Recruitment Best Practices: Improve Your Recruitment Process

<div class="grey-callout"><h2>Key Takeaways</h2><ul>
<li>Structured recruitment: Create Great Performance Profiles and focus on recruiting Great Performers.</li>
<li>Right people, right time: Only recruit when necessary, using the Six Tests of Recruitment. Match hires to business life cycle stages.</li>
<li>Team-based decisions: Collaborate for better hiring outcomes.</li>
<li>Effective interviews: Use Telephone Interviews, Structured Interviews and Job Simulations.</li>
<li>Attracting talent: Offer competitive salaries and use multiple, diverse recruitment channels.</li>
</ul></div>

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Here is an overview of my golden rules from my Recruitment Book, with instructions for how to get more information on each topic.

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Continue measuring your return on investment: Part of your monthly reporting should be your gross profit divided by combined payroll and outsourcing costs. If the numbers get worse, it might indicate a serious problem.

Only recruit when you need to: Organisations often recruit unnecessarily. Use my Six Tests of Recruitment to determine if you really need to hire.

Recruit the right people at the right time: As businesses mature they go from needing mainly generalists to having to recruit more specialists. Determine where you are in the business life cycle and recruit appropriately.

Know what a Great Performer looks like: Don’t use traditional job descriptions which tend to be too vague and generic to be of use. Instead draw up a Great Performance Profile for each role which specifies desired Measurable Outcomes and Key Competencies that you want in an applicant.

Be realistic: Don’t ask too much of applicants. Consider whether the person you’re looking for actually exists and remove unnecessary and overly-stringent competencies.

Assemble a Recruitment Team: Don’t let one person do the recruitment. You need multiple perspectives to make good decisions and to avoid costly mis-hires. Bring in an outside consultant to help if necessary.

Pay enough: You need to offer a credible salary to attract great applicants. Conduct a market analysis to figure out the right amount.

Attract enough applicants: Use several Applicant Attraction Channels in the correct order to get a good pool of applicants to choose from.

Don’t go to recruitment agencies first: You can usually find the same applicants through job sites and recruitment advertising agencies for far less money.

Choose a good recruitment advertising agency: Recruitment advertising agencies can save you time and money – but make sure you use a reputable one!

Advertise on lots of job sites: There are many job sites to choose from and your ideal applicants could be anywhere so you need to widely publicise your advert. If you’re using a recruitment advertising agency, make sure that they use a good range of sites.

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Select sites rationally, not dogmatically: Don’t advertise on a site just because that’s what your company has always done. The market tends to be fluid and what worked before may not work now. Advertise a job by carefully assess job sites’ suitability for your current recruitment needs.

Duration based adverts are preferable: Cost-per-action job adverts seem like a nice idea, but are complicated to use and can end up costing a lot. Traditional duration based adverts are often the best option.

Forget CV databases: CV databases are hard for many small employers to use and have lots of old CVs. They’re best left to recruitment agencies who mine them heavily.

Write a good job advert: To get a good response, you need a good job advert, not a glorified job description full of jargon and business-speak. My guidelines for writing adverts are based on rigorous real-world testing.

State the salary: If you don’t advertise a salary you’ll tend to get 80% fewer applicants.

Don’t identify your company in your advert: If you include your name and logo you might get swamped with calls from applicants and recruitment agencies. And if you advertise regularly, jobseekers might perceive you as having high staff turnover. It’s best not to include your name and logo at all.

Don’t state a closing date: You wouldn’t want to turn down a great applicant just because they’d applied one day after a closing date, so it’s best not to include one.

Don’t redirect jobseekers to a career page: You’ll lose approximately 90% of applicants if you redirect them from a job site to your employer career page.

Understand a candidate’s motivations: Often overlooked in recruitment, but key to successful recruitment and retention. Identify what a candidate is moving away from and being drawn towards, and the difference between professional and personal motivators.

Shortlist everyday: Don’t wait to see who else applies before shortlisting a promising applicant. You could lose them to a competitor while you dither, so shortlist regularly.

Use simple solutions to track candidates: Advanced applicant tracking software is expensive and often overly elaborate. Spreadsheets, emails and cloud-based file sharing usually do the job perfectly well.

Don’t skip Telephone Interviews: Telephone Interviews save you time and effort by helping you avoid interviewing obviously unsuitable applicants.

Don’t bother with video screening technology: Often candidates don’t want to use these systems. Telephone Interviews are much more effective.

Don’t use psychometric tests to screen candidates: Few candidates will be willing to take a test early on in the recruitment process. Even the psychometric test providers don’t recommend that you rely on such tests to screen candidates.

Use the Promise of a Reference Call (PORC): Telling candidates that you will be making Reference Calls to their former employers makes them much more honest at the interview.

Carefully arrange interviews to reduce no shows: Arrange interviews over the phone and send a calendar invite via email to encourage candidates who aren’t going to attend to let you know this.

Don’t rush interviews: Allow 75 minutes for an interview. If you don’t allocate enough time, you might not find out everything you need to and will have to do follow-up interviews.

‍Assemble your Interview Team: These are the 2-4 people involved in the final decision making process. Ensure everyone attends to avoid dragging out the process.

Choose an appropriate location for interviews: Your work environment is best, otherwise using a provider such as Regus or WeWork is preferable to a cafe or other public space.

Probe what candidates tell you: To get the information you need to make good decisions, you need to probe candidates’ answers to see if they really stack up.

Sell the job: Great candidates always have options so don’t assume they’re 100% committed just because they turned up to interview. Keep selling the job and your organisation throughout the recruitment process.

‍Be honest with candidates: If the job requires them to work long hours or if there are constraints on career advancement, you need to be open about this. If you aren’t honest, new hires might get fed up and leave.

Don’t use competency interviews: Competency interviews can be useful if interviewers properly explore the context of candidates’ answers. Often they don’t, though. Structured Interviews are a more effective and predictable way of getting the information you need.

Use a Structured Interview script: A script helps you stay on track and be consistent across different interviewees. They also enable you to really listen because you’re not worrying about what to ask next.

Pre-close the candidate: This helps you gauge how likely it is that a candidate will accept a job offer. If they don’t accept, you’ll have already got a sense of this and lined up other options.

Don’t bother with third or fourth interviews: Make sure that your first and second interviews are thorough and well designed so that you don’t need further interviews. Candidates might well lose patience with a long sequence of interviews and take a job somewhere else.

Use Job Simulations: These allow you to check if the candidate really can perform the tasks required of them. Sometimes people shine in interviews but perform poorly in Job Simulations.

Test for cultural fit: Candidates need to fit into the team to be effective. Equally they need to be comfortable with the culture of the business they’re working for. Work Culture Assessments are a good way of checking this out.

Use the Delphi Technique to make decisions: During the final recruitment discussions, senior people often dominate. But good recruitment decisions need to be made on the basis of everyone’s views. The Delphi Technique helps you to do this.

Use a Pre-Mortem to foresee problems: Thinking ahead of time how things might go wrong with a candidate helps to make decision making more robust. (For more on this, see our guide 8 Crucial Steps for Deciding Who to Recruit and chapter 14.)

Keep open the option of not hiring: Recruitment can be such an effort that it sometimes feels like you must hire come what may. Hiring the wrong person could be very costly, however. Sometimes you have to decide not to hire if you can’t find a suitable candidate.

Always take references: At interviews you only hear candidates’ side of the story. Taking references is vital for checking their claims and potentially avoiding expensive mis-hires.

Take references before making a job offer: If you make an offer, then take references and find out something you don’t like, it can feel difficult to backtrack. For this reason, take references first.

Speak to referees yourself: Don’t outsource to reference checking firms or recruitment agencies. Calling the referee will get you better information than communicating in writing.

Make job offers over the phone: When you call a candidate and offer them a job you can listen to their reaction – what they say and how they say it. This is much better than having to wait for a reply to an email.

Send a written offer straightaway: Without an offer in writing, the candidate might continue to look for work. Nail things down with a written confirmation as soon as possible.

Stay in touch with new hires before they join: It’s surprisingly common for people to accept a job offer and then never show up! Keeping in contact with a new employee increases the chance that they’ll start – or at least inform you that they won’t.

Decline candidates professionally: Declining candidates is never 'nice' but they deserve a few minutes of feedback, ideally with constructive feedback that is specific and actionable.

Hold a proper induction: New staff often leave. Effective onboarding helps to settle them in and reduces the likelihood of them resigning.

Keep your composure when a staff member resigns: When an employee resigns, don’t get angry or upset or tell the employee to leave. You may want to make a counteroffer or hold an Exit Interview so you need to receive the news calmly.

Conduct Exit Interviews: Don’t let an employee leave before holding an Exit Interview. The conversation might reveal issues about your organisation that need to be addressed urgently.

Don’t tolerate Poor Performers: See if you can get them to change or develop other staff so that you’re less dependent on them. If you can’t find a solution then you may have to dismiss them to protect your organisation.

Reassure your existing staff after a resignation: Employees leaving can destabilise a company. Other employees might get itchy feet and start looking for other opportunities. Resolve any issues that contributed to your employee leaving. Speak to your existing staff and let them know how much you appreciate them.

‍Seek good legal advice: Good employment solicitors are worth the money. They can help you find solutions when things go wrong. Some lawyers are less helpful, telling you lots of reasons why you can’t do things and never giving you a straight answer. If you treat staff well, you’re much less likely to encounter problems in the first place.