What is a hiring process?

A hiring process is a carefully crafted step-by-step plan for hiring the best talent. It involves everything from attracting, sourcing, interviewing to short-listing and onboarding recruits. It is specific to the organization’s needs and can help ensure a steady flow of human resources. 

Companies that build a hiring process tailored to their structure and markets show improved efficiency and progress.Although the overall plan and stages might be similar, many stages are bound to be unique to a company. A hiring process isn’t just about the mechanical steps; it is critical to gaining a tactical benefit and enhancing the quality of recruits.

Good hiring practices ensure that a company gets acquires quality resources and keeps up its productivity. Simply looking out for candidates when the need arises isn’t going to help you make the cut in this competitive world. An excellent hiring process is a must for companies who want to gain an advantage over their competitors in the talent market. 

Hiring process steps with Freshteam

Why is a hiring process necessary?

A hiring team armed with a foolproof hiring process is better suited to build the right talent pool. When prepared with care and precision, a hiring process can

As a result of all these, the company can acquire a beneficial place in the talent market and leverage it to attract top-quality candidates.

Steps in the Hiring Process

Wondering how to go about setting up a good hiring process for your company?

Here is a hiring process checklist with ten steps that can help make your hiring process efficient and effective:

Steps of the Hiring Process with Freshteam

1. Make a hiring plan 

The hiring process begins with right planning - identifying and anticipating the hiring needs of your company. Recruiters generally hire for a space that gets created instantly or if they need extra resources. It is critical that the hiring team tracks the organizational growth rate and plans the addition of resources required. Also, the team should keep an eye on the employees and try to anticipate any impending departures. It is essential to make a hiring plan by identifying the needs proactively to make  the recruitment process more streamlined.

Regular meetings with team managers to discuss the workload can go a long way towards anticipating the need for extra resources. Evaluating teams’ performances and finding out issues not being addressed can help you figure out any potential hiring need. It would be best if you kept a tab on the expected output and the actual results.

 

2. Define the job role

The best recruiters act on a hiring need as soon as it is evident. It is crucial to start working to fill a need before it becomes an urgent issue for the company. Defining the job role with the work specifications, experience & skills required, qualifications, etc., lets you swiftly move to the next steps. It would be best if the job descriptions of the company roles are ready in advance. You can try using an ATS that offers well-written job descriptions for various roles.

 

Defining job roles in a hiring process with Freshteam

Preparing a clear and concise job description can help you refine the quality of applications. It’ll also help the potential candidates to determine how fit they are for the role. Here are some essential elements that you should include in your job description:

For a good hiring process, recruiters need to communicate with the candidates effectively. The job description is a key piece of communication. Therefore, it is critical to ensure it is concise and informative.

 

3. Define the application process

The next step is to build a fool-proof application process. A one-click application form with only a resume upload option will give you a high volume of applicants but you might take a hit on the quality and relevance of candidates applying for the role. Hence, it is important to have a robust application form that is tried and tested.

Use filtering questions:

It is easy to set up an application form with some basic screening questions using an ATS. These screening questions might include questions on

These questions make it easy for you to filter out candidates who don’t meet the qualifying criteria and save you a ton of time. This application form can be hosted on your career site. But there is a balance between filtering candidates and turning them away with too many screening questions in the form. So monitor the application drop-offs and keep the screening questions short. You want to turn away the less serious candidates but not the good ones.

 

4. Source candidates

Advertise:

Advertising the job role in the right spaces can be a bit tricky. However, it is incredibly crucial for the success of a hiring process. A lot of recruiters tend to depend solely on external resources while looking for applicants. Letting your employees know about an open position is an essential element of sourcing for an opening. Even if you don’t wish to recruit internally, employee referrals can be instrumental in bringing in suitable candidates.

External candidate-sourcing avenues should be a balanced mix of social media platforms, job sites, and the company’s website. An ATS lets you post to multiple sourcing platforms from right within one central dashboard.

 

Job boards advertising in a hiring process with Freshteam

Companies must do thorough research to find out where their ideal candidates spend most of their time looking for jobs. Choosing the right avenue for posting is essential to source the best candidates. If your ideal candidate is browsing social media sites for jobs, advertising in newspapers will prove significantly counterproductive.

You can check out this useful guide to candidate sourcing that covers practical tips and hacks for sourcing great talent from multiple platforms.

Freshteam ATS allows you to effortlessly utilize smart candidate sourcing features to post and advertise your job openings on different channels. It helps you gain visibility wherever your ideal talent pool is active.

Recruit actively:

Advertising is just one way of reaching out to candidates. Companies should remember that not every candidate is actively looking for a job. As much as 70 percent of the global workforce are passive job seekers. Missing out on tapping into this talent pool can be disastrous for the hiring process.

As soon as the advertising begins, it would help if you also began actively reaching out to potential candidates. An excellent strategy would be to reach out to the chosen few that you find the most suitable. Also, if you have a prepared talent pool, sort through it to find out the best candidates for the position.  Recruiting actively can help companies reduce the gap between their advertising and the ideal candidates. Proactive recruitment throughout the year to build a talent pool can be another excellent strategy to accomplish this.

 

5. Application or Resume Screening

Screening applications and shortlisting candidates is a highly crucial element of the hiring process. The steps that follow are solely dependent upon the quality and efficiency of shortlisting. A successful sourcing campaign could result in a massive inflow of applications. You must ensure a fixed process to screen and shortlist these applicants.

Manual screening of resumes for relevant fit can be the most draining part of a recruitment process especially when there is high applicant volume. Make your life easy by setting up a pre-fixed set of criteria that your ATS can look through and sort applications for you depending on the skills required for the role. 

With Freshteam, you can quickly go through this process and save time to focus on the best applicants. The recruitment software allows you to screen resumes based on fixed criteria. You can even compare between selected resumes in case of a close contest for the role.

You can also send out pre-screening tests to candidates who satisfy a certain criteria and can advance to the next stage. This is useful in scenarios with a high volume of applications or when you are recruiting for tech roles.

 

Pre-screening test in hiring process with Freshteam

6. Screen on call 

When you arrive at this stage, you would have already shortlisted the applications to be left with the most suitable ones. However, it is likely that some applicants have either accepted a position somewhere else or have stopped looking for a job-switch. Therefore, before scheduling an in-person interview, it would help to have a short discussion on a call.

A screening call enables you to gauge the candidate’s interest and learn more about their personality. It is one thing to look at a resume, and entirely another to hear from the candidate about their experiences. By including a screening call in the hiring process, you add a crucial stage in the funnel that allows you to spend your resources on the top chosen applicants.

An excellent approach would be to note down the questions you would like to ask the candidates beforehand. A call can be pretty dynamic, and you must ensure that the time you spend on it leads to some valuable information. The questions should be prepared to figure out whether the candidate is genuinely interested in the position. Only then, you should proceed further.

 

7. Schedule an interview

The next step is to schedule interviews for the candidates who have made it this far. Some companies like to precede the interviews with an assessment test to understand the candidates’ skills better if they are hiring for highly skilled domain roles like tech. However, businesses should determine the scope of time and resources to structure the hiring process better.

An interview is one of the last steps in the recruitment process. Recruiters should ensure that they ask all questions they need to arrive at the final decision. You can divide the interview into multiple stages based on the size of the hiring team. Here’s what you can do to ensure good quality interviews:

In the journey leading up to the interview stage, both you and the candidate would have invested significant time and resources. Therefore, recruiters should prepare well for this stage to prevent any misjudgments.

Interview scheduling in a hiring process with Freshteam

Freshteam ATS provides you with an end-to-end interview scheduling experience. It allows you to schedule interviews with different candidates, sync their availability with the interviewer’s and notify the candidate in just a few simple clicks. 

8. Screen through interviews

This step is usually considered the most important since it has the most visibility to the hiring manager. The interview panel needs to be provided with the interview toolkit prior to the interview to make themselves well-acquainted with it. Here are some do’s and don’ts.

 

Interview Do's Interview Don'ts
  • Stick to the questions in the interview toolkit to have a structured interviewing process
  • Make the questions situational based on their past experience to judge their problem-solving capabilities 
  • Probe their goals and aspirations behind the career-switch
  • Make notes during the interview to help you while registering your feedback
  • Make use of an interview scorecard to facilitate collaboration between interviewers
  • Don’t give room to any unconscious bias based on the candidate’s looks or personality or gender or race or region
  • Don’t ask too many hypothetical questions that can make the interview very subjective
  • Don’t forget to check for motivational fit. You don’t want to hire a short-term candidate for a role that had long-term goals
  • Don’t make the candidate feel uncomfortable with questions of a personal nature. It is always good to run the interview questions with a colleague in legal first

 

9. Make the hiring decision and roll out the offer

This is where you decide whether you’ll welcome a new member to the team or keep looking for a more suitable candidate. However, if you’ve followed the hiring process well, chances are you would’ve found the talent you were looking for.

The first thing to keep in mind at this stage is that any delay could mean missing out on the candidate. The recruiters should remember that a candidate applies in multiple places and good quality candidates get picked up first. So, you cannot afford any delay in the process. However, if some of the paperwork has gone through, it is likely for the candidate to stay.

Before you roll out the final offer, ensure that you conduct a thorough background check. There are chances of a candidate furnishing fake information. Hiring someone with fake credentials can cost your business heavily.

However, once you finalize the candidate for the role, extend the offer without any delay. The offer should include some essential elements to ensure that the transaction is smooth:

A good approach would be to keep all the teams in the loop to ensure all paperwork can be prepared in a limited time. However, even if it takes some time to prepare the paperwork, ensure that you break the news to the candidate and assure them of their position. An informal call or email would suffice.

 

10. Onboarding 

The hiring procedure doesn’t simply end with rolling out the offer.The onboarding process and the early days of employment are big contributors to the long-term growth of the new hire. So, put in efforts to make the onboarding for the candidates as smooth as possible.

You can use onboarding checklists for easier coordination with your team easier on the preparatory work to make the new hire feel welcome even before they join your organisation.This ensures lesser drop-out or rejected job offers.

An effective and efficient hiring process is a crucial element for the success of any

organization. Investing time and effort in building a robust hiring process will have compounded results by enabling you to optimize your ability to find the most suitable talent for your company and the growth of your business in the long run.

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