Finding good candidates is half the battle. The other half of the battle is managing to retain those candidates. One way to improve how you fill positions and who you fill them with, is to focus on improving your recruitment process.

This article is going to focus on 8 things you can do that will give your recruitment process a huge boost. Did you know that boosting your hiring process is as easy as using our free online recruitment system? Try Recruiteze today to make hiring easier.

Boosting Your Recruiting

• Make sure your job ads are detailed enough

Your job adverts should be detailed and should contain enough information for the candidate to understand whether or not they are suited for the role and whether or not it’s a role they would enjoy.

Some ways to ensure your job ads are detailed are:

Talk about what the candidate would be doing on a day to day basis. This way they can see if the sort of tasks your looking for someone to do, are in line with the tasks they want to do, and the tasks they’re qualified for.

You could even go as far as mentioning what would be asked of them during the first 90 days. This way they will have a clear picture of the sort of deliverables they will have to present and will know, before they begin the recruitment process whether the role is right for them.

Do be sure to list the required education, qualifications and experience.

Don’t just write “5 years’ experience” but be explicit in what you want this experience to be in. “5 years managing a remote team” for example.

Above all else, make sure the job application is exciting let the candidate know what success looks like and how they can go about achieving It in the role.

• Don’t put it all on yourself.

When you’re thinking about the recruitment process, it shouldn’t just be the hiring team who are involved.

If you want to improve your process, then you need to include other people in the team.

One way to do this is to find the person, or people, who will be interacting with the new hire the most. Talk to this person and find out the specifics that are required to do well in the job.

This will give you a clearer picture when writing your job ads.

If you have more than one interview, it could be helpful to have said person involved, or at least present in one, or part of an interview. This way they can offer their own opinion on how suited for the role they think the candidate is.

Even if they can only offer an initial opinion, it can still help you further down the line, if you’re torn between two candidates.

• Test your candidates

During or before the interview, be sure to test the candidate’s skills and experience in the best way you can.

For example, If the candidate is applying for a role heavily predominant in writing, then why not have them write a sample article, or edit an article looking picking out any mistakes they find.

If they’re applying for a role that works with code, get them to fix a bug whilst they’re in the interview.

If you’re going to test your interviewees, then make sure you are adding real problems to the interviews. This means problems should be ones that they could come across in the role.

Don’t ask far-fetched things that would never happen, as it isn’t a very effective way to measure whether or not someone is suited to the role in hand.

• Make sure every applicant goes through the same process

Make sure everyone goes through the same recruitment process.

This means when you respond to a candidate be timely with your response. Don’t take three weeks to get back to one candidate and reply to another one immediately.

When looking at their skills, account for their education and experience in the same way. This way, no one is at a disadvantage unless they’ve achieved less than is required of the job advertisement.

Make interviews feasible for everyone. Not everyone who goes for the roles will be able to make an interview at any time. Sometimes people are applying for a role whilst they’re still in their current company.

These people may not be able to get the relevant time off needed to attend the interview. You don’t want to miss out on top talent, simply because they can’t make the interview, so try and secure some early or late interview slots for these candidates.

If you don’t treat all your candidates equally and put them through the same system, it’ll add bias to your process and make it harder for you to differentiate between the true quality of the candidates.

• FAQ page

Having an FAQ page can improve your recruitment process because it frees up your time.

Often as a recruiter, you spend time answering questions from potential and current candidates. These questions are often repetitive and mirror other questions from other people.

Having a FAQ page, and encouraging people to read that first before contacting you, will allow them to see the answers to their questions without taking up too much of your time.

This is beneficial for two crucial reasons.

Firstly, it shows your recruitment process is transparent as everyone has access to the answers at all times. They could even use this information to decide whether not just the role, but the company is a right fit for them.

It also cuts down your response time and you can use this time to improve other areas of the recruitment process.

• Keep in touch with finalists

Regardless of whether a candidate gets the role or not, you should try and keep in touch with anyone who makes it to the final stages. The fact they got to the final stages means they must have some redeeming qualities that made them suitable. It might simply have been a case that although they were a strong candidate, there was just someone else stronger than them.

This, however doesn’t mean there won’t be another role in the future they will be best suited for. Keeping in touch with previous finalists gives you access to people who have already expressed interest in your company and have potential to be suitable.

Contacting these people will reduce the hiring costs you have to go through.

• Feedback and survey applicants

If you want to improve your recruitment process, one of the best ways to find your weak areas is to ask the people who have been through it.

When a candidate leaves the process, either because they were unsuccessful, or were placed in a role, find out what they thought about the whole process.

It’s important to find out from people who were place in a role as well as those who weren’t so you’re not working with a completely biased review.

Use this feedback to find common problems people are facing and work out ways and systems you can implement to combat them.

Example questions are along the lines of:

• How helpful was the recruiter throughout your process?
• How easy was it for you to access information you needed?
• Did you feel like you were supported during the process?
• Referrals

If you haven’t already, you should start implementing referrals into your recruitment process.

Referrals are when you allow your current employees to refer people they think are well suited in the role. You can then add them to your online recruitment system.

This improves your process for three reasons.

• People who already work in your company understand the culture and the missions. They will be able to easily understand whether or not someone they know is a right fit.

• You can reward people who refer candidates to you and are chosen. This sense of reward will boost morale among the team, who will In turn, both work harder and look for other suitable candidates.

• It also reduces the amount of time you have to spend looking for candidates when they are sent directly to you.

• Good candidates

When you find candidates who are suitable for moving forward to the finalist stage, find out what their acceptation requirements would be, or if they have any.

At this stage, you are able to see if candidates have any specific requirements that you haven’t thought about.

When you choose your final hire, these requirements could help you decide who is the best person to choose.

Alongside this, it acts as a way to gather feedback for the process. If multiple people are requiring an answer to the same thing, then perhaps you should think about putting the answer either on the FAQ page, or mention it in the advert.

Whilst your recruitment process has many different stages, it’s important to constantly be looking at ways you can improves your processes so they are more streamlined with your business goals and can run automatically without much input from you.

Boost Your Recruiting Process With Our Free Online Recruitment System

Murali Takalpati is the founder of Recruiteze.com. Recruiteze is our free online recruitment system as well as iReformat: Automated Resume Formatting Service. With iReformat, you can format a resume in less than a minute. Try it for FREE today!