Hiring the best candidates for your business
Recruiting the right people is the key to unlocking the potential of your business. You could be offering the most amazing product and service, but if you don’t have the right people marketing or selling it, the empathetic people helping your customers and the correct people leading your teams, how do you expect your business to thrive?
Therefore, it’s important that you get it right more often than not when making new hires. Hiring a new employee is much more complex than buying an inanimate object like a washing machine. Human beings have feelings, emotions and their own dreams and agendas, so there is a lot to consider to make sure that you’re able to make the right people want to join and stay in your business. Every hiring manager will make mistakes at times, but it’s all about recognising when you do, managing the mistakes, and minimising them so that it doesn’t happen very often.
Job Description
It all starts with a job description. You want to advertise your position to all the candidates out there and get them interested in your job. It’s often the first hurdle during the recruitment process, making sure that you get it right. It’s not easy to either, you need to make it look professional and give all the details of what you’re looking for from the ideal candidate while also making it eye catching to people scrolling through pages and pages of job adverts.
Sell the role and your company, make the candidate want to apply for your role, but it’s also important to remain honest. Just like you wouldn’t want a candidate to oversell themselves on their CV, you shouldn’t oversell yourself on a job advert. If you hide something here then you’re probably just going to end up wasting yours and the candidates time, it might also have a negative impact on the thoughts people have on your company too.
When writing a job description, start by explaining a little about your company and why the position is open, then bullet point all or most of the employee’s daily responsibilities. Follow this up by the skills, experience, and personalities you’re looking for. Don’t forget to include all the benefits you offer. A good salary might be eye-catching, but many employees look for more than just that. Do you offer a good healthcare plan, perhaps a great pension scheme, or maybe you run multiple social events? These are extras that will make the candidate want to choose you.
Shortlisting the top talent
When you advertise a position, there’s a very strong chance that not every applicant will be right for you. It’s vital to sort the best quality candidates from the rest, you don’t want to be interviewing every candidate you come across, especially if you get a high volume of applications. When going through applications, it’s good to have an open mind about how you’re going to go through them. We’d advise that you make sure you know exactly what the basics are that you need, but then stay open-minded. Remember, you never really find the ‘perfect’ candidate, there’s always a few compromises that you have to make. Just because a candidate isn’t perfect on paper, doesn’t mean they aren’t the right person to take on the role.
If you’re dealing with a high volume of applications, then it might be a good idea to create an initial shortlist by getting rid of the candidates that are definitely not right, to cut down on the number. Then spend some time on each remaining CV to read a little deeper and create a final shortlist ready for interviewing.
It’s always a good idea to give feedback to all candidates, even those who were unsuccessful. Read our blog about providing feedback to candidates.
This can be a very time-consuming process, so be prepared to set aside some time out of your day to do this task. It’s important that you get it right. This is where a recruitment agency really pays for itself, by saving you time to do your other tasks like running your business or managing a project. A recruiter will do all the shortlisting for you based on your requirements and will likely have access to a much wider pool of candidates than you could have as a hirer. MP Recruitment could help you with this and won’t charge you a penny until you make a hire with us.
Time to interview
You’ve selected the candidates you want to bring to interview. We’re not going to tell you how to interview here. What we will say is that it’s key to move quickly. The number of companies that we have seen lose candidates because they wait far to long to bring them in for an interview. By the time it comes round to inviting them in, they’ve probably already found another job. If you want to see a candidate or selection of candidates, don’t wait around. Get in touch with them and get the to come in as soon as you can see them.
If you have a member of staff who is away on a business trip and can’t be there in person then invite the candidate(s) in anyway. In this day and age, you can probably set up a voice call where they can get involved in the interview without having to be in the office. If that isn’t possible or realistic in your business, then see the candidate yourself and then make sure the desired staff member can attend a second interview. This way you’ve managed to grab the candidate’s attention, hopefully sold them on your company, and bought yourself some more time between the first interview and the second interview.
Retention
Once you’ve made your hire, the last thing you’ll want is to lose them early on. All that time, effort and subsequent money you spent recruiting the candidate, and they’ve left in the first month! Now you’ve got to do it all over again! If you’ve been honest in your job advert and interview process then the candidate shouldn’t get any nasty surprises about the role or your company.
Find ways to make your work environment stimulating for your employees. If you have good retention then you should be fine, but don’t drop the ball. If you have issues with loosing employees quite often, then you should look at things to change to make staff want to stay in your company. Keep your employees safe, well looked after and challenged.
For more ways to improve your retention, read our blog about Driving Employee Retention.
We hope this helps you understand how to better recruit for new employees. Just remember that it takes time and a lot of effort to get the right people. If you don’t think you have the time to recruit properly, give one of our consultants a call on 01235 330110 and they will advise how we can help you and your business, whatever your situation.
