The No. 1 Priority in a growing company often neglected: recruitment
The number 1 priority of growing companies must be finding the right people to hire. In practice, I observe that most of the companies have no adequate process to support this. In some cases they have no recruitment process at all. Resulting in disappointments; not finding the right persons or in some cases no persons at all.
Having an effective process will of course not ensure you will hire a star team, but it is pre-conditional. Let’s discuss a 7 step process for effective recruitment.
1. Identify Recruitment Need: Most companies are hiring just when the need arises. Preferably they are planning their recruitment need much more in advance. This Instead of hiring people, you can also consider to near or offshore or even outsource the job.
2. Create Job Descriptions: You can’t find what you’re looking for if you don’t know what you’re looking for. I have worked with founders and managers who found out during the selection process that there were missing an adequate candidate profile. And of course resulting in mismatches and going back to square one. Be precise in the required competences and expertise, the main tasks and responsibilities.
3. Talent Search: There multiple channels to consider for your talent search. Let me mention a few next the more expensive ones like recruitment agencies and job boards:
- Look within your organization
- Use your employees to spread the word
- Linkedin posts and Linkedin Jobs
- Build a pool of interns and trainees
- Job fairs and campus events
4. Pre Selection: By using a combination of some of the above-mentioned channels for collecting applicants, you can begin the process of narrowing down the list of candidates. With using minimum criteria and/or using shortlisting criteria.
5. Selection Process: There are a multiple ways of selecting new colleagues. The most used is of course interviews. Assessment are also a valuable method. It will show actual behavior instead of mostly described behavior as in interviews. An assessment can be conducted both externally both also internally. Board presentations, consultancy assignments and sales conversations as examples. We observe that companies are using also more and more data through questionnaires.
I always advice to use reference calls with superiors in the previous jobs.
6. Discussing the Offer: Important step is of course discussing the offer with the candidate as the recruitment process is also a sales process in which closing the deal is vital.
7. On boarding: If companies do not have a recruitment process, even more companies do not have an on-boarding process. Retainment of just hired people already starts with a good on-boarding process.
How is your recruitment process?