5 Easy Recruitment Strategies for Hiring the Right People

In order to succeed, your company needs to hire talented employees. Good employee recruitment strategies are key to ensuring that you get the proper applicants for your position. Here are 5 strategies for hiring the right people:

1. Creating the Job Description

Determine the skills and characteristics needed for the position. What would the ideal candidate bring to the table? Where is your team lacking and who can fill that need? Some valuable characteristics could include things like a candidate’s ability to think outside the box, generate new ideas, and if they will fit into the company culture. Write down your candidate characteristics and skills “wishlist,” as it were.

Once you’ve settled on what your ideal candidate looks like, you can create a job description. Besides information about your company and the specific role of the position, you should include preferred experience, skills and abilities, weekly schedule, and a pay range. Note your deal breakers by labeling conditions as required or must-have and label conditions that you would like to have but are not deal breakers as preferred. 

Encourage a candidate who will fit in with your team to apply by incorporating your brand voice into the job description. Some might be dissuaded, but they probably wouldn’t be a good cultural fit anyway and now they’ve been screened out. Showcase your company culture, but maintain a professional tone with clarity so qualified candidates can understand the opportunity. 

2. Time to Post It

There are lots of good job search sites you can use to recruit. You can pick a search site that offers exposure to a specific audience or pick one that allows every profession to post. Some are free with some premium offerings while others are subscription based. You can also use other ways to spread the word including social media channels. By using social media, you can put a more personal touch on it with an engaged audience. Also, consider attending job fairs and other networking events.

Wherever you post your job description, make sure you devise a system to track, organize, and then screen applicants. If you, or a hiring manager, are sorting through the resumes and notice that there are a lot of unqualified applicants (or applicants that are just missing the mark of what you are looking for) review your job description and revise it accordingly. Check to see if you need to reword a phrase, take some information out, or add something more specific.

When choosing where to post your job description, determine how much time you will have to review various places each day. It might seem like a good idea to post it everywhere, but you don’t want to spend more time than you are willing to spend checking all post locations. However, if you want to spread the word everywhere, there are some job posting sites that will post to over 100 job search sites and consolidate your applicant results. 

3.  Screening resumes and holding introductory calls

At Solomon, we like to use a job posting site that is free but also offers cost-per-action options and has a user-friendly candidate management system. You can easily screen candidates, label and organize them, and set up automatic, kind rejection emails to candidates that don’t make the cut. Once you sort the best from the rest into a manageable group, reach out via email or phone to schedule an initial phone or video conference interview. 

Prior to the phone interviews, develop a screening interview script. Include a few questions that you feel are important (e.g., why did you apply for this position, how do you feel your past experience will help you perform at this job, etc.), confirm a few things about the position with them (like pay, hours, etc.), and give them an opportunity to ask questions. Having a script in front of you will help you keep on task and remember the important information you want to get from them.

Be sure to take notes on their answers as this will come in handy after you have multiple interviews to remember what you thought of each candidate. Pay attention to mannerisms, personality, and potential cultural fits as well as the information they give you. Compare their responses and your overall impressions of each candidate and choose 2-4 candidates to move on to the next interview. 

4.  Interviewing Finalists

You may want someone from your team to meet with each candidate two or three times to get a sense of their personality and qualifications. The first round can be with a hiring manager or human resources representative over the phone or via video as mentioned previously. The interviewer in the next round can be the supervisor of this position.

The final interview may be with another supervisor, or depending on the size of your company, the owner or CEO. The later interviewers should read the notes from the screening interview and ask questions that go deeper and more specific. A multi-step process can ensure you have plenty of opportunities to assess each candidate. 

5. Extending an offer to a candidate and beginning the employee onboarding process

Time to choose! Discuss with all those involved in the interviewing process who they liked the best and why. It is also a good idea to choose a backup in case your top choice turns you down. Talk about their strengths and weaknesses as well as any questions you still have about the candidate. You can follow up with the applicant and ask those questions if they need to be answered before extending an offer.

If the questions are a matter of wondering how they will do, then it’s good to hold those in the back of your mind while you onboard and train the individual. Many employers choose to do a probationary period during the training and onboarding process in case it turns out that the person is not the right fit and you need to choose someone else, just make sure to let them know upfront about the probationary period and check your local employment laws to make sure you don’t engage in unfair dismissal or wrongful termination.

It’s also important to note that you do not have to choose any candidates from this round of interviewing if you feel like none of them would fit the bill of who you are looking for. This is why sometimes I let the job posting advertisement continue to gain interested applicants so I have a pool to screen from again should we need to go back to the drawing board. 

However, if you’ve found some good candidates to choose from and the team has agreed on the right one, make your offer! Once an offer is accepted, you can put your hiring on hold and transition to the onboarding process. 

Do not skip training and onboarding. If you’d like to set your new employee and your team up for success, provide proper training. This process can include providing them with your company handbook (we always recommend this), providing needed equipment, meeting other team members, setting them up with credentials for software, explaining benefits and duties, and teaching necessary skills and knowledge to do the job to the best of their ability. 

By following these simple steps, the process of hiring the right employee for your company should be simpler than you might have imagined. Now to keep your employees happy, motivated, and bought in… that’s a topic for another discussion, which you can read about here in being a leader others want to follow.

Solomon Advising is a marketing & branding agency focused on helping professional services firms retain their relevance and ensure sustainability by consistently promoting a credible brand. Contact us today to see how we can help improve your brand’s health.