Increasing employee headcount is important for any business aiming to scale operations. However, depending on your organization’s ability to streamline the process, recruiting employees can be both exciting and daunting. Below, our experts explore how to recruit employees, and tips on making this process easier!
Understanding the Recruitment Process
The first step in recruiting success is in the general preparation required to promote the opening. Before spending money on advertising or reaching out to your network to source talent, you need to identify and document the position’s needs.
Once you have refined the messaging for the job description and developed a final version of the listing, it’s time to publicize it online through job sites such as LinkedIn and Indeed.
While the job post begins to generate applicant traffic, you should also consider reaching out to your colleagues’ professional networks to actively source candidates.
Most challenges in the early stages of the recruitment process will involve managing expectations. Be ready to ensure that candidates understand expectations such as the job type (full-time, part-time, or contractor) and work environment (remote, hybrid, or on-site).
Talking about work environments has become increasingly challenging as many employers are issuing RTO (return-to-office) mandates while a substantial percentage of the workforce prefers to remain fully remote.
Salary expectations are also a primary focus of these preliminary conversations. It’s best practice to confirm that the candidate is comfortable with your predetermined salary range from the start, or you risk wasting time, effort, and trust if the pay isn’t consistent with the candidate’s interests and skill level.
The Best Ways To Recruit Employees
When deciding how to recruit employees, it’s ideal to test channels to source quality talent from a powerful variety of targeted platforms. Promoting LinkedIn and Indeed job listings with advertising funds is a great starting point, but it shouldn’t be the only channel to generate leads.
If applicable, tapping into your internal network of professional talent should be one of the first places to check. These individuals may be referrals, former colleagues, or partners who have worked in capacities relevant to the open role you are looking to fill.
Events such as dinners and conferences are great opportunities to meet rising professionals, distribute business cards, and develop professional networking with potential candidates. Job fairs are also great places to source individuals who are actively searching for new positions, as well as for professional network development.
How To Recruit Employees: Step-by-Step
Step 1: Job Announcement
The five key phases when recruiting employees start with the job announcement.
Before promoting the job listing online and through your network, you’ll need to identify the requirements for the position and relay this information to the entire team responsible for placement. This step includes documenting everything from the job description, type, and environment to the seniority level, reporting structure, and department.
Step 2: Job Promotion
Once the job listing has been created, the promotional phase begins.
The job is posted to sites like LinkedIn and Indeed and promoted via advertising spend. The amount spent on advertising may vary depending on factors such as how long it takes to source quality candidates and the specificity of the job’s requirements.
While the advertisement generates leads, #OpenToWork LinkedIn candidates with relevant backgrounds are vetted simultaneously. This is also an opportune time to tap into your professional networks and pitch the opportunity to individuals with relevant backgrounds who may not be actively seeking employment online.
Step 3: Screening
A select group of applicants then advances to the pre-screening interviews. During this phase, you meet with potential candidates to explore their backgrounds, review their resumes, and discuss their expectations for their next role.
If expectations align, the candidate advances to the first official round of interviews. At this stage, they will meet with a hiring manager (an employee who is responsible for onboarding a new employee to their department) to discuss specific items related to the position.
Step 4: Interviewing
If the candidate excels during the initial interviewing round with the hiring manager, the applicant is scheduled for additional rounds with potential peers and senior members of the organization.
Before each round of the interviewing phase, you may consider inviting candidates to preparation sessions. You may also want to invite them to interview debriefs in which the candidates discuss how they felt they performed after each round.
These debriefs also provide opportunities to ensure candidates are still interested in pursuing the position. You may want to ask if candidates are participating in any other late-stage interviews and field any counteroffers or questions regarding compensation. This stage is also when reference requests are usually made, with each candidate typically expected to produce one or two references from former colleagues.
Step 5: Offer and Background Check
At this point, if your team is satisfied with a candidate’s performance, you should extend an official offer letter in a timely fashion. If the candidate accepts, you should alert them to any background checks or other procedural checkups that will occur in the weeks following his or her acceptance.
Streamlining Recruiting
It’s fair to say that learning how to recruit employees and put it into practice can be complex and time-consuming. Streamlining your workloads can help enhance efficiency and reduce time-to-fill.
Your streamlining efforts aren’t limited to one phase. As soon as the new job order is received, having an internal documentation and distribution process in place can help get the job listing and description published online.
When it comes to the sourcing portion of the job promotion phase, the importance of fostering long-lasting relationships with members of your professional network becomes evident. Lessening your reliance on cold outreach and promoted job advertisements is critical for streamlined recruitment. To do so, you will need to maintain a warm pool of contacts to reach out to when hiring for new roles.
There are plenty of ways to stay in touch with former colleagues, contractors, freelancers, and other professional partners. An occasional check-in call with a contact to discuss industry news or express interest in a current project can go a long way. If you don’t have the time to chat with members of your network, a simple email or LinkedIn message can be just as effective.
Make sure that your messages are genuine. Take the time to review what your contacts are up to before hitting the “send” button. Ask them about their day-to-day working schedule and inquire about what they like and dislike about it. Ask about their goals and the kinds of projects they would be interested in supporting. You may want to jot down some notes. A new initiative may become a priority within your organization, and you may be able to refer back to your correspondence with one of your connections and find an alignment between that person’s interests and your company’s needs.
How Daley And Associates Can Help
At Daley And Associates, creating and maintaining strong relationships is the foundation of our recruiting model. Our team can leverage our in-house resources and years of industry expertise to help reduce your organization’s time and energy spent recruiting employees.
Unfortunately, it has become common for staffing firms to overwhelm their clients with hundreds of resumes from applicants who do not align with their organizational needs. When our clients approach us with an open position, we know they’re seeking only the best talent, and that’s what we strive to deliver.
How We Work
Our team takes the time to understand our client’s business model, the position being promoted, the company culture, and what an ideal candidate would look like in the eyes of the hiring manager. For us, this process is much more than matching a resume to a job order. We evaluate candidates based on their skills, knowledge, personality, demographics, and other qualities to ensure our clients review applicants who can perform the job function and serve as integral team members within the greater organization.
Many clients partner with us to avoid wasting time and resources interviewing dozens of candidates in a given cycle. We manage the entire process from the job announcement phase to the offer. Rather than inundating them with massive, imprecise lists of contacts, we highlight and present hiring managers with smaller groups of high-performing professionals.
Our experienced team members are also flexible and experienced when working with salary caps for certain positions. Daley’s experts strategically negotiate with candidates to arrive at a mutually satisfactory compensation package. We respect budget limits by ensuring all applicants presented to our clients acknowledge and are comfortable with the proposed salary range.
Get Started Now
Wondering how to recruit employees for your business? Click here to connect with one of our team members to discuss how Daley And Associates can help transform and manage your recruitment process from start to finish.
