At the center of any successful business is a team of highly competent professionals. For smaller businesses, this could mean hiring raw talent and training and polishing them to reach a level of productivity that you want to see. Larger businesses can afford the luxury of simply hiring higher quality staff and then improving their work efficiency even further.
In either case, the quality of people that you start with has a huge impact on the entire process. Getting better quality talent for your company will reduce training costs and improve the overall output you can expect to get from the team.
As businesses become more competitive and employees are being head hunted by bigger companies that offer better salaries, companies need to focus on how they can hire the best people possible.
Overhauling your hiring processes and thinking outside the traditional boxes are key to attracting the right talent. Here are a few important things to consider if you want to improve the recruitment process in your business.
Dedicated Portal
Where you hunt for talent is very important. A lot of companies choose to hire the services of a headhunter or specialized recruitment companies because they don’t have the time or resources to explore every talent pool. On the other hand, some companies will limit where they hire talent specifically to keep quality high.
Online marketplaces and recruiters have their place, but you also need to be directly available to your potential employees as a company. If you have a careers page on your website or an application portal on LinkedIn or any other way for applicants to directly reach out to you, that will help a great deal.
This is especially true if you are in a very particular business niche and employees battle to find employment in that niche. Having a way for prospective employees to reach out to you directly, means you can personally evaluate all the applications. Moreover, you will also get more applications this way as you increase your accessibility to potential employees.
Copywriting
How you structure your job posts also makes a difference to the type of candidates you attract. This doesn’t mean you have to provide all the amenities and the same salary that your competitors are offering but just the tone of your advertisements can change the perception of an applicant. Getting a professional copywriter to write out your job posts in your company’s voice will make a huge difference.
This will help you to attract the kind of people that will be a better fit for your company in terms of their personality and mentality rather than just their professional abilities.
Application and Interview Process
As your company grows you will start to receive more applications for each job post. Some positions generally receive a lot more applications because there is such a large pool of people that can fulfill that role. It can be hard to organize all this information if you are doing this manually.
Use technology to your advantage and get a specialized HRM platform to help manage all this data. You can get custom-made solutions but even off-the-shelf software works really well for this. Moreover, commercial-made software has more information available online so it is much easier to train staff and actually start using the platform. Custom-made software has a bigger learning curve but in either case, digitizing your hiring process will help tremendously.
Assessments
Companies always look out for the right education, relevant job experience, and the right skill set, but they often overlook HOW that person will be able to perform in the specific role that they need within the existing structure of your company. A person with the right experience could still be a poor fit if they aren’t able to understand the company culture or staff dynamics.
Some of the biggest companies in the world have their own testing procedure to help screen all the applications. This process is critical to ensure the applicant will be a good fit for the company and will also have what it takes to perform their required job properly. Smaller companies can get premade assessment tests and quizzes or they can formulate their own if they have very particular needs.
Referrals
If you already have a group of great employees, chances are that they also know other people who can perform similar work for your company. Using your employees’ own network to find the right kind of talent is an extremely efficient strategy for finding great employees.
The people that are already working for you are in that field of work and will know people in that industry. Similarly, they will also know other professionals in other spaces that could be a great fit for your company. Simply offer an incentive for referrals and let your existing group of professionals bring your more talent.
Internal Hiring
As your employees spend more time in your business and get to learn about all the different components of the organization, they are also growing as professionals. Rather than hiring new people and having to train them, use your existing pool of talent. Look for people who are showing signs of growth in areas other than their own job and see if they can be placed at a different level in the hierarchy to manage a broader range of operations.
This is a great strategy to make hiring less painful and to recognize and appreciate employees as well as the added bonus of employee retention and career growth. It reduces the possibility of a competitor stealing your top talent. With a bit of training and the right experience an existing junior employee could be the best choice for a senior role.
Optimizing your recruitment process requires you to adjust the whole hiring funnel. Just having the right assessment or simply marketing your jobs in a better way will not do much when done in isolation.
Making small improvements to all the parts involved in talent acquisition will help you find the best possible people for a given role and will help reduce the costs associated with new hires.
As your company grows you can look to invest in specialized talent acquisition managers or even outsource your entire talent onboarding process. This will help you to stay focused on operations while experts ensure you get the right people to work with.
