Recruitment Best Practices: 4 Expert Tips
Recruitment is often lengthy and expensive– at the end of it, you don’t want to end up with the wrong candidate. Here are our recruitment best practices.
There are many factors at play when recruiting new candidates to join your team. It can be a challenging process to narrow the selection and ensure each qualified candidate has a fair chance. That’s why we asked our experts about recruitment best practices. Here are their four tips:
1. Limit The Application Timeline
To avoid getting overwhelmed with too many candidate applications, it’s a good idea to limit the amount of time your job posting is live. It’s ok to extend the window if you don’t find a qualified candidate but set an initial timeline to be most effective.
A couple of weeks can be enough for a highly populated area whereas businesses in smaller towns might want a longer period of a month or two. If you typically receive too many resumes when posting a new position consider using an Applicant Tracking System (ATS), which will help you filter out unqualified resumes automatically without your input.
2. Phone Interviews
If you’ve gone through all of your applicant resumes and are finding it difficult to narrow down your search to just a few interviewees, consider conducting a few phone interviews. This is a great way to screen candidates more in-depth and find out if they should move forward onto the interview stage.
3. Avoid Closed-Ended Questions
Closed-ended questions can be answered with a simple “yes” or “no.” These questions won’t tell you much about the candidate’s experience. Instead, ask questions that start with “tell me about a time when…” or “how did you handle…” It’s good practice to include a few behavioral questions as well. If you’re having trouble brainstorming interview questions, use the job description as a resource to generate ideas.
4. Interview With Multiple People
Interviewing with multiple people is always a good idea. Often managers hire candidates based on what they believe the perfect employee looks like. Including multiple employees in the hiring process is a smart move to decrease the risk of personal biases. When conducting multiple interviews, it’s important to make sure each interviewer knows exactly what you are looking for. Multiple interviews are also a great way to help the candidate get a better feel for the team and what the job is really like.
