduling meetings) while presenting all important data in a structured way. That boosts your recruitment team’s productivity and even helps you reach out to desirable candidates before the competition.
Some other important features of good recruitment CRM software are:
- A great level of integration with your calendar and communication tools you use;
- Recruitment pipeline management;
- A range of sourcing tools to seamlessly source your candidates, scrape their data (email addresses, phone numbers, etc.) and automate job posting, and;
- Personalised email sequences.
Incorporating recruitment CRM software into your HR department is an excellent way to establish and maintain an effective recruitment process.
Consider referrals
In the business world, a strong recommendation counts, and one way to effectively find new, high-quality hires is through referrals from your trusted employees. Asking if they happen to know someone that would fit a certain position is a time-saver and a great source for finding great candidates.
This works because the referrer wouldn’t want to compromise his reputation within the company by recommending inappropriate candidates. Quite the opposite, they would reach out only to those candidates within their network that match your open positions by their skills, expertise, and values.
Research shows that 88% of employers stated that employee referrals are the best source for finding top talents. Recruiting through referrals can also positively affect the induction of new employees since they already know someone from the company. This can help them quickly adjust to the new work environment and adopt the company’s values and culture more successfully.
Improve your existing referral program
In case your company has a referral program, but it doesn’t provide any viable results like constantly generating quality hires, then it is time to assess it and see where the bottleneck is.
Every company needs a concise and dedicated referral strategy to avoid the failure of their referral programs. Therefore, make sure to eradicate some of the common reasons for referral program failure like:
- Not helping employees (referrers) get a clear picture of how the referral program works;
- Having a referral program that isn’t straightforward and simple;
- Not creating stimulating and creative benefits for referrers (gift vouchers, getaway trips, competitive cash bonuses);
- Long waiting time for a referrer to get his reward;
- Lack of assistance to help referrers reach out to potential candidates within their network;
- Not following up on EVERY referral;
- Not giving public recognition to referrer after successful hire;
- Poor marketing for your referral program (across the entire company and every department), and;
- Not making it a part of the company culture.
Reassess your screening and shortlisting practices
Many companies say that the most challenging part of the recruitment process was shortlisting the best candidates from a vast group of applicants. This is also the most sensitive and focus-demanding step in the recruitment process. By reassessing the way you screen and shortlist your applicants and optimising it the right way, you’ll enable a more effective recruitment process.
Applicant Tracking System
Applicant Tracking System (ATS) is a decent replacement for Recruiting CRM software if you are tight on budget. It is heavily focused on the acquisition of applications and aids in their screening, evaluation, and selection. ATS also helps recruiters create and publish job openings and it serves as a repository for compliance and process tracking.
One of the main reasons ATS is useful for an effective recruitment process is that it helps to quickly screen through tons of resumes. This saves a lot of time and energy and helps standardise this stage. In particular, you can filter vast pools of CVs by keywords that relate to the preferred skills or expertise you want for the position you’re recruiting.
ATS also allows you to create pre-screening questions that will help in narrowing down certain candidates that don’t meet predefined requirements. You can use these questions to check eligibility to work in a specific country or gather relevant information by asking open-ended questions on candidates’ experiences, aspirations, etc.
Use screening services
It is important to be able to easily run background checks on multiple candidates and quickly get valid reports. That accounts for checking the essential information in their resumes regarding their education and experience and their credit report, criminal history, etc.
This is critical because studies have shown that 85% of applicants lie on their resumes by providing inaccurate or false information.
This may include:
- False or expired certifications;
- Inaccurate years of experience;
- Purposely replacing the institution they got their degree at with a more prestigious one;
- Making up experiences and false reasons for leaving previous jobs, and;
- Faking their job title or exaggerating their position.
To eliminate candidates like this in the first stages of recruitment, use relevant background checkers in compliance with the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA).
Image: Pexels
Build candidate personas for an effective recruitment process
The latest step to wrap all the above up and add a final touch of improvement to your recruitment process is building a candidate persona.
Candidate persona focuses on building a semi-fictional representation of your perfect candidate. You can shape it by identifying and ingraining the most desirable personality traits, skills and expertise into your semi-fictional representation of an ideal candidate.
This is crucial because you’ll have a blueprint of how the perfect fit for the job and your company’s culture should look like. This will help streamline your recruitment activities during the whole process, shortlist candidates more effectively, and reach out to quality candidates faster.
This concept is similar to the buyer persona and, similarly, it’ll help you target and attract the ideal candidates that’ll convert better (become high-quality employees). It aids your recruitment process in a myriad of ways and boosts your recruitment efforts across many aspects (writing more compelling job descriptions for example).
The benefits of crafting candidate persona
Ingraining candidate personas at the core of your recruitment process will make it substantially more effective by allowing you to:
- Create compelling and relevant job descriptions that attract a lot more quality candidates;
- Get insights about the most effective hiring channels for your company;
- Efficiently pinpoint top talents;
- Better organise and adjust your sourcing strategies so they supplement each other;
- Strongly engage candidates with your new role openings;
- Build an image of a prospective company where people want to work at — employer branding;
- Easily switch to hiring software (as you’ll have strong data from your persona to feed it with);
- Reach out to passive candidates, and;
- Reducing time to hire.
Now, let’s see how you can craft buyer personas and reap these benefits.
Creating candidate personas
The creation of candidate personas usually encompasses these steps:
- Research and gathering data;
- Discovering trends, and;
- Assembling personas.
Research is important for quality data acquisition and you’ll need real-time, relevant data from multiple sources.
One way to get this data is by surveying your best employees for their interests, opinions about their role and company and their goals within your company. You can also ask these questions to your current candidates and later compare the answers with those from your employees to get some valuable insights.
After you’ve collected this data you should analyse it to discover patterns and find trends within, so you can gradually start shaping your personas. This stage focuses on creating a pool of characteristics and traits that comprise the ideal candidate.
Assembling personas is the last step that will give a final shape to your personas. They should have a fair resemblance to the ideal human candidate that best fits the role and the company. You can enrich personas with human names and images to give them more context and help your recruitment team get a clearer representation of the ideal candidate.
In Summary
Optimising your recruitment process to make it more straightforward and effective isn’t an easy task, but is well worth the effort. The change should start from within by reassessing and re-evaluating current practices and objectives. Once you do that, you can start implementing these steps according to the changes you want to make in your recruitment process.
An effective recruitment process is paramount to building a successful workforce that drives results and creates an aspiring company culture. Even when you establish it and start getting tangible results, you should focus on maintaining and looking out for new ways to optimise or improve it.
About the Author
Manan Shah is a Co-Founder & CEO at Recruiterflow – an ATS & CRM for modern recruiters and headhunters. He is obsessed with productivity systems and building sales orgs.
