Effective Recruitment Process - eGuide

Recruitment is a preplanned cum assigned task within human resource management whereby the human resource department looks for top qualified candidates through the invitation of job applications, thereby potential candidates, as well as passive candidates, pass through the hiring process carried out by a hiring manager or recruitment teams representing employer brand name.   

Recruitment teams are responsible in larger business organizations whereas in smaller concerns hiring managers do this job.

An effective recruitment process has several, as mentioned below, important, elementary, and unavoidable steps:

• Identification of your company’s human resource requirement
• Recognition of the job description of the vacant positions
• Plan the recruitment process
• Attracting prospective potential candidates through advertisements
• Review application: screening for top candidate(s) selection and Shortlisting of the qualified candidates as per predetermined criteria
• Interview process
• Selection form amongst interviewees
• Employee Referrals / References cross-check
• Hiring
• Onboarding

Let us now discuss in detail every one of the above-mentioned pivotal steps when it is time to hire.

Identification of your company’s human resource requirement

When the previous or existing job position is vacant due to firing, retirement, or deceased employee, or the plan vacancy is underway, you need to look at the requirements of that particular position in terms of education, experience, expertise, knowledge, skills, and abilities’ profiling.

This is applicable in all cases: previous, present, or future job vacancies. The profiling also needs to be looked into for the updated requisites therein are the updates as per your business expansion and development in micro as well as macro organizational environments to be checked for and followed as per the required standards.

What is more, as an HR proficient personnel, you are required to look into the very necessities of the job role’s requirements are existing or otherwise. In other words, HR needs to screen if the task requires the new recruitment process to be initiated or just the tasks can be distributed among available human capital to manage the assigned jobs in your company. 

Recognition and posting of the job description (JD)

The job description (JD) of the vacant positions / Terms of Reference (ToRs) needs to be straightforward and as short as possible – that is to the point.

But remember not to miss the main points to be included in the JD. The main points in a JD are what you want to look within the candidate and what a candidate will have a career with you for her / his future endeavors and opportunities, including educational requirements, preferred number of years on the job experience on certain job position(s), the salary and benefits a candidate would receive upon selection, organizational mission and vision declaration so that a job candidate would match herself/himself to be in line with; job location, hours to work per week or month - as the case may be, and indeed job title and departmental introduction along with organizational intro, to include.

Plan the recruitment process as your recruitment solution

Once the human resource team members look for a recruitment solution to initiate its process, there remain two major area domains within it to consider for you being at a strategic HR level or even at a middle managerial level. The first one is the internal hiring and the other one is the external sources.

The internal sources are the existing talent pool you have working with you for a considerable time. This way, the employees are enticed to practice employee engagement processes and are encouraged to foster in their existing positions opportunities within an organizational hierarchical chain of command, categorically, in the hope of promotions within the current employment they are in.

The other magnificent benefit of internal hiring is a recruitment solution for your company whereby the talent pipeline is made flow smoother than before and the employees become open to new job roles. As 65% of the recruiters claim that there remains a shortage of talent in the markets and therefore internal hiring is cost-effective.

Moreover, external sources are job adverts in print media – if required by Government agencies, career fairs, on-campus hiring, job board portals like Indeed, social media LinkedIn social forum, Facebook, monster; and your website career page representing your organizational culture.

Attracting prospective potential candidates through advertisements

Again, attracting potential job candidates through advertisements is the same as mentioned above: social media - your website career page representing your organizational culture, print media – if the Government departments requisites for so, job carnivals, on the school, college, and university hiring, job board portals say, linked-In social forum, Facebook, monster, Indeed; etc. This is an important step within your recruitment solution.

Review application

Screening for top candidate(s) selection and Shortlisting of the qualified candidates as per predetermined criteria. Crossmatch the applications received with the criteria you mentioned in your job description of the job advert. Also, look for the required educational qualification and the experiential quantification of the job candidates. Better to go for telephonic screening via speaking to them like a short interview to convert a curriculum vitae (CV) into the person.   

Shortlist the good fit candidates having the matching profile for the open role/open position, and call them for face-to-face or video conferencing job interviews.

Interview process

Plan the way you want to conduct the job interviews against the screened/short-listed applications. Either that will be a structured interview or an unstructured one.

This is the real-time to convert a resume into a real-time human resource. As an expert in HR, you are required to dive into the CV of job candidates and conduct structured interviews or unplanned unstructured interviews.

Structured interviews are those having a pre-determined sequencing of the questions that tell you the details about the prospect. Every so often, the structured job interview questions are closed-ended questions having not a vast area for the candidate to reply and highlight the achievements concerning her/him-self, rather they have to answer directly and shortly like yes or no / agree or disagree / thereby short answers are expected. This is a standard process of inquiry. This is also known as the quantification method in research. This is sequential.

On the contrary, the unstructured interviews are the qualitative observation. This method is flexible to conduct. Here, every question is taken out from within the answer of the candidate, hence there is no sequence of the questions as predetermined and the questions are not the same for all candidates. But they contain open-ended questions therefore it gives candidates a vast area to recall and tell their qualified domains and experiences of life to share with you, that are relevant to the job role of current position vacancy in your company.

We, at WebHR, advise our clientele employers to conduct panel interviews, the third type of job interview at the end, and before that: intelligence tests encompassing words’ making sentences to grab the very internal psychology of the candidates, then after the teamwork-based activities, physical obstacles games and group discussions.

It is also advised that the remarks by the interviewers about every interviewee are marked right after the candidate leaves the interview room, so as not to miss any of the good points in favor of a job candidate hence in favor of your recruitment process to be a success.

Not all, but the mandatory as per your job role requirements, you may do more or less as per feasibility analysis of your interviewing process – because this all costs your company, business-wise.

Selection form amongst interviewees

It is better during the interviews you noted down the remarks now should be taken into account and the criteria in terms of education, experience, intelligence, physical fitness – if required, and other conditions should be further shortlisted and the scores at the higher side candidates be given a step forward into the process for a chance to serve you. It is pertinent to mention here that the candidate’s strengths are also taken into account by a prospective employee.

Employee Referral Program/ References cross-check

Employee referrals – the employees working with you referred to someone for your company employment - if any, and the references a candidate gave you in their CVs, etc. should be cross-checked in terms of their reality and validity.

Also, it is a must to check for the relation of the job candidate with the referred person, if any.

Moreover, the reason for leaving the previous employer along with leaving conditions should also be checked.

Hiring

Hiring new employees for onboarding. The provision of timely job offers recruits the talent for you, otherwise as per the research of this decade (2015) showed that 47% of job candidates do not join you even after being selected by you, due to competitors’ offers quick enough to take over you! Therefore once decided, quick job offers are mandatory without any delays.

Onboarding

Onboarding is the process at last of a successful recruitment strategy. This initiates with company orientation, organizational cultural knowledge, mission and vision declaration, and oath ceremony – if the job role is a public service office for the general good like city administrators, etc., the whole socialization process goes on.

We advise taking your recruits to lunch / dine-outs for more openly mingling opportunities for them with you and your organizational culture, telling them they are important for you, in an attempt to incorporate within them a sense of ease, vitality, and ownership.

Should you consider outsourcing?

If your company's financial balance sheet is not allowing you to spend the hours the HR domain employees working with you earn salaries, you may go for outsourcing.

But keep in mind that the company culture understanding is not an easy task to transfer to every talent hunter agency advisory! But then again, they do work for you in hunting the market available talent as per the criteria you mention for them.

What Research has to share with us?

As per the empirical research, social networking is a vital tool for effective recruitment. Research says that social networks are the places where both parties can share their required and offered skill sets and hence the companies are profitable to attract talent from around the globe through one click’s screens. Social networks provide the personal and professional details of the job candidates to prosperous employers worldwide, but then again it depends on the quality of the information provided. Moreover, through the swiftness of unified data processes, social networking attracts top talent for employers.  

However, there are several models available in the market for the recruitment process to be effective, in terms of academic empiricism for research concerned in diverse settings.

Final words

As far as the final words are concerned, you need to make flowcharts for your recruitment process in vogue. This may be done every time and again to see for improvement room, if any, which is always there indeed. The flowcharts connecting activities for your effective recruitment process help you understand and implement the activities as planned and sequenced, leaving the minimal chance of leaving behind any step, only if necessary - then it can be bypassed too. Hence, for your recruitment process to be your recruitment solution, try to make your recruitment step-by-step but rather keep it simple avoiding complexities and sidestepping which takes a long amount of time.

It is important to note too from HR perspective that companies usually focus on the positions only, hence ignoring the persons - which is not a witty decision. As HR domain specialists, you must focus on candidates' experience and then their positions together.

To end, the recruiters are the data scientists for job candidates to screen out, interview, select, and put on the job entrants. Thereupon, recruitment professionals need knowledge-intensive dynamic skills to conduct these sorts of jobs effectively. Hence, timely training of recruitment teams is also a recommended tool for the process to be effective and not defective, efficient, and less deficient.