5 Easy Steps To Improve Recruitment Outcomes
Finding the perfect candidate can be a struggle. With so many candidates to choose from, how can you be sure that you are selecting not only the best, but also the one that will stay with you in the long term? It is not easy, and you are certainly not alone in your battle to find the perfect employee, but refining your recruitment process could help. Here are five easy steps you can follow to improve your recruitment outcomes.
1) Make a plan
Recruitment is a long process. It is easy to get distracted and prolong it by putting off looking through those CVs or holding those interviews. Setting a clear timeframe early on will help keep you on track. Start by thinking about when you want your new employee to start and work backwards. How long do you need for each stage of the process? Once you have an idea, set clear goals and deadlines. Knowing when you want to interview and when you need to have reviewed all the applicants by, will keep you on schedule.
2) Know what you want
How can you expect to hire the perfect candidate, if you don’t know what the perfect candidate should be like? Spend time really thinking about the role and what skills, experience, and qualities are required. Equally as important, think about what you don’t want – are there any qualities, personalities, or values that will not fit in with your business?
Once you know, write it down, produce a set of criteria. Human error is inherent in many recruitment processes; it is natural to want to hire the candidates you clicked with, but they may not be the best for the role. Having a clear image of what you are looking for when you are reviewing applications or conducting interviews will reduce the desire to go purely on gut feeling.
3) Use psychometric testing
CVs and interviews are a good indicator of a candidate’s skills, experience and personality, but CVs can be embellished, and interview nerves can prevent a candidate’s real personality from shining through. Using psychometric tests, designed with your ideal criteria in mind, will enable you to determine quickly and easily how suited a candidate is to a role and also how they will behave in your company. Are they likely to get on with the rest of your team? Do they have a similar work ethic?
E-Talent apply psychometric and behavioural testing early on in the process. This is beneficial, as it can stop you from spending time on applications from unsuitable candidates and make you spend longer evaluating ones you would have otherwise dismissed early on.
4) Use technology
Technology is inherent in our lives, so why shouldn’t it be integral to successful recruitment? With technology, your job description can easily be posted in multiple places at once, which increases the reach and gives you the best chance of finding that perfect candidate.
Furthermore, candidate management systems can streamline the entire process, from posting job descriptions, to selecting candidates for interview. Submissions are all in one place and online application forms remove the need for unnecessary paper. E-Talent’s system goes one step further and includes psychometrics and behavioural testing. All candidate information is stored in one place, and candidates are ranked against your criteria, making coming to informed decisions easy. The process is fully automated – saving you time and money.
5) Prepare for interviews
Be prepared and avoid conducting unstructured interviews that inevitably lead to important information being forgotten. Knowing what questions you want to ask in advance, and asking all candidates the same ones, makes the process fair and comparisons between candidates easy. Open questions are great for getting candidates talking; yes or no answers limit your ability to judge a candidate’s confidence or character. Finally, try to avoid relying on a single interviewer. A second opinion, particularly from someone that the new candidate will work closely with, is ideal, as they could spot something you don’t or may just see it from a different perspective.
