The Modern Recruiting Process

Greater Efficiency for Greater Demand

Millennials on the move cost companies billions

According to an analysis of the 2016 U.S. Census data, millennials have become the largest generation in today’s workforce, comprising an average of 35% of the total labor pool. Although this generation brings many advantages to the business world—including high regard for diversity and technological savvy—they are creating new challenges for recruiters.

Dubbed “the job-hopping generation,” millennials are changing jobs much more often than previous generations. Gallup reports as many as 21% of millennials have started a new position in the last year, costing U.S. businesses at least $30.5 billion annually.

As a result, creating an efficient recruitment process is becoming more and more important for maintaining company profitability. Vacant positions cost money, strain resources, and stress existing staff. And, the longer positions are open, the higher the price. With every employee having a direct and measurable impact on a company’s bottom line, organizations must find new ways to discover quality talent faster.

21% of millennials have started a new position in the last year, costing U.S. businesses at least $30.5 billion annually.

But, building a better recruiting process can be an overwhelming undertaking for any human resource/ talent acquisition department. This guide will show you what a structured recruitment process looks like and help you identify ways to work more efficiently at each step. Keep reading to learn how to get qualified candidates on the job quickly—all while providing a superb candidate experience.

In this guide:

Why a structured selection process is essential to your recruitment success

How to streamline your recruitment strategy and planning with the right technology

How to improve candidate sourcing and job promotion with creativity

How to make applicant outreach and communications more efficient by cutting tedious tasks

The importance of screening candidates and assessing early in the hiring process

How to help your hiring managers with candidate onboarding

Why a structured selection process is essential to your recruitment success

For many organizations, the recruitment process is broken up into a handful of steps shared by recruiters and hiring managers. Usually, the recruiter owns the process, taking responsibility for involving the hiring manager at key stages.

The five stages of the recruitment process

1. Strategizing & Planning

A need is identified by the organization and the qualities of a desirable candidate are outlined.

2. Sourcing & Promotion

A strategy for finding and reaching talent is executed by the recruiter.

3. Outreach & Communications

Candidates are contacted, and the most qualified are passed to the hiring manager.

4. Screening & Assessing

The hiring manager and other key stakeholders meet top candidates to verify skills and experience.

5. Offering & Onboarding

An offer is extended to a candidate and preparations are made for them to join the team.

Hiring teams move through each of these steps for every open position. As they do so, it is sometimes necessary to repeat or spend more time in one stage to accomplish its goal.

Due to organizations’ increased demand for talent, it has become essential for them to look for ways to save time and money at each stage of their recruiting process. The best strategies for improvement dig into the data to identify opportunities for unification and structure, then plan for addressing those concerns with efficient solutions.

A structured recruitment process can help you address these challenges and:

Get everyone on the same page

Standardization makes it easier to explain decisions and engenders trust across your larger team. It also reduces the possibility of discriminatory hiring practices when everyone is evaluated against the same set of criteria.

Find the right candidates faster

Taking the time to standardize your candidate evaluation process can lead to superior-quality hires. With standardized criteria, you will be able to focus your search on key qualities and it will be easier to determine whether a candidate is a good fit.

Understand the value they’ll bring

When everyone on your team is using the same language to describe a candidate, how each applicant meets or exceeds specific criteria will become more clear. As a result, you’ll be able to advance or dismiss candidates more efficiently and with added confidence.

Improve your process

The biggest advantage a structured process brings is the ability to make changes to improve your recruitment process in the future. With a framework in place, you can create a baseline to evaluate the effectiveness of your process over time.

How to streamline your recruitment strategy and planning with the right technology

From the perfect job description and applicant tracking systems to sourcing tools and candidate assessments, there are many technologies available that can help you get your team working efficiently and filling your pipeline with quality applicants.

The first step in any recruitment process is identifying a hiring need. Often the need is easily recognized when a current team member resigns, but that isn’t always the case. Sometimes a new hire is essential when gaps are identified in workload balance, or when specific expertise is sought.

As organizations grow and change, this can mean starting from scratch for many acquisition teams— from planning an approach to identifying the desired skills and talents of an ideal employee. With these time- consuming tasks at hand, streamlining this process is essential to getting a candidate in the door quickly.

Jump into important tasks—like building comprehensive job descriptions and organizing the onslaught of applicants—rapidly with these tools:

Applicant tracking systems (ATS)

Build a streamlined recruiting process using an applicant tracking system. The latest hiring software can help you automate your activity, ensuring important steps are facilitated on time. The best systems take you from start to finish, helping you hunt for talent, select the best candidates without bias and then get them onboarded efficiently.

Here are some examples of popular applicant tracking systems:

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Zoho Recruit

Applicant Stack

BambooHR

JazzHR

Workable

Lever

Job description tools

Writing a detailed and all-inclusive job description can be one of the most difficult parts of the hiring process. But, having a standardized description will not only help you communicate the full depth and breadth of the position you are hiring for—it can help the right candidates find you. When writing your descriptions, be sure to use a clear job title and align your job descriptions with other similar positions across your industry.

Here are a few free tools that can help you get started:

hr360 (Custom job description builder)

Workable (700 job description templates)

Monster (Sample job descriptions)

hr360

Workable

Monster

Data sharing and management

The recruitment process has many stakeholders and making the best hiring decision requires that each be able to access documents and candidate data.

If your organization doesn’t already have a best-practice for sharing internal information, or if you have limited storage, one of these tools could help streamline your hiring process:

Dropbox

Evernote

Google Drive

How to improve candidate sourcing and job promotion with creativity

As the workforce changes with the growing millennial talent pool—and turnover becomes more frequent— recruiters are facing increased pressure to find and recruit new talent. That’s why, at this critical stage, recruiters execute a thorough plan for reaching candidates.

The plan, created in the strategizing phase, includes a list of recruitment methods and activities that get the word out about an open position. At this point, recruiters are posting ads on job boards, requesting referrals and reaching out directly to top candidates. And, because finding just the right person to fill an open position is often a numbers game, acquisition teams are looking for new ways to find more people faster.

Many use LinkedIn to discover and research talent that fits their needs. Although supremely effective, the screening process is largely manual and very time-consuming. Do you use LinkedIn? Don’t miss our tips below for streamlining outreach and communications.

Do you use LinkedIn? Don’t miss our tips below for streamlining outreach and communications.

Consider trying one of these other types of sourcing tools to help you expand your outreach to a larger audience with a bit more creativity:

Resume Databases

Instead of waiting for qualified candidates to come to you, search them out. Resume databases are marketed to job seekers, so candidates with profiles are open to new opportunities. Some examples include:

Hired

Zillion Resumes

Portfolio Hubs

Looking for a professional with a specific kind of talent or creative eye? Browse any number of portfolios and projects—from designers and copywriters to information technology professionals and developers— on a hub like one of these:

Behance

CarbonMade

Github

Referrals

One of the best ways for companies to find the right talent is through their current employees. Give your employee referrals a boost and incentivize your workforce with a platform like:

EmployeeReferrals

RolePoint

Zalp

Social Scanners

Don’t have time to search every social media platform for potential employees? Using a social scanner like one from the list below can help you dig through the masses in record time:

Followerwonk

SourceHub

TweetDeck

How to make applicant outreach and communications more efficient by cutting tedious tasks

When it comes time to reach out to candidates, or to communicate with those who come to you via a traditional application or job posting, the stakes are high. Ensure you’re at the top of your game, opening lines of communication and answering questions consistently and efficiently with the following tools.

The People Search Chrome Extension

What do you do when you’ve found a candidate through an online search, or were given a name by referral, but don’t have enough information to contact them? Stop spending hours looking for contact information. Tools like People Search can help you find the information you need—email addresses, resumes, social profiles, etc.—to reach out.

People Search

TextExpander

Much of a recruiter’s day is spent sending the same or similar messages to candidate after candidate. And often, the online tools they use do not have the templates or tools necessary to streamline the process. TextExpander can help automate the most tedious pieces of candidate communication. It offers the ability to instantly insert text snippets—like boilerplates, job descriptions, or entire outreach messages—from a library of custom content created by you and your team.

TextExpander

Zapier and IFTTT

These applications allow you to link up your favorite apps and devices. Use them to streamline the workflows in your recruiting process and increase your collaboration and communication efficiency. Zapier can help the applications you use most to share data and information. IFTTT is a simple and free way to connect your programs into automated workflows.

Zapier

IFTTT

The importance of screening candidates and assessing early in the hiring process

No matter how efficient your recruiting process is, the outcome can only be as good as the quality of your talent pool. Screening and assessing the candidates that enter your recruiting funnel quickly and efficiently is a key part of the entire recruitment process.

Narrowing the applicant pool to a shortlist of the highest quality contenders traditionally begins with a thorough review of application information and includes a short phone call with the potential candidates to confirm key qualifications. However, accurately gauging the skill level of your talent pool can look different for every position.

No matter how efficient your recruiting process is, the outcome can only be as good as the quality of your talent pool.

One way to level the playing field is to administer a skills assessment. Assessments could include anything from a short skills test to a portfolio of writing samples or an executive-level strategy presentation. An easy way to ensure you are consistent is to make the assessment part of your process—like the assessments described as part of Deloitte’s hiring process. Management systems like MindTools or online tools like SurveyMonkey can help facilitate some of the details at this stage.

Another important tool for selecting talent is the candidate interview process. Speaking with candidates to confirm skills and experience is a crucial step, and it can be the most intricate to organize and manage from a recruiter’s perspective.

Use these tools to help determine when schedules sync, coordinate online or in-person meetings and share feedback:

Calendy

Zoom

Two tips for helping your hiring manager close the deal

Congratulations! You’ve finally found the one. Although this stage in the recruitment process often doesn’t fall directly into a recruiter’s job responsibilities, hiring managers could benefit from help in continuing to make your organization look good.

Help your hiring manager close the deal with the following two tips:

1. Project Excitement

When the hiring manager contacts your choice candidate with an offer, show them how to project excitement to the candidate. When executed well, the candidate will detect urgency, and the hiring manager will get a tentative commitment before allowing the candidate to review the detailed formal offer letter.

2. Implement Onboarding

Once an offer is accepted by a candidate, help the hiring manager make their transition as easy as possible with a thorough onboarding process. Training is the step that is most often overlooked in the recruitment process. Allow your new hire to ease into your company culture and help them make connections that will make their transition smooth.

3. Employee Development

Investing in the development of your employees is key to stopping the resigning/ recruiting cycle. Don’t be afraid to build on the success of your onboarding with additional training and growth opportunities after a candidate’s start date. After all, companies that prioritize ongoing development are ultimately investing in a powerful recruitment tool— their employees.

Have any recruiting process tips or challenges of your own? Tell us in the comments.