As a business owner, recruiting for a new role can take a lot of either your or your HR’s team time. Therefore, you need to make sure that everything is in working order before conducting job interviews, or else you’ll be doing both yourself and the potential candidates a disservice.
Here are four areas to get in order before holding your interviews.
1. The job description
The job title and description is what is going to attract your potential candidates. Be sure to include a full list of responsibilities and requirements. If it is a brand new job role that isn’t quite defined, perhaps mention ‘additional responsibilities as required’ at the bottom, as oftentimes the role ends up changing and evolving based on the business’s needs.
However, if you are hiring for a role due to a member of staff leaving, or an internal promotion, refer back to their previous job description and see if any tweaks need to be made.
Be sure to include factors such as where you are based, whether the role is in-office, remote or hybrid, benefits of working for the business and salary. There are pros and cons to adding salary, the main pro being that if you do add salary, you are going to attract far more candidates of the quality that you desire, especially in well-paid roles.
At the bottom of the job description you should also explain how candidates should apply, whether that’s emailing their CV over, filling out an online questionnaire or answering a set of questions. This will of course depend on the time and resources within your HR team, if you have one.
2. Promoting the role
Once the job description is drafted up, you need to think about how you’re going to get in front of your ideal candidates. Consider posting on your website initially, then on job role sites such as Indeed and Reed. If you have a paid ads budget, you can also push the role via ads on those platforms, or even PPC if you get a decent landing page set up on your site.
If you’re hiring for a particularly specialist role, e.g. HR, consider getting in touch with a specialist recruiter, such as a HR Recruitment Agency. This can be especially helpful for businesses who don’t have the huge amount of time and resources that it takes to hire someone. They do cost, but it can actually save you time and money in the long run as they are out there sourcing people for you.
3. Preparing for interviews
Whilst you’re waiting for the applications to arrive, it’s a good idea to prepare for the interviews. Perhaps you have a document of questions from hiring previous roles that you can revisit. If not, think about the depth of the role and what it involves. Make sure you ask questions specific to the role and the person’s experience. Being prepared will make you stand out from the other candidates. This will also help you with performance results. For example, preparation will let you know to prepare for verbal reasoning tests if the company you are applying to focuses on them.
Questions such as, what do you think makes you a good fit for the role? Can you give examples of how you dealt with X situation? Can be a good measure of character and how well they would work within the business. Be sure to allow them time to ask you questions at the end too.
4. Have steps for an approvals process in place
Once your applications start flowing in, it’s time to review and create a ‘yes’ and a ‘no’ pile. If you aren’t working with a recruitment agency who can filter the initial applications out, you may have a lot of spam applications from people who aren’t relevant to the job role at all. You may also find that some applicants aren’t experienced enough for what you’re looking for, so you can filter them out immediately.
It’s up to you how you want to filter out your quality candidates. Maybe you want to ‘star’ or flag their email applications, or perhaps set up a different email folder for them altogether to refer back to at a later date. You could possibly print them out and create a physical pile to go through with other key members of the team.
Whatever method you choose, it’s important to get back in touch with those quality candidates quickly, as they may be actively seeking other roles and might get snapped up!
As long as you prepare in advance, you’ll be ready to interview and hire the best candidate possible.