Like most activities within an organization, having a clearly defined and documented hiring process helps to improve efficiencies and increase hiring successes.
In this article, I divulge details on what steps should be included in your hiring process, what organizations most often miss, and how your process can influence your ability to find the best candidates for the job.
Steps of the Hiring Process
There are five clear steps in the hiring process that we, at Linx Talent Advisors, recommend all organizations consider:
- Understand job requirements
- Identify the onboarding team
- Collect feedback from teams on the job responsibilities & description
- Complete benchmarking for candidate requirements
- Present You With The Best Candidates
To ensure a seamless and effective hiring process, it’s important that organizations don’t overlook any of these steps.
Understand Job Requirements
I’ve seen it many times before, where larger organizations put little time and effort into evaluating job descriptions, focusing more on filling the role quickly rather than truly understanding the business needs.
Developing a comprehensive overview of the job’s purpose, responsibilities, and expectations as well as the critical qualities necessary for the role – such as communication skills, leadership abilities, and problem-solving skills – is critical to identifying the best-fit candidates.
Taking the time to complete this will also save significant time in the long term, and help reduce turnover by setting clear expectations for the role.
Identify the Onboarding Team
It’s essential that you identify and understand the needs and behavioral tendencies and motivators of each of the onboarding team members.
Establishing a clear picture of what the onboarding team needs, and how they will interact with the new hire can help to streamline the onboarding process and increase retention.
Collect Feedback from Team Members
To complete an accurate job assessment, turn to the individuals who know best. This responsibility shouldn’t lie on one individual, rather you should collect feedback from all team members who will engage with the individual from a variety of perspectives (i.e. direct reports, managers, teammates, etc).
Extending the opportunity for direct communication on job needs and feedback on the position will help to identify any gaps or shifts that need to occur, and build out a strong job assessment.
Benchmark Candidate Requirements
Benchmarking candidate skills and behaviors against job requirements is one of the most critical elements to a successful hiring process.
To effectively benchmark, it’s important to first come together as a team to establish the job requirements and set realistic and well-defined expectations for the role.
At Linx Talent Advisors, we source, qualify and benchmark candidates for our clients, providing a match score of 1 through 10 for each individual. This score is based on our evaluation of each applicant’s skillset, experience and behavioral tendencies, drives and motivators.
3 Strategies to Hire Better
Set Expectations
It is absolutely critical that the entire team is aligned on expectations for the role, and how that role will interact with existing team members. When creating the job assessment, if two individuals internally are far apart on expectations, it may mean you need two different roles. Otherwise, additional conversations need to be had to get internal alignment before moving forward.
By setting expectations before hiring, you can qualify candidates more quickly and effectively and ensure a smoother onboarding process and integration into the team.
Understand Behavior Types
In my experience, understanding behavior types is a powerful insight into hiring the right individuals. Unfortunately, many businesses bypass this step.
For example, when qualifying candidates ask questions about their preferred work environment and style, and the levels of collaboration they prefer to better understand their behavior type, how their managers could help them succes, and if they would be a good fit for the team.
Leverage Individually-Tailored Questions
Sometimes we identify really promising candidates that have small variances from job requirements or don’t fit the exact expectations of the role. Use the interview to dig into those variances and identify if it’s something you can work with or if it’s a deal breaker.
Successful hiring ultimately comes down to quality communication, setting expectations and developing a deeper understanding of your candidates by incorporating behavioral assessments. If you have these foundational elements in place, I’m confident you will save everyone time in the hiring process, improve your match rate and increase overall retention in your organization.
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