How to Build a Recruitment Process to Hire Top Talent: The Ultimate Guide
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How to Build a Recruitment Process to Hire Top Talent: The Ultimate Guide

By Admin 6 min read

A good recruitment process is key to hiring top talent. It may seem quite complicated to create a good recruitment process, but a great recruitment process will pay off (and there are tools like Pypa Hire to make life easier). In this guide, we’ll go through all of the steps of a recruitment process, from defining the job to onboarding, to show you how to create a recruitment process to hire top talent:

What Position Are You Hiring For?

Firstly, you need to accurately define the position you are hiring for. What skills are you looking for? In particular, what skills are missing in your organization, department or team that you are hiring to fill? This doesn’t just include hard skills but also soft skills. (However, regardless of what skills you are looking for, you need to separate them into essentials (i.e. minimum requirements) and nice-to-haves).

Job Description

Now you’ve figured out what you’re hiring for, you can write a job description. But how do you write a job description that stands out in the crowd?

  • Avoid long paragraphs: Structure your job description well so that candidates actually want to read it.
  • Include all the necessary information: In a job description, you need to mention key information like hours, minimum requirements, experience needed, what department the job is in and what location.
  • Don’t include unnecessary information: Don’t include unnecessary, irrelevant or metaphorical information, because this might discourage some candidates from applying.
  • Point out benefits: Including a competitive salary and benefits such as health-care, paid leave, and pets-at-work in your job description will help attract top talent.
  • Talk about the company: The job description is a great place to talk about your company’s values and healthy work culture.

Advertise The Job

Your job description will do no good if you can’t get it out there, so you need to advertise your job with every tool you have available (not just job boards):

Job Boards:

Job boards are still really important in hiring, but you need to look beyond Indeed. Place your jobs on job boards that are specific to your industry (for example, StackOverflow or YCombinator for IT) which will help you narrow in on qualified candidates. Also, consider placing jobs on job boards for specific groups (e.g. women and minorities) to attract diverse candidates. Remember, that many of these options are free, if you are a small business on a limited budget. An Applicant Tracking/Staffing software like Pypa hire lets you post on multiple job boards at once.

Social Media and LinkedIn:

These days, prospective employees are as likely to see a job opening on social media (especially LinkedIn) as a job board. There’s lots of ways you can recruit on social media, not just limited to posting your job listings. You can also use your social media accounts to promote your company culture and even ask your employees to share job postings. Always remember to use appropriate hashtags and that you don’t have to limit yourself to the main platforms.

Your Website:

Candidates will also look at your website, where you should have a more detailed job description (and position description). They may have even found the job on your website. This means it’s very important that your website (as well as your listing) is representative of your employer brand. It’s another good place to talk about benefits and show off your company culture.

Of course, there’s one more (big) thing that you can do to increase your talent pipeline.

Seek Out Passive Candidates

Many of the top candidates may be currently employed. Despite this, this is a talent pool you don’t want to miss out on as it may include the top talent. Where do you find passive candidates?

  • Linkedin and professional networks: The perfect candidate may be hiding in your LinkedIn network or be someone you know in your industry.
  • Internal recruitment: Recruiting from within your ranks is a useful strategy to increase employee retention, as it gives employees hope of promotion. The bonus for you is that your employees already know your company.
  • Referrals from existing employees: Your employees may know people in your industry who would be perfect for your open position. You can even offer employees a referral bonus for successful hires. However, beware of bias: employees are likely to recommend people from similar backgrounds as themselves.
  • Portfolios: Workers in some areas (e.g. content writers and graphics designers) may have portfolios online where you can view their work. This is a great way to find someone with the skills you’re looking for.
  • Past applicants: Someone you passed over for a job previously might be interested in your new job, especially if they had a positive candidate experience.
  • Job fairs: Job fairs (or even virtual job fairs) are a good place to attract candidates who might not even have heard of you.

Review Applicants

Once you have your candidates, you need to start reviewing them. How do you review applicants?

  • Use an ATS: Applicant Tracking/Staffing Software like Pypa Hire can help you streamline your application process and make sure you’ve gone correctly through the steps of your recruitment process.
  • Discount unqualified candidates: Discounting candidates who don’t have the minimum qualifications or requirements in their CVs is your first step to narrow down your list. However, don’t discount wildcard candidates immediately—remember that some may be strong in the soft skills you’re looking for.
  • Conduct phone interviews: Short phone interviews let you check things like qualifications and salary requirements, saving you time before you go to the interview stage.

Interview Well

It’s not just employees who can interview badly, recruiters can too. Here’s some tips for interviewing well:

  • Put together an interview team: A single person doesn’t have enough perspective to conduct interviews successfully, so you should always interview as a team. To avoid bias, try to make your interview team as diverse as possible.
  • Prepare: Make sure you’ve read all of the candidate’s application materials thoroughly so that you don’t waste their (or your) time asking questions that are answered in their cover letter or CV.
  • Ask job-related questions: Questions like “What is your biggest strength or weakness?” don’t actually tell much about an employee’s ability to do the job. Keep your questions relevant to the job or at least relevant to the soft skills required by the job. (Here are some lists of interview questions for different industries). Ask everyone the same questions in the interests of fairness.
  • Don’t cater to a specific type of candidate: Steer clear of bias by keeping on work related topics (asking the right questions should help). This also applies when talking about benefits—Not all candidates are going to be interested in your beer keg or your pet-friendly policy. Make sure you mention different benefits such as paid parental leave or that your insurance includes mental health.

Check References And Send Out a Job Offer

Once you’ve decided on a candidate (which should be a lot easier with a proper interviewing process), you need to check their references and then offer them a job. When you’re doing this:

  • Check references: When you’re checking references, remember to ask questions about the quality of a candidate’s work, how long they stayed at that position and why they left.
  • Offer the contract quickly: Make sure you get your contract to your new hire quickly, otherwise (if they’re really top talent) someone else will get in first.
  • Make sure the contract’s signed: Iron out any issues with the contract. Remember, they’re not your employee until they’ve signed that contract. (It’s very easy to sign contracts in Pypa HR).

Ensure a Positive Candidate Experience

It’s not just your eventual hire who you need to please. All of your candidates matter, because their candidate experience will reflect on your employer brand. This is why it’s very important to keep candidates up to date with where they are in the hiring pipeline, give them lots of notice and give feedback after the interview so that they have a positive candidate experience.

Have a Good Onboarding Process

Keep your new hire happy with a good onboarding process. Onboarding should be a quick, fuss free process. Onboarding is easy with the Pypa suite. Pypa HR takes care of everything for you and comes with a handy checklist so you can make sure you haven’t missed out any part of the onboarding process.

Review The Recruitment Process

After you’ve made a hire, it’s crucial to review the recruitment process so that you can improve your hiring process. Pypa Hire or another job application management software is perfect for this because it includes metrics from which it is easy to generate hiring reports. Pypa Hire’s metrics include:

  • Number of candidates at each stage
  • Filled vs in progress jobs
  • Hires by job board
  • Hires by recruiter

By looking at these metrics, you can identify problems and solve them before you have to hire again.

Creating a recruitment process that helps you hire top talent is something that will pay off for your business in the long run. If you follow these steps (and have a little help from an ATS like Pypa Hire), then recruitment will be far easier. From sourcing plenty of qualified candidates to hiring the perfect person, you too can create a recruitment process to hire top talent. Still find recruiting overwhelming?—Sign up for Pypa Hire today!

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By Admin 6 min read

Originally written 22 Nov, 2021 . Updated on 22 Nov, 2021

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