An effective hiring strategy can help you find job seekers with the skills and backgrounds needed to strengthen your workforce. Whether you’re hiring your first employee or adding a new member to your existing team, it’s important to implement the right steps to fill your open position and develop a hiring process that’s fast and effective.
By streamlining and enhancing your hiring approach, this guide helps walk you through the steps of creating a process to hire new employees.
At smaller companies, employees often take on many roles, frequently switching from task to task and working outside their job description to keep up with business growth. Even though this ability to work across departments is a sign of flexibility, resourcefulness and drive, it can also be a clue that your employees need assistance. This over-extension can eventually lead to burnout, low productivity and inefficiencies in your business.
To keep your business growing and maintain high employee morale, look for the following signs that it’s time to grow your team:
As you consider hiring new employees, consider whether they align with your company, its open position and your expectations. By assessing how they can add to your business, whether through specialized expertise or similarly shared values, you can recruit top candidates and find your next hire.
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Review job descriptions for similar roles to better understand what skills and experience apply to your open position. Monitoring job trends can also help your hiring team identify industry-specific job titles, relevant keywords and salary information.
Consider running a recruiting event to generate excitement about your company’s job opportunities. These events can expand your recruiters’ reach and create organic leads to follow up on later.
A carefully crafted job description can be a valuable hiring tool. Incorporating strong keywords, compensation information and accurate descriptions of the job’s responsibilities and duties can encourage job seekers to apply. Consider including details about company culture and benefits to set your company apart.
To determine which applicants to interview, look for information on their resume that indicates their skills, motivations, experience and work style:
A culture add approach to hiring employees can also be effective. Considering applicants with a unique background or skill set might bring new ideas and perspectives to the team.
Filter out applicants who don’t match the key job requirements by sending them a rejection email. (Indeed has a built-in rejection message you can send with the click of a button.)
When interviewing candidates, consider starting with a quick 15- to 30-minute phone screening to determine whether they meet the basic job qualifications and if your role aligns with their expectations.
Approaching the interview process with a list of interview questions specific to the industry and role can help interviewers make informed hiring decisions. Taking notes or using an interview scoring rubric may also make it easier to evaluate and compare candidates objectively.
Consider whether you’d like to use behavioral or situational questions. Behavioral questions primarily address past experiences to assess future behaviors. These questions can help you evaluate whether the candidate may be a good addition to the team.
Some examples of behavioral questions include:
Situational questions typically demonstrate how a candidate thinks, which can show how they may respond in certain scenarios. You may ask:
References can provide additional insights and verify skills listed on a candidate’s resume. They can also ensure you’re hiring employees who are honest about their work experience and qualifications. Consider requesting one to three references from your top candidates.
Here are some questions to ask during a reference check:
Consider how your candidates may add to your team and company culture. To help make a decision, reflect on what you’ve learned about the different candidates’ skills, personalities and experiences from their resumes, interviews and references. Look for individuals who can help solve roadblocks and contribute to company goals.
Read more: Employee Selection Process: 9 Steps to Your Next Hire
Before sending the official offer letter, contact the candidate to set up a time to talk over the phone. During the call, express excitement about inviting them to join your team and present the terms of your offer, including salary, benefits, start date, etc. If the candidate accepts your verbal offer, send an official written letter.
Part of knowing how to hire staff is notifying candidates of a rejection promptly and respectfully. You can deliver the update by phone or email. Be honest but supportive, and consider offering constructive feedback to help them in their search elsewhere.
Understanding how to hire workers involves being aware that the process continues after the job offer. Effective onboarding may help new employees feel welcome and support their success in their positions.
Consider these tips when creating a memorable onboarding process:
Learning how to hire people is a continuous task, and tracking your team’s progress can help you make additional adjustments. Indeed allows employers to generate performance reports from their employer dashboards to find out how their job postings perform.
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