7 Ways to Improve Your Hiring Process
Hiring the right talent is crucial as it has a direct impact on the business. A bad hire can cost you dearly in many ways. ‘Bad candidate is worse than no candidate’ is a familiar adage in the business fraternity. While it is common to make mistakes in hiring it is easier for big companies to correct the mistakes while a small business suffers financially and emotionally in dealing with it. Hence it is important to know about the best practices in hiring process to avoid pitfalls. Here are some tips from our HR experts on hiring process which will help you do the trick proficiently.
Here’s a list of such best practices to consider that can improve your hiring process:
- Proper Job Description: The job description is the first step you take when looking for a new hire. By providing an incomplete and/or irrelevant job description, you may get a large number of applications, but most of them will not have the skill sets needed for the position. As an HR manager or employer, you need to provide a detailed job description with minimum qualifying eligibility and mandatory skills set that are required to fill the position. Also clearly spell out the roles and responsibilities of the position. This will attract the right candidates for each position, which in turn helps grow your company and reduces costs,. If we get the best possible fit for a job position, the chances of employee retention are higher.
- Ask the Right Questions in the Interview: Be prepared with standard list of questions that you are going to ask each candidate. The questions and the conversation must help you gauge their technical suitability for the job position and the personality attributes as well which is important for the candidate to blend with your organisation’s culture. Involving division heads in this stage of the hiring process is a recommended since they have the subject matter expertise to ask the right questions and understand the answers. Furthermore, they are the ones who will be working with the new hire.
- Set a Timeframe: Set a timeframe for each stage of your hiring process. If you are conducting a written test, set a time limit for taking and submitting the test. It helps speed up the interview process and candidates’ productivity within the specified time limit. Also, you can restrict interview questions to a standard set in order to limit the time required for the process and avoid spending excess time on evaluation.
- Keep Scorecards: Create and use hiring scorecards with weightage for elements like educational qualifications, skills set, experience, certifications, etc. It makes it easy to compare all the candidates and simply shortlist those who get the highest score.
- Fast Response: After completing your candidate review process, send a response mail to all the participants in which you inform them whether they have been selected for the interview, or not. Sending a polite response mail as feedback to participants within a stipulated time is helpful for those eagerly awaiting a response from you . As a delay in response might lead to losing a good candidate.
- Integrating Software: There are now many HR software and tools available, especially for conducting written tests as part of the hiring process. These tools (amcat, timespro, etc.) make it easy to get accurate results and gauge the talent of the candidates in much less time. Most corporate companies use their own software to test the skills of candidates. Usage of technology speeds up the hiring process, requires less resources, and provides more accurate results.
- Social media channels: Being active on social media will help improve the hiring process. Linkedin is most popular professional social network used by employers for finding and hiring new employees. According to LinkedIn’s latest statistics, 93% of companies use LinkedIn to fill their vacant positions, and 48% use only LinkedIn for social outreach. By comparison, only 66% use Facebook, and 54% use Twitter for hiring reasons. A full 73% of companies note that they successfully filled their positions using social media.
