We waste up to 40% of work time on routine tasks unrelated to our direct responsibilities. The situation begs for optimization to increase productivity. Luckily, the accessibility of frameworks and data enables us to boost our efficiency. All it takes is the right tools and approaches specific to our needs. People who deal with hiring are among the professionals who’d benefit the most from the optimization of recruitment workflow. Being in a constant hunt for the top professionals, juggling numerous tasks from advertising jobs to screening candidates and scheduling interviews, recruiters definitely need a scaled and personalized recruitment workflow.
Let’s go through the steps that help HR managers create a customizable workflow and look at the best ways to optimize the recruiting experience.
The steps in the process of recruiting
Recruitment is one of the main tasks of the HR department. Its goal is to bring employees into the company. To do so, recruiters need to find the right candidates and check if they have the desired capabilities. That is why many companies have large HR departments. Numerous businesses reduce their workloads by outsourcing recruiting or employing customizable workflow software to ensure a consistent and result-driven process.
Follow these seven steps to make the recruitment process scalable, effective, and straightforward:
1. Decide on what you need
As tempting as it may be to jump right into looking for a new employee, recruitment won’t bring desired outcomes unless HR managers put some preoperational work into talent acquisition. The first step is to think through who you are looking for and what tasks the potential employee will be performing. It is also helpful to look at the current team and its shortcomings to determine what gaps a new hire can fill.
2. Describe the job
When you identify your team’s needs and the qualities that you’d like your new team member to have, let job seekers know about them. A clear and accurate job description will prevent any misunderstanding during the recruitment process. Be sure to include requirements such as educational background, desired work experience, listing the potential tasks, and any other skills that might be an advantage.
3. Start searching
There are two approaches to looking for new employees: searching within the company and on the job market. When it comes to looking for someone inside your organization, you can transfer or promote existing workers. Also, introduce a reward system for referring a candidate to the company. Thus, your workers will be motivated to assist in finding the right person among their contacts. And finally, go through your talent pool of previous applicants and contact the best ones directly.
When you start looking for new workers outside your organization, you have some great options at your disposal, too. For example, you can begin advertising the position on relevant websites and social media. Publish the job opening on your company’s web page in the careers section, as many professionals may check it when searching for new opportunities. Don’t forget about the college graduates—partner up with on-campus career services to recruit your new workforce.
4. Identify the relevant candidates
Once you receive applications, begin screening CVs. To avoid drowning in a sea of applications or overlooking worthy candidates, first sort candidates by basic requirements. Having created a long list of those, look for a preferred qualification and experiences to develop the shortlist. Lastly, identify any possible issues or red flags related to a candidate and ask about them during the interview.
Avoid bias at any point. Hiring and recruiting is no place for discrimination or bias based on anything other than the ability to perform the job at hand while making a positive impact on the organization. Unfortunately, unconscious bias is just that. ‘Unconscious.’ Here is one way you can eliminate bias in your HR technology software: Gender-neutral resume review—encourage your ATS administrators to turn-off candidate photo inclusion. Many times, there is a default to enable the software to associate the applicants’ email addresses with a social media footprint, and it can import their photos into the ATS.
Ryan Naylor, CEO/Founder, VIVAHR.
5. Interview
This is your chance to ask all the questions. It’s essential to prepare your questions in advance: make them relevant and professional. Don’t forget to focus on the candidate’s soft skills, as well as their future goals. And remember that an interview is a conversation, not an interrogation. Explain the benefits of working for your company to ensure that the candidate will join your company if you make an offer.
6. Make an offer
After you have identified the most successful candidate and checked their references, it’s time to offer them the job. Include the contract details such as starting date, compensation, schedule, and other important information. Having made the offer, ask the candidate to confirm acceptance of the offer in a written form. Some companies even ask their employees to sign the offer in paper.
7. Onboard
Great job, you have completed the most challenging part of the recruitment process! All that is left is to introduce the candidate to the team, explain some organizational stuff and any important aspects. Provide the new employee with all the access, equipment, and tools necessary for the job. In some organizations, this process may include some sort of training.
Optimizing recruitment workflow
Now that we’ve covered the steps of the hiring process, it’s time to check out the ways to scale it up. The easiest way to scale is using customizable workflow software.
First, HR automation removes a large part of the manual workload. From generating a job description to managing candidates through the recruitment process, you can complete tasks in a few clicks. Workflow software also provides full integration of the tools and platforms recruiters use.
Second, the technology leverages data in recruiting. It eliminates guesswork from the employment process. Information can be gathered automatically and manually and is then processed by machine learning algorithms depending on the inquiry. These reports can be shared with managers from different departments and offices to ensure everyone involved in the process is on the same page.
The right recruitment workflow tools can help HR managers with the following tasks:
- Identifying the best performing hiring sources
- Developing a quality hiring pool
- Running an employee referral program
- Managing tests and job simulation tasks
Technology has brought great benefit to the recruitment process with solutions that facilitate offer creation, resume parsing, de-duplication of databases, ATS updating, sourcing candidates, personality assessment, skills assessments, interview scheduling, and initial screening. The list goes on.
Jim Stroud, an HR Influencer,
Custom conversation
When you are establishing a scalable recruitment process, customized emails and messaging solutions are a must. Here is what you can do with such tools:
1. Narrow your focus
With rich data at your disposal, you can avoid investing your efforts into someone who is not interested or under/overqualified. Just define the ideal candidate by searchable characteristics and automatically receive the best matches.
2. Reach out with customized messages
There’s a wealth of free email templates for HR professionals, but all of them lack one crucial element: a personal approach. Modern-day recruitment tools analyze information related to each candidate and automatically includes it in personalized emails and messages to candidates. Tailored messages lead to a higher reply rate, creates a better connection between recruiters and applicants, and promotes the employer’s brand.
3. Research
It’s imperative to know who you are talking to, which is why you need to research. Manually Googling and frantically scrolling through social media may be of little to no use. In contrast, recruiting technology automatically pulls related information from the internet, applications, and your conversations to provide HR specialists with a clear profile of the candidate.
Create work from home process
The pandemic has forced businesses to completely reinvent many processes. One of the biggest and arguably most impactful changes is the wide adoption of working from home. Naturally, this has led to online recruiting too.
But how do you establish an effective and sustainable hiring process while working from home? Follow these steps to keep delivering on your goals (while working in your pajamas):
- Focus on your body and mind. No matter what task you’re working on, pay attention to your physical and mental health. Check your posture, the position of the screen, and the amount of light. Take breaks to focus on something positive and always keep a bottle of water next to you to avoid dehydration.
- Team up with technology. Make digital tools your friends as they help you stay productive without exhausting yourself. Use video tools for screening candidates and scheduling interviews with the hiring manager.
- Stay connected. Remote work doesn’t mean you have to do the job by yourself. Use the tools to collaborate with your colleagues throughout the hiring process. Identify preferred channels of communication and how to make the most of them.
- Don’t miss a thing. Working from home may be full of surprises, especially if you have children or pets. And some surprises may lead to missing an important phone call or email. To avoid this, download messengers and email apps on your phone and activate notifications during working hours.