How to Create an Effective Recruiting Process

What is the Recruiting Process?

The goal of recruitment is not just to fill an organization’s open position with a qualified candidate—it’s to find the talent with the skills, experience, and personality that best fit the role and successfully hire them.

Your recruiting process is your carefully crafted plan to achieve that goal.

Typically executed by the organization’s human resources (HR) department, the recruiting process involves identifying a staffing need, drawing in interested talent, sifting through applications, interviewing and evaluating candidates, and hiring the right person for the open position on time and on budget.

5 Qualities of a Good Recruiting Process

Not every recruiting process is effective and efficient. If you’re looking to have top-tier talent in your needed positions as quickly and efficiently as possible, you will need a rock-solid recruiting process.

So what makes a good recruitment process? Here are a few things to consider when building and designing your company’s recruiting process:

1. Tailored to your business needs

There is no one-size-fits-all strategy for hiring talent, so a good recruiting process should never be rigid. It needs to be consistent, structured, and scalable, but you shouldn’t have the same exact process every time.

For a recruiting process to fit the organization's hiring needs, each step must be intentional and serve a clear purpose. This means the steps will vary depending on the specific role to fill.

For example, a graphic design position will likely require applicants to submit a job portfolio, while a sales position will not.

Get a clear picture of your hiring needs and tailor-fit your process to meet them.

2. Designed for a positive candidate experience

Your recruitment process speaks a lot about your organization. In a world where people can easily voice their opinions about you, how you deal with candidates (even those you don’t hire) can impact your bottom line.

In fact, according to G2, 63% of job seekers will likely reject a job offer because of a bad candidate experience.

Your recruiting process reflects your company’s brand, so design it with candidate experience in mind. Write clear job descriptions, optimize your career site, provide a clear timeline, schedule interviews effectively, and give application status updates regularly.

3. Automated and streamlined

A 2022 report by the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) states that it takes an average of 54 days to fill a nonexecutive position and 62 days for an executive position.

The longer your recruiting process takes, the fewer interested applicants you end up with. While many companies see this as an opportunity to weed out unfit candidates, Punchkick Interactive Director of Research Sarah Gregory believes it’s doing them more harm than good.

"Good candidates know their time is important, and they have plenty of opportunities in the job market,” Gregory said. “Their tolerance for jumping through hoops is much lower than many employers think.”

A good recruiting process is streamlined and efficient; the best way to achieve this is by taking advantage of technology. Using tools can automate a large chunk of your recruitment process, from filtering resumes, tracking applications, posting job listings, and collecting data.

Automating and streamlining your talent acquisition process eliminates unnecessary delays and drastically improves recruitment productivity.

4. Data-backed and data-driven

Data is a crucial ingredient in making business decisions, and recruitment decisions are no exception.

Data-driven recruiting means using tangible facts and statistics, not hunches or guesswork, to inform and influence your hiring decisions.

According to Forbes, talent acquisition teams with mature data analytics are twice as likely to improve their recruiting efforts. They are also three times more likely to realize cost reductions and efficiency gains.

But how do you shift to a data-driven recruiting process? You can start by choosing which hiring metrics you want to track, learning how to calculate each one, and then deciding which ones best align with your recruitment efforts. Here’s a helpful cheat sheet from LinkedIn to get you started.

Quality data is powerful. A data-backed and data-driven recruiting process can help you evaluate past performance, assess current strategies, and develop future plans.

5. Open to employee referrals

Did you know that companies can expand their talent pool by ten times by recruiting through their employees’ networks?

Employee referrals are among the most effective recruitment tools. In fact, the SHRM's 2022 Talent Access Report shows that employee referrals are the most common tool used to source nonexecutive candidates—89% of recruiters use it!

Not only do employee referrals help you hire faster and lower your cost per hire, but candidates referred by current employees also tend to be more qualified for the role, more interested in the job offer, and more likely to stay longer.

Establish a recruitment process that includes an employee referral program. Engage your employees and incentivize them to refer quality candidates to your company.

Read More: 30 Employee Perk Ideas to Attract and Retain Employees

8 Steps in the Recruiting Process

Now that you know what makes for an effective and efficient recruitment process, you can start building one!

Here are the primary stages of the recruitment process to use and customize to fit your company’s needs:

1. Identify your hiring needs.

Make a list of the job vacancies in your company, and be as specific as possible. What existing roles need to be filled? What roles do you anticipate filling due to gaps in the current team? Was the position recently vacated, or was it newly created? What specific knowledge, skills, and experience does the role require?

2. Prepare the job description.

Job descriptions tell potential candidates what responsibilities and requirements are expected for a specific position in the company. A good job description is clear and specific about what the role requires. What are the core responsibilities of the job? What are its qualifications? What compensation and benefits are you offering? 

Read More: How To Write The Perfect Job Description

3. Develop the recruitment plan.

You may be tempted to jump straight to searching for talent, but it’s important to take a step back and figure out the best way to do that. Which channels and tools will you be using to get the word out? Who will review the resumes? Who will interview the candidates? Who will make the final hiring decision?

4. Start the talent search.

Execute the recruitment plan and start searching for talent. This is the most time-consuming step in the process, but by strategically using the channels and tools you have, you can cut down on time and expenses. Don’t forget to tap both external and internal recruitment sources.

5. Screen and shortlist qualified applicants.

For a recruiting company, this can be the most challenging step. You need to execute it as accurately and efficiently as possible. Otherwise, you’ll have top-tier candidates falling through the cracks. Start screening applications using the minimum qualifications, then set aside ones with preferred skills, experience, credentials, etc. The applications with minimum requirements and preferred credentials can be your shortlisted applicants.

6. Conduct interviews.

The next step is interviewing the shortlisted applicants. Whether you plan to do it over the phone, through a video call, or in person, make sure you come prepared. Review the candidate’s resume and formulate the right set of questions beforehand. It’s also helpful to have an interview rating scale handy so that you can measure and compare the candidates’ capabilities fairly.

Read More: How to Conduct a Job Interview Effectively

7. Check references and make an offer.

Once you’ve selected the perfect candidate for the position, your next step is to run a reference check and verify their employment details. When everything is in place, come up with a desirable offer and present it to the candidate. Be ready to negotiate salary and benefits.

Tip: According to Linkedin, 94% of candidates say being contacted by their prospective manager can make them accept a job offer faster.

8. Onboard the new employee.

Not every talent acquisition team covers this step, but a successful recruiting company knows just how vital onboarding is to create a comprehensive recruitment process. Nexus HR, for example, helps its clients meet state training requirements by providing sexual harassment, HIPAA, and workplace policy training to every employee it hires.

Read More: Employee Training Tips for Successful Onboarding

Reach Your Recruitment Goals with Nexus HR

Finding the right people for the right positions effectively and efficiently is hard work! It also requires an experienced recruitment team, a workable budget, and a proven recruiting process. Unfortunately, not all companies have the resources for all these.

If your organization doesn’t have the time, staff, or technology to build and implement a streamlined recruiting process, then outsourced recruitment may be the answer.

Nexus HR is a company that provides affordable, full-service HR solutions to companies like yours. Besides comprehensive recruitment, it also offers full-service payroll, remote HR management, and even legal consulting services.

Get more services from Nexus HR than from any other recruiting company—all at half the cost.