Tips to Enhance Recruitment Process

A company is only as strong as its people and that’s especially the case with startups and small businesses who rely on a modest band of workers. With limited resources, you need to be able invest in the right people who share your vision and have the right skills to drive growth. This is why it’s so important to recruit efficiently and effectively to make sure you get the best hire through your door.

With your eyes firmly on your finances, you’ll want to make sure every spend is well invested. That means working out the true cost of your hire, which isn’t just a case of focusing on the salary. You should take into account the costs of advertising your role and the indirect cost involved in the time taken away from your other responsibilities during the recruitment process (from drawing up a job description to conducting interviews and even training, there’s a lot to do). You can set the cost of all of this against the returns you’ll expect from a new employee when they start work.

We can find better candidates by following tips:

• Create a recruitment marketing plan.

Treat your candidate funnel just as you treat your sales lead funnel. To increase the volume of applicants and attract the right candidates, you need to build a recruitment marketing plan with clear goals that are aligned with your growth goals.

This plan should define the ideal candidate profile, the desired deadlines and the activities needed to hit your goals. Activities may include paying for ads targeting talented people on LinkedIn, or creating high converting landing pages that clearly articulate the desired skills, the company culture and perks.

Having a recruitment marketing plan will not only help to attract more of the right people but will also save your team time by attracting fewer wrong people.

• Only hire A players

Scaling is an opportunity to on board incredibly talented people. Each new person who is hired should be more talented than the person who was hired before them. Following this scaling principle will help entrepreneurs make sure that the collective capabilities of their company continues to improve with time.

Eventually, your new hires will be hiring managers. If you bring new team members on board who are motivated to work with other A players, you’ll be building a company that gets increasingly more talented and driven with time.

To make sure we only hire A players, we look for a spark of excellence from each candidate regardless of the position they are interviewing for. Candidates must have a history of demonstrating excellence in some form, whether professionally or personally. They need to show they have what it takes to be a top contributor to the company

• Look for potential future leaders.

Hire people who can lead teams in three years or less. Avoid hiring employees who are a great fit for a current open position, but lack the interest, motivation or basic skills needed to assume more responsibility down the road.

By hiring people who will be able to lead teams in the future, you will be creating a flexible workforce, while also helping to establish the groundwork for promoting from within  a cultural trait present in most successful organizations.

• Have a great training plan.

To make your hiring more efficient at scale, make sure you have an on boarding plan in place. The success of each new team member is dependent on the quality of your company’s on boarding process. Invest at least as much time in training talented people as you do in finding them.

During the first few weeks of working at a new company, new people will form long-lasting judgments about company culture, colleagues and more. The onboarding process should clearly articulate what it means to work for your company. What are the values your company espouses? How should employees work with one another? What are the main goals and challenges facing your company? What have the most successful people at your company done that can be replicated?

•  Highlight your dynamic culture.

The best employees want to work for the best companies. Websites often are candidates’ first opportunity to get a feel for the company, so be certain your site design highlights company values and champions an appealing culture.

• Use the freelance economy to test

The booming gig economy allows executives to take highly qualified contributors on extended test runs. When new projects or needs arise, hire a freelancer to do the work. If that person reliably produces high-quality work, extend an enticing offer. Convincing a talented freelancer to end the lone-wolf lifestyle can be expensive, but the productivity and savings of filling a needed role more than make up the difference.

• Measure passion. 

Skills and talent are important, but you must also take into account whether candidates are passionate about going to work for you. Did they do pre-interview research to inform themselves about your organization? Are they enthusiastic during the interview? Do they illustrate their talents and passion with stories of previous experience? Its answers to these types of questions than can help evaluate whether or not potential employees really want to work for your company, or are simply looking for any job.

The real thing about finding and hiring talent when you’re a small company

Hiring as a small company can come with its own advantages. On one hand, you need to be sure of your message and express who you are and being really authentic about that. “Don’t try to present something you aren’t. Because you’re a small company and you are just growing fast and you are at an early stage, there are quite some uncertainties and risks. The people that join will be affected by that. On the other hand, in reality, not everyone wants to go the corporate route. “There are people who don’t want to be bored and want to be in chaos. It’s really about making a personal connection,” Maier says. “It’s often for us as founders and team leads to share what we do and who we are in a very personal manner. I think that is a power of recruiting as a founder compared to being a recruiter. You can very well keep that message across because you’re the most passionate person in the room. And there is no one that would not be easily drawn to that kind of message. That makes a big difference.”

You might have a lot of disadvantages by having a small name. But in the end, it’s about creating a good culture and workplace where people feel so happy about that they keep talking and sharing. “But you have to be aware that you need to make that effort everywhere to get the word out, to make potential candidates eventually wander to your recruiting page and watch that team video and feel like ‘This is something I would want to join.