If you want to expand your staff at work, you will need to go through the process of advertising, interviewing and hiring new people. This is far more complicated than just collating resumes and picking the best one; you will have to put the work in to make sure you find and hire good people! A good job advertising and applicant tracking program like FindWork can be a huge help in this process.

Advertising

There are a number of different platforms you can post your job listing to get people who are looking for work interested in your vacant position. In Australia there are a few major platforms like Seek.com.au that many job searchers and employers use, but it is also useful to post on smaller career platforms like university job searching sites – especially for entry level jobs.

CV checking

When you look at a candidate’s CV there are no rules that you have to follow, except for anti-discrimination ones. You are perfectly entitled to throw every second application in the bin on the basis that you don’t want to hire someone unlucky, for example. However, with an approach like this you risk missing out on the best applicants.

What you should check for is experience and skills – and these may not necessarily come from the candidate’s last job. If you are advertising for an IT job then an applicant who has previously worked on building and running a website for a social club could have useful experience, despite not being paid for this.

You should narrow your candidate pool down to about 10 or so for interviews by picking the most impressive resumes and contacting the applicants.

Interviewing

When you interview people you are not simply looking for who you like the most – you want to find the people who have the best characteristics for the role you are hiring for. When you interview people you will get an idea of whether or not they have prepared adequately for the interview and whether they are generally organised – which are good traits to have in your staff.

You can also give your candidates scenarios that will come up in the role, and see how they are able to handle it. This will help you to get a better idea of who will be the most likely to hit the ground running, who would be very good at the job with a bit of training and who would require lots of attention to get up to speed.

Interviewing can go over multiple rounds as you weed out weaker candidates, which enables you to test different skills from your job applicants.

Hiring

At the end of your interviewing process you should have narrowed down a top 3 out of the people who applied for the job. You should (obviously) offer the top one the job, along with the salary and benefits package, and open negotiations. If you can’t reach an agreement on terms with your first choice, try again with your second. If none of the top 3 agree, you might need to revisit how much pay you are offering!