- Thursday 02 August 2018
According to Dr Brad Smart, author and leading expert in recruiting as well as managing high performers, it will cost you 5 times the annual salary of your new recruit if you hire the wrong person.* Research from the Office for National Statistics shows that the average UK salary is £27,271, meaning that getting an average job-level hire wrong can cost your business up to £136,355.* Make the calculation if you are recruiting a senior manager a £50k salary or more…
The below definition of “Recruitment” from the BusinessDictionnary sums up very well what elements should be part of an effective recruitment process.
“The process of finding and hiring the best-qualified candidate (from within or outside of an organization) for a job opening, in a timely and cost-effective manner. The recruitment process includes analyzing the requirements of a job, attracting employees to that job, screening and selecting applicants, hiring, and integrating the new employee to the organization.”
This process should not only be to fill a position within your business or interviewing people. It needs to go beyond that. It does not matter if recruiting is your daily job or if it is a task you undertake periodically, the process should not be ignored.
Below are 9 steps that will give you guidelines to define your own recruitment process:
#1 Identify what you need
A key step you need to take when recruiting is to identify what you need in terms of job requirements (qualifications, experience, special characteristics…) and in terms of employee profile. It is important to have a mix of the two to ensure that your new recruit corresponds to the job itself and to the company culture and values.
A bullet point list of the skills and responsibilities needed for the job will help you. Then you can write a detailed job description which outlines what the company expects from the candidates. Your job description should be clear, concise, accurate and free from discriminatory language, use keywords to guide you and appeal the best candidates.
#2 Search for the right person
Searching is another crucial step as you will first need to decide if you’ll recruit internally or externally. Sometimes looking within is a great opportunity to hire quicker and cheaper: “The average cost of finding and hiring someone from outside the company is 1.7 times more than an internal hire” reports the Saratoga Institute. Your employees are already familiar with the business, its culture and values and providing the opportunity to your people to grow is a real motivation factor as employees who are promoted into jobs perform significantly better than workers hired externally into similar roles. Cisco found that recruiting internally has increased their employee’s career satisfaction by 20%.**
If you cannot find the right candidate internally then you will need to find another way to circulate your employee value proposition (in our previous article about building an effective HR strategy, you will find some guidelines to develop a strong EVP). Word of mouth is one of the effective ways to communicate your company’s benefits, its culture and its values and to have recommendations from trusted people within your network. Using the right platforms is also essential, you need to ask yourself for each platform you are considering, who will be receiving the ad? To whom it will be forwarded to? How fast these platforms are usually performing?
There’s an ocean of possibilities as to where and how you can search for the right person.
#3 Screen candidates
The goal is to spot each element that corresponds to what you have defined earlier when identifying your needs.
Screening CVs in the first place independently of cover letters will eliminate irrelevant applications. That is why reviewing each one of them is essential. Split the CVs in different piles:
- Relevant applications in terms of experience and skills
- Relevant applications in terms of employee profile
- Relevant applications in terms of experience, skills and employee profile
The last pile will naturally be the most interesting one for you, however you still need to give everyone a chance as phone interviews can be surprising.
#4 Shortlist
Short telephone interviews in your recruitment process will give you the opportunity to have a first impression of each candidate: a CV that you have put in the “Relevant applications in terms of experience, skills and employee profile” pile could end up being not interesting at all after a phone interview and vice versa.
#5 Conduct face to face interviews
Conducting interviews needs a full preparation. In fact, you need to be as prepared as the candidate. The first step is to determine a date, a time and location that suit both the candidate and you. You want them to be as comfortable as possible, so they can show the best of themselves during the interview.
It can be hard to remain impartial sometimes as you can get along with one candidate and on the other hand have a bad gut feeling with another one. We are human after all. So, having a couple of lead questions can help (i.e Why did you apply to this job?). These are the ones that you should ask every candidate to remain as objective as possible and give the same chance to any of them.
Depending on responses you can then ask follow-up questions (i.e What stood out in our ad that you liked particularly?). If the candidate seems very uncertain when being asked a follow-up question, then it usually means that the candidate is just saying what they think you want to hear and have rehearsed the interview too much. If the candidate can easily answer the follow-up questions, then it means that they did really look into the ad and the company and it is always a good sign.
#6 Appoint the candidate you’ve chosen
Once you have reached the appointment step, it means that you have found the right candidate. Congratulations! But there are still a couple of steps to take.
Appointing the chosen one concerns all legal matters such as sending the letter of appointment and preparing the paperwork (job description, work contract, handbook etc…).
Using a checklist with all elements of your appointment process is a good way of not missing any step.
#7 Onboard them
Again, an induction checklist which at least covers some of the basics of your employee induction process is beneficial:
- Introduction to the company - values and work ethics
- An overview of health, safety and fire procedures
- Introduction to departmental managers as required
- Standard training programmes to be attended
- COSHH training
- Training and development opportunities
High Speed training stated that “A poor induction can result in a longer adjustment period for your new recruit and can result in them underperforming” so it needs to be taken seriously.
#8 Train them
Once your new employee has been fully onboarded, they will need appropriate training to be up to speed on how your operation works on a daily basis. It can be in the form of training courses, workshops or ideally on-the-job training with one or more of their new colleagues.
It is important to always take the time to train your employees, it will ensure that they have all the tools and skills to do a great job.
Poor training will also have a direct impact on employee engagement: “40% of employees with poor training leave their job within the first year.” (Go-GulF).
#9 Appraisal
Last but not least, allow a couple of months before conducting a formal appraisal interview. It usually takes place at the end of the probation period and allow you to sit down with your new employee to review their performance over the past couple of months and to give them the opportunity to share with you their own view on their work so far.
Between their start and the appraisal interview, I would recommend running a couple of follow-up meetings to ensure they are feeling comfortable and understands what you expect from them.
As a conclusion, recruiting someone is a long-lasting process and it needs to be fully and seriously considered and prepared. Remember, it is always better to take more time in finding the right person and keep them than to waste time and money in recruiting the wrong one.
© Dobiquity
Photo by rawpixel on Unsplash
*https://mp-squared.com/recruitment-strategy/3-terrifying-recruitment-statistics/
***http://business.time.com/2012/08/15/the-power-within-why-internal-recruiting-hiring-are-on-the-rise/
