The hiring comes with a lot of headaches. It takes hours at end to separate the wheat from the chaff all while ensuring that each candidate is given plenty of chance to prove his worthiness. On top of that, statistics reveal that talent is short in the market.
Nearly three-quarters of the employers, or 72.8% to be specific, are having a tough time finding the right candidates. Moreover, 45% of employers are worried about searching for employees with the required talents.
Not only is the talent shortage plague a concern for recruiters but the time that the hiring process sips is another important matter. A report by the Society for Human Resource Management highlights that it takes an average of 42 days to fill an empty position.
What’s more, millennials are flooding the market already like 75% of the global workforce is expected to comprise of millennials by 2025. In other words, recruiters would have to align their objectives with the right candidates’ preferences such as the ability to work remotely and better work-life balance for example.
If you’re a recruiter and worried about the hiring procedure, don’t fret. We’re here to walk you through the best hiring tips to help smoothen the recruitment process for you.
1 – Ask the candidate about his expectations from the job
While this may seem mainstream, it allows you to learn a lot about a candidate. Questioning a candidate about what he expects to get out of this job experience will also help you see if the person is genuinely interested in working long-term with your company.
After all, there is no point hiring a person who only sees the job that you are offering as a means to an end. Furthermore, only creative and confident candidates can correctly answer this question, which will help you in understanding where a potential candidate stands.
Senda Athletics, founder of Santiago Halty shared the same with The Muse. Athletics opined, “I look for answers that feel personal and authentic and are about more than ‘career development.’ Once I feel I have a good candidate in front of me, this question lets me think about projects he or she might enjoy.”
2 – Look for someone who will fit well in the team
Office teams are like cocktails with each member bringing in a different color, flavor, and texture to the beverage on the whole. So, when you sit at the hiring table, put on your thinking cap and give a thought to everyone on the team.
With that information in your mind, look for a candidate who can blend well with the rest of the team and adds flavors that are missing from the cocktail. In other words, keep tabs on the aggregate skills and strengths in the team and note the missing skills.
Finally, select a candidate that fills the gap in the strengths and skillset of the team. This will help you prepare an efficient team with all skills on board.
3 – Keep an eye open for potential candidates
It is not essential that you go looking for candidates only when the need arises. As discussed, recruiting is a time-consuming process. Over and above that, hasty decisions may lead to bitter results.
Research from Gartner supports this as it outlines that 1 in 5 hires are considered “regretted decisions” or “bad hires.” Numerically speaking, that’s 20% of the total hires. Of course, you don’t want to end up in such a bad spot.
A good solution in this context is keeping your eye open for potential candidates. Several interesting candidates may reach out to you even when there is no vacancy. Don’t turn them down. Instead, tell them that you don’t have an opening right now but there may be something in the future.
4 – Look in diverse markets
The odds of you finding the right candidate are slim. Besides, CEO of CareerBuilder, Irina Novoselsky, pointed out in the Fast Company that increasing consumer confidence, higher productivity, and low unemployment are making the recruitment landscape competitive.
Candidates are also becoming choosy as the market sees strong job growth in the present year. This stands true for both full-time as well as temporary workers. Under such circumstances, you need to cast your net wide enough to find and attract high-potential candidates.
- Listen more, talk less in the interview
Another great piece of hiring advice is to listen during the interview process. The fundamental rule of interviewing is listening and letting the interviewee talk. Your role should be to make the candidate comfortable, ask some questions, and then prompt the person in the hot seat to answer your question.
Several interviewers talk a lot. Monster.com shares that your aim should be to interview the candidate to learn about him, not educate him. In this regard, mix in open-ended questions with close-ended ones to see how well the candidate addresses them with this experience, education, and confidence.
- Work with your employees
Pairing up with your employees to find another employee is another great hiring tip. Research from LinkedIn Talent Solutions found out that 48% of the businesses find their quality hires by means of employee referrals.
So, before you go about spending your time posting your opening on job boards, look for candidates by asking the employees in your office first. Employee referrals help save money and time while also bringing forth good candidates who are worth hiring.
Employees typically don’t recommend unqualified candidates because they understand that the employee will be a direct reflection of themselves. A key point here is to motivate your team to share other candidates’ names. To this end, offer an incentive during the recruitment process. For instance, announce a prize for the employee who recommends a candidate who ends up filling the vacancy.
- Use the right recruitment tools
As a recruiter, there are several responsibilities on your shoulders. These include answering emails, following up with potential candidates, and interviewing to name a few. With such a vast platter of responsibilities, there is little room for error, which brings us to using recruitment tools.
The smart technology helps up your productivity and reduces the chances of error. Tools also help you keep an aggregate of your work. The functionality of these recruitment tools helps you find the right candidates. For example, employing AI for screening can help you solve the issue of heavy application volume.
- Resort to recruitment marketing strategy
One of the leading recruitment trends in 2019 is recruitment marketing. The hiring strategy implements marketing tactics in recruiting. The entire process involves attracting and nurturing talented folks to your organization by employing marketing tactics and methods.
The aim of this strategy is to align with the latest trends in the market and provide respective solutions. Recruitment marketing helps attract talent, which is why it has found a leading place in the recruitment trends of the current year.
In many ways, recruitment marketing is similar to keeping tabs on interesting candidates. However, this is a more deliberate strategy that walks an interesting candidate through the awareness, consideration, and interest stages that are further followed by the main recruitment process of application, selection, and finally hiring.
- Pay attention to employer branding
This is another recruitment trend of 2019, which makes for solid hiring advice. Research by LinkedIn concludes that 75% of the job seekers research a company’s reputation before applying. That’s more than half of the potential employees researching your company.
In this regard, what they come across is precisely what is known as employer branding. So, companies with a poor reputation can suffer here as talented folks back-pedal before applying. Moreover, such companies not only strive hard to attract candidates, but they also have a hard time retaining employees as well.
So, what can you do to improve your employer branding? A golden tip is to pay attention to your company’s reviews and ratings. About 83% of the people seeking jobs read company reviews and look out for its ratings before they apply. Thus, you need to ensure that your company’s reviews are positive.
- Look at candidates’ online presence
While asking personal questions may or may not get you anywhere in the recruitment process, checking a candidate’s social presence can reveal a lot about him. In fact, personal questions can make the situation awkward and uncomfortable for both sides.
To get an inside scoop of a shortlisted candidate’s life, head over their social media profiles. This strategy is, particularly, valuable if you are looking to hire employees for tech organization.
If you are still not convinced, know that 92% of the businesses prefer to recruit through social media networks such as Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. What’s more, 45% of the Fortune 500 firms put their job openings on social media.
- Take your time
Pushing the hiring process can lead to significant monetary losses. In fact, the cost of onboarding a bad hire stands at $240,000 with the true cost equating to a minimum 30% of the employee’s first-year earning. Not to mention, hiring and firing the wrong candidate wastes a lot of time as well.
Unity Council’s Michele Gonzalez-Pitek shared such an experience with the Forbes Human Resource Council. She explained, “I recently allowed the sense of urgency for a key position speed up the process in hiring a candidate. Within 30 days of hire, we were terminating the candidate for poor performance. The pressure around getting someone in soon got the better of me, and it ended up being very costly. Had I slowed the process down and spent more time screening, I may have been able to avoid the situation.”
- Check the candidate’s expertise
Every company wants experts. Now, this doesn’t mean that a potential candidate needs to have the experience to have the expertise, in-depth know-how of the position he’s been interviewing for does just as well.
For instance, if you’re looking for a marketer, you should be asking both basic questions as well as questions that give you an insight into how much technical knowledge he has. You can ask him what he thinks would be the best way to empty up inventory and if his answer suggests the use of discount and coupon codes among other unique techniques, you know the candidate is well-informed since coupons are the best way to offer discounts these days. Here are also some interesting and amazing coupon statistics.
You can also ask questions that are not only related to the job he’s applied for but regarding his general behavior toward stressful situations. This will give you an idea about whether or not he can work in a team, can do well under pressure, and the like.
- Make your interview process fun
Another interest hiring tip from the Forbes Council relates to improving the aura of your interview process. Make it more fun instead of formal. This encourages the interviewees to relax.
Brett Comeaux of LG Fairmont preaches three key factors here – engaging, talking, and laughing. These prompt the candidate to relax and open up about himself, helping you better understand the potential employee and decide if he would be a good fit for your company.
- Prepare a checklist for hiring
While you must already be having job and employee descriptions, you also need a recruiting checklist. Use it for hiring all of your employees, whether the first or one of many. The checklist allows improving your hiring process significantly while helping you track your hiring efforts.
Consequently, you won’t miss a step through your hiring process. Besides recording your hiring effort, this list will help you communicate your process to your manager.
- Run a background check of all the credentials
Another important piece of advice is to run an effective check of the potential candidates. Start off with pre-screening candidates so that you have a shorter number of people to interview. Before or after the interviewing process, when you have a shortlisted list of names, run a background check.
To this end, you need to verify all the details including skills, credentials, and experience that the interviewee claims he has and is written on his resume. Get in touch with a candidate’s former supervisors, work references, educational credentials, and employment references.
Plus, you need to keep tabs on the criminal history of a candidate. Other background checks that you need to make during the recruitment process include checking their credit history. These checks are important for ensuring that you are hiring the right candidate and save you from any wrong decisions.
Take home message
In a nutshell, recruitment is not a walk in the park. It takes a lot of time, energy, and proper candidate analysis before a candidate can be finalized. Make sure that you are looking for interesting employees in different places and even at times when there is no vacancy.
Align your hiring process with the latest recruitment trends and make sure that you ask the right questions while doing your best to make the interview process fun. Don’t forget to run background checks, use recruitment tools, and check candidates’ social media profiles.