You CAN Get The Staff These Days: Improving Your Hiring Process

Tired of hiring the wrong people for your company? Improving your hiring process could allow you to find better candidates, allowing you to build a stronger team of employees. Here are five ways that you can improve your hiring process.

Fine-tune your job description

Your job description should be carefully worded to attract as many applicants as possible. Advertise the perks of the job and use a professional sounding job title. Whilst you should detail certain qualities that you’re looking for, try not to make the job sound too demanding as you may scare off applicants – the bad ones and the good ones.

Use social media

There are all kinds of places to advertise job vacancies including job listing sites, newspapers and public bulletins. Social media is fast becoming one of the best places to advertise jobs. It’s also a great means of screening applicants to check that they’re the right fit. LinkedIn is one of the best social media platforms for screening applicants as it tells you which previous job people have worked. You may also want to check someone’s Facebook profile – even if it’s set to private, an inappropriate profile picture could be enough to tell you that a certain candidate isn’t right for you.

Create an online tests and quizzes

Online tests and quizzes are great ways of deciding if people are the right fit for your job. This could be a personality test, a decision-based quiz or test of knowledge. Afterwards, you can look at the results and determine which candidates should progress forwards. Online quizzes could save you having a trial shift and could help to weed out applicants that are good blaggers.

Hire a recruiter

To save yourself time and increase the range of your search, you could hire a recruiter. This will cost you extra, but it could help you to find better candidates. Recruiters can be useful when it comes to hard-to-fill vacancies – these may require very niche skills or could simply require gruelling responsibilities.

Leave yourself enough time

The biggest mistake that employers make when hiring new staff is rushing the process. By giving yourself more time to advertise the vacancy, read CVs and interview candidates, you’re more likely to make the right decision. Manage your time effectively so that you’re keeping interviews on schedule and replying to queries from applicants promptly. If you’re struggling to find the time to do this, you may be able to get help from a senior employee of yours or use a recruiter to handle aspects such as interviews. On top of leaving yourself enough time for the hiring process, remember that you’ll also need to pour some time into training this new staff member and taking them through introductory paperwork. Many employees that leave soon after being hired do so because they haven’t been trained properly or haven’t been made to feel welcome – even if you’re hiring someone with ample experience, you company may have a different way of doing things, so help them to adjust.