We say “organization-specific” because each company operates differently—what works well for one company might not be the best choice for yours. The recruitment process steps below will give you some ideas on how to find and evaluate job candidates, but we encourage you to adapt these steps based on your company culture and needs.
Steps of the recruitment process
1. Understanding client requirement
You can’t get what you want unless you know what you’re looking for. At the end of this process, you’re hoping to find the ideal employee, so you have to start by determining what “ideal” means for this position. This step will impact every other part of the recruitment process. Ask yourself and employees close to the position questions such as:
- How does this role fit into your department?
- What gaps or missing skills does this employee need to fill?
- Which skills and qualities are essential for this position and which are simply nice to have?
As you answer these questions, you might want to look at an org chart of your company. With a single glance, an org chart can give you an idea of what skills are available with your existing team and decide where this new employee would fit within the hierarchy.
If you need to fill an existing position, don’t just recycle the job description used when you hired the last employee. Understand the role as it currently stands, since the responsibilities and skills involved have likely changed.
2. Sourcing candidates using database head hunting and other methods
It is a well-known fact across all industry domains that sourcing good candidates are the first step towards better talent acquisition. Every Human Resource or Recruitment Professional identifies a list of potential candidates for a particular job profile. It has become one of the most important tasks on their to-do lists.
Your Talent Acquisition team should maintain a database of potential candidates as a part of your recruiting strategy. These could be candidates who applied in the past or sourced through another channel.
You could always stumble upon some good candidates from this talent pool. It would be much easier to connect with such qualified candidates when the desired opening is available. Maintaining a Talent pool is a must for sourcing passive candidates.
3. Shortlisting candidates
- Decide how many candidates you want to interview.
- Make lists of your essential and desirable criteria
- Shortlisting stage 1: essential criteria
- Shortlisting stage 2: desirable criteria
- Consider other eliminating factors.
- Notify the unsuccessful candidates.
4. Interviews and assessments
Interview assessments evaluate your abilities and how they match up to what is required within a role. They test you against the core skills needed for a position, so that the interviewer can determine how well you would perform if they were to offer you the job.
How to prepare for an assessment interview
- Know the Job Role Well.
- Research Your Interviewers.
- Know the Company and the Industry.
- Know Interview Etiquette.
- Anticipate Questions and Practice Interviewing.
- Dress to Impress.
- Know the Location Well.
- During the Interview – Be Positive, Listen and Ask.
Keeping candidate backup
First and foremost, the backup candidate is an informal term. It describes one of the precautionary measure’s recruiters take to assure the recruitment process’s consistency and efficiency regardless of circumstances.
- The backup candidate is a type of candidate the recruiters retain despite proceeding with the top candidate.
- But how? For the most part, the recruiter stays in touch with the candidate regardless of outcome – that’s networking in action.
- The goal is to have a candidate at hand and avoid restarting the whole recruitment process because of one candidate declining an offer.
The thing is, it is about making the most out of “rounding up the usual suspects.”
