Recruiting the right people is key to your company’s success. Hiring a good team can be more important for your firm’s future than anything else you do. Bringing in the wrong people can damage your team’s morale as well as your company’s reputation.
In the last year, I’ve been supporting both hiring managers and a few candidates through their recruitment journeys. This reminded me of my own experiences and the frameworks which helped me hire better people. In my view, recruitment can be broken down into defining a role, sourcing candidates, selecting a new hire and onboarding them.
The recruitment process
Deciding which job you’re hiring for is the first challenge. How will this role relate to yours and the rest of your team? Which activities will it be responsible for? What will it deliver to your company? What resources will it require?
Finding good interview candidates can be tough. Where will you source CVs with relevant skills and suitable experience? How will you encourage the best candidates to apply?
Selecting who to hire is the hardest part. What are your criteria for choosing someone? How will you assess they meet your needs? How will you sell the job to the best candidate?
Onboarding new hires is important too. How will you check they are good enough at the job? How can you ensure they’re engaged and productive? Who will they need to work with? What will they need to learn?
Improving your hiring
Successful recruitment can be a mixture of luck and judgement. Sometimes you find great people through accidental connections. Often you can spend forever reviewing CVs and meeting candidates with no results. And impressive interviews don’t always lead to good performance.
If you find yourself learning to hire ‘on the job’, then don’t worry if it appears daunting at first. Whichever process you use, there’s always some risk in recruitment. The trick is to recognise when you’re making a mistake, correct it quickly and learn from the experience.
Future articles will explore the hiring process in more depth, expanding on how to define roles, source candidates, select recruits and onboard them. If you’d like to discuss how to get the best out of your hiring process, then please get in touch!