Process of Recruitment: Hiring the Right People for Your Company

The process of recruitment is a model of how new employees are sourced and is organization-specific. Typically, the recruitment process ownership resides within the department of Human Resources. Of course, depending on the structure of the organization, this might differ. While the exact process is unique for every company, typically, the process follows the general steps of identifying vacancies, preparing a job description, sourcing a database, role marketing, management response, making short lists, interviews, checking references and selection.

In itself, the process of recruitment is the focus of approaches of BPO as outsourced process of recruitment, where external providers of services are engaged to get the process done. Here is a course entitled Staff Recruitment designed to assist managers find the perfect person for their team.

Recruitment refers to the process overall of being able to attract, select and appoint candidates that are suitable to 1 or more jobs within organizations, either temporary or permanent. The process of recruitment also refers to the process of choosing employees for positions that are voluntary or training programs. Depending on what practices and size your organization is, recruitment can be done by recruitment specialists, human resource generalists or in-house manager. On the other hand, part the process can also be done by specialist search consultancies, commercial recruitment agencies or public sector employment agencies.

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These days, the use of computer technology and internet-based services to support recruitment in all its aspects has revolutionized the activities of recruitment and has become pretty widespread as well. This ranges from sourcing candidates from social media or online job boards. As part of the selection process, human resource professionals also use job simulation or assessments as part of the process of selection. Oh and by the way if you like articles like this one, here is another one entitled Human Resources Job Description: A Fun and Exciting Career Opportunity that lets you in on what it takes to be part of the human resources department.

Internal Process of Recruitment

The process of selecting a candidate from the work force that already exists in a company is called internal recruitment. This can be to meet an urgent or specific organizational need, to provide a career development opportunity or as a promotion. The advantage that this approach has is being familiar with the employee, their competency and their ability to be trusted. It can also be lower in cost and quicker to hire someone from another part of the same company.

Secondment

When an internal temporary appointment for a set time period occurs, where the employee is expected to go back to their position previously is called secondment. If this is something you went through, it would be said that you were ‘seconded’ to the new team. This sometimes happens between related companies.

What Goes On in the Process of Recruitment?

• Job Analysis

A job analysis happens when many new jobs are created for the 1^st time. This is so that the abilities, skills and knowledge about the job would be documented. The information that is relevant is then written as job specifications or job descriptions. Often, companies have descriptions of jobs representing tasks performed in a historical collection.

• Sourcing

Sourcing is using a few strategies to identify and attract candidates to fill vacancies of a job. This could involve job centers, window advertisements, professional publications, specialist recruitment media, the internet, national or local newspapers, using appropriate media and external or internal advertising. A company might also use an agency or consultancy to find non-active candidates who are happy with their current jobs and not looking to move. This leads to name generation of candidate potentials who can be discreetly contacted to be approached or screened.

• Screening and Selection

Typically, job suitability is assessed by looking for what a job requires. This can be done through resume screening, job applications or interviews. Psychological test can also be used for assessment along with tools in software called psychometric testing. In most countries, there are legal mandates for employees to ensure that their process of selection and screening meet ethical and equal opportunity standards. Aside from the assessment criteria of the process of recruitment, many employers are also likely to see the value of those who encompass soft skills like team leadership or interpersonal leadership and have the abilities of reinforcing the company brands through attitude portrayal and behavior to suppliers and customers.

• Lateral Hiring

When you hire someone into a position that is in the same salary or the same level of the organization, it could mean getting someone hired from similar organizations and perhaps luring them with promises of better opportunities in their career and with a better salary. One example is the recruitment of a law firm partner by another firm. Lateral hires also refer to employees moving from within the same organization from one position to another.

What Else Goes On in the Process of Recruitment?

• Determination of Your Ideal Candidate Recruit

This step’s goal is to precisely determine the person targeted by the efforts of recruitment, including level of performance, level of experience and whether or not they are looking for a job actively. If you are poaching competitors or targeting top performers, the other recruitment process steps need to be made for fitting the needs in the process of job searching of your targeted candidate if you even expect to get their attention. Many firms prioritize their jobs at this step so they focus resources on jobs with the highest impact on business. This step usually fails if you define your candidate employee but fail to design the approach used in methods capable of hiring and recruiting this candidate type.

• Knowing the Decision Criteria of Your Candidate

One significant part of any process of recruitment is attracting talent you desire. This is something you won’t be able to do effectively without fully knowing what your candidate considers important. This step in the process of recruitment puts the focus on getting key factors identified, known as ‘criteria for job acceptance’ that are needed in order to convince qualified prospects to apply for and accept a position at your company eventually.

• Where Do They Hang Out?

Now that you defined both the decision criteria of your candidate and the candidate itself, the next step is finding out where you will most likely find your talent candidate, including what channels of communication would be effective for messages of recruitment. If you don’t identify where their time is spent accurately, there will be lower probabilities of you placing compelling company information and the opportunities in places they pay attention to or will find. The mistake many companies do is to advertise their jobs where it is easiest, not necessarily where their candidates are.

• Employment Branding

Employment branding is a discipline driven by science that produces consistent flows of talent qualified and interested in working for your firm. The role of employment branding is driving a pipeline of talent towards you. This step’s goal is to develop and deploy content about what makes your company a great place to work in in the minds of your preferred candidates proactively. Obviously, if individuals who are qualified have never heard of your company or think that your company is not exactly compelling, you won’t get many applicants directly. The mistake many companies make at this step is to present a ‘generic’ job opportunity and company format that the candidate audience does not really believe to be authentic.

• Learning the Job Search Process of Candidates

This step involves implementing a designed process for identifying what our candidate does once they start to search for a job. The goal is to precisely understand how your candidates look for jobs so that your approach can be engineered to advertising opportunities to increase your job’s visibility to them. If you learned for example that top talents start job searches using search strings rather than visiting job boards, you might focus on making your own lists optimized and acceptable to search engines versus broadcasting to micro and macro job boards. Many companies rely on coincidence or luck in order to be at the right time and the right place.

• Sourcing Directly for Prospects that are Non-Active

Since prospects that are ‘non-active’ are not in the mode of job searching  and are not likely to visit your corporate career website or read any postings. Rather, recruiters will need to get them identified, contacted and build relationships before eventually convincing them to apply through sourcing directly. Direct sourcing is something that not a lot of companies do and because of this, are forced to do a selection from a pool of mainly active candidates.

• Job Posting for Active Candidates

Since candidates that are more active are seeking out new openings proactively, it won’t take too much to get your job visibly posted. The goal of this step is to write postings of positions and place them were active candidates can find them with ease. Naturally, if there are written descriptions so that these are not appealing or placed where they can’t be seen you won’t have a very high percentage of applicants. Here is a course entitled Diversity Training for Businesses, Legal Assistants and HR that helps you become trained to be a legal assistant, HR Employment Law Specialist, Employment Law Paralegal and a Diversity Consultant.

• Strategic Acquisition of Talent

The targeted acquisition or recruitment of performing groups like finance traders or sales management is talent acquisition. The goal is to acquire talent from organizations that are similar or even competitors. Organizations that require head hunting firms or external recruitment now employ specialists for talent acquisition whose job it is to do identification, approach and recruitment of competitor’s top performing teams. This is a specialized role not unlike that of a traditional headhunting or recruitment specialist but carrying greater strategic importance and visibility to businesses. Many times, the person in charge of acquiring talent is directly linked to the executive management of the company and the positive potential impact companies can benefit from by getting top performing sales personnel into the company while removing the same top sales performers from the competition. Hope this helps! Here is a course entitled Leadership and Change which shows you all the ropes you need to become a great leader for any team.