Use the New Year to Evaluate Your Hiring Process

With 2014 upon us, it’s the perfect time to revisit your hiring strategy.  A new employee is one of the biggest investments your company can make, so it’s essential that the hiring process be given adequate time and attention.  You can’t afford making bad hires.  Use these steps to evaluate your hiring strategy to make sure you’re getting the best candidates.

Develop a plan.
In order to hire effectively, you have to know what you’re looking for in a job candidate, what your staffing objectives are, how you plan to recruit, and what kind of budget you’re allowed to work with.  You need to evaluate what you need and how you’re going to get it.  Defining job descriptions up front is essential to recruiting the right talent, because accurate job descriptions allow you to clearly communicate what an applicant’s required skills need to be. The more effort you spend defining these things up front, the greater impact they’ll have on your hiring process.

Set your time frame.
The length of time you have for recruiting, evaluating, and hiring affects your recruiting options and determines how much money and effort you’ll need to accomplish your goal.  If you need an employee quickly you might consider making a temporary hire while searching for a long term replacement or using a temp-to-hire service to make sure an employee fits the position before hiring them on full-time.  If you have more time to spend on the hiring process, you’re able to spend more money on targeting the right candidates and on multiple rounds of interviews with people at varying levels of the organization.

Grab the attention of your ideal candidate.
Determine where and how you’ll attract the best candidates.  List all of your options such as you HR department, outside recruiters, business affiliations, search engine ads, etc.  Then, develop a marketing plan to reach the talent you’re looking for.  Are your job postings easily found on your website? Who can see your posts on jobs sites?  If you’re not talking directly to your target audience, you may be wasting time recruiting applicants that don’t have the necessary requirements.  How do you handle walk-in applicants?  If you don’t have a process for giving information on where to find available jobs, you may be missing out on talented applicants.  Consider having a business card printed up with the web address of your online job openings to give to walk-in candidates.

Talk with recruiters.
If you foresee a large hiring need in the near future, start thinking about those gaps ahead of time.  Consider bringing in an expert to help with staffing.  Have a recruiter talk with you and your employees and get a better idea of your company culture and the type of positions you’ll be hiring for.  If you build these relationships now, it’ll be much quicker to jump into the hiring process once a position opens up.

Set benchmarks.
The only real way to know if your hiring strategy is effective is to have a way to measure your recruiting success.  Set up benchmarks and actively look at the metrics, and make revisions based on the outcomes.  Measure things like where the applicant heard about the job, time it took to find and hire an employee, and success rate of new hires.

Hiring is one of the most important processes, and making a bad hire can be both a costly expense and damaging to office morale.  Don’t leave your hiring process to chance.  Let the experienced recruiters at Area Temps provide you with customized staffing solutions.  When it comes to staffing your business, making the right selection is crucial. Whether you’re looking for temporary fill in or direct hire, we’ll take the stress of the hiring process off of you.  Contact our professional team of recruiters today, and we’ll help redefine your hiring process.

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