If there is one change that you introduce to your business this year, make it improve quality of recruitment. The better quality the hires that you make, the bigger the contribution those people will deliver to the ongoing growth and performance of the business. Quality recruitment means a business culture that thrives and supports staff who have the space to be innovative and add value. It could be the key to unlocking greater profitability in 2019. So, how do you achieve it?
Assess the current situation
Are you happy with your recent hires, do they achieve the goals you set? It’s worth evaluating your current hiring strategy and the results that it is achieving before making any changes. Look at where you want to be in six months or a year and identify how a different approach to recruitment could help you to get there.
Involve others
Although everyone in the business is likely to be pressed for time it can be useful to create a way for key members of the team to interact with candidates. This will provide a range of useful insights, including how they might fit within the culture of the team and whether their thinking and work processes could be easily integrated.
Reevaluate your job description
A clear, concise and detailed job description is crucial to ensuring the quality of recruitment. It’s this that will attract the right candidates and help to manage expectations in terms of what the job involves.
Go beyond the standard interviews and testing
You can determine whether someone is capable of doing a job from skills and qualifications. However, it’s the organisational fit that will really raise the standard of quality and that requires more than just the average series of tests and interviews. You might want to consider group interviews – to monitor abilities such as team interaction -, activity days, judgment tests or even informal sessions to get more of an idea of how candidates would fit within your business.
Free your recruitment process from bias
The best hiring decisions are those that are made on the basis of candidate ability andnot thrown off-task by unconscious bias or a subjective view. Wherever you can, make sure that your recruitment is objective – you’ll get the best quality results this way.
Give candidates the opportunity to do a test run
It could be a trial day or an internship opportunity – you’ll only really get to see how an individual performs within the business by monitoring them in a role. A trial run can be invaluable in ensuring that you don’t waste time and resources on people who are, in reality, unsuitable candidates.
Don’t forget the first few days
On-boarding is as much part of recruitment as interviews and reviewing CVs and will also impact the new employee’s perception of the business – 66% who have a positive onboarding experience are more likely to stay with the company for at least a couple of years. A high quality onboarding process paves the way for positive performance.
Working with a recruiter can help you to achieve many of the above, whether you’re overhauling existing recruitment processes or introducing new ways of assessing candidates. We have a wealth of experience in assisting companies achieve better quality recruitment – contact us to find out more.
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