Who Can Benefit From Using This Guide?

Recruitment is the most important component of a successful workplace. You can have the best products or the best services, but without the right hires your business will simply struggle, and the better your hires are the greater opportunity you have to compete in today’s competitive economic environment.

Businesses both small and large need to learn how to recruit better, and the time spend learning how to recruit top talent to your organization, the better your return on investment and the more you’ll be able to profit from your decisions. This guide is designed for anyone that is looking to understand the recruitment landscape better and what it takes to hire the perfect employees for your company.

What Does This Guide Include?

Within this guide, you’ll learn what it means to identify the perfect candidate. You’ll learn how to find candidates and attract them to your company. You’ll learn how to manage candidates and grow your business using tools that are designed to both improve productivity and create a steady flow of talent.

Within this guide, you’ll learn information such as:

• Where and how to advertise your job.
• How to brand your business as an excellent work environment.
• How to interview candidates and recruit them to your company.
• What you need to do to ensure new hire success and more.

This guide is by no means comprehensive, because the recruitment process is always growing and the needs of your company dictate how you hire and what you can do to make sure that you’re hiring the best of the best. But the goal of this guide is to ensure that you’re well on your way towards identifying and recruiting the best possible candidates for your company so that your company can continue moving forward and growing.

We created this guide as a tool to help you start pointing your hiring processes in the right direction, with tips and advice that can be leveraged to make better decisions within your organization. At Employment Office, we also have technology and tools to help you get started with your recruitment, and so at any point feel free and contact us to learn more about what is available.

We hope that this guide helps you on your way towards hiring the best candidate available, so that your business can thrive both now and in the future.

1. Identifying the Perfect Candidate

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Before you can start hiring, you need to learn how to identify the perfect candidate. Surprisingly, very few businesses take the time to truly identify the perfect candidate. Most have a vague idea of what’s needed and what’s not, but companies that take the time to genuinely consider what is needed to perform at your workplace will be the ones that will find those candidates.

Common Mistakes

Most companies only think about the simplest idea of the perfect employee for an open position. For example, perhaps they need someone that programs PHP, so they advertise for someone with 3 years PHP experience. In theory, you can still find the perfect employee, but in practice this can lead to common mistakes, including:

• Ignoring Great Candidates – Depending on the position, do you really need 3 years of PHP experience? Do you need any other coding knowledge? Would you turn down someone that was self-taught, or would you reward someone that had a college degree but no practical experience? Without a true idea of what you want, you could be ignoring someone that meets your needs.
• Poor Advertising – Great applicants often apply to jobs they know they can get. They know that they’re desirable already, so they have little need to apply to jobs that ask for skills they don’t have, or experience they haven’t developed. You need your job advertisement to be as accurate as possible for the perfect candidate, and until you’ve developed that perfect applicant profile you may not know what it is you’re truly looking for.

Remember, it’s not just what you need but also what you don’t need. Perhaps a self-taught individual with no college experience that can prove they have the knowledge would be just as good or better than someone with years of experience. Or perhaps you are looking for someone that you can train, and you’d prefer to work with an individual with more work experience so that the transition to the corporate environment is more seamless.

There are many different considerations to make when deciding on what makes the “perfect candidate.” But it’s an important exercise, because it will drive decisions that you’ll make later and affect who will apply to your advertisements.

What to Do – Write a Profile of the Ideal Candidate

Before you open the position, write up a profile of the ideal candidate. In this profile, identify the things that are important for the role. Be realistic. Ask yourself what you really need, what you don’t need, what you can train in easily, what you cannot, and more. Map everything out.

If possible, have other people map these out as well. Look for things like personality expectations. What is the person probably like? Think about them in terms of personality, the other jobs they may apply for in other fields, and the many different potential qualities you need in an applicant.

Why it is So Important to Profile Your Candidates

Profiling your candidates will help you find and develop strategies that will target them more successfully. Imagine what you can do if you’ve perfectly identified the best candidate for the role. You can:

• Figure Out the Best Way to Reach Them

When you’ve identified the best candidate, you’ll know how to reach them. For example, companies that advertise through Employment Office have access to websites such as nfpjobs.com.au, bluecollar.com.au, traveljobs.biz, and more – these are niche job boards that appeal to those that are looking in those areas. Identifying the perfect candidate means you’ll know exactly where to look and where to target when you start advertising, and you’ll be able to figure out how to make sure the best candidate will see the ad.

• How to Talk to Them

It’s not just about how to reach them either. Once you’ve figured out where they are, you want to attract the best applicants to your job description. Remember, there are employees that you wait for and employers you go out and get. You want the latter, and that means that you need to take the time to figure out how to craft a job advertisement that speaks to that perfect employee.

• How to Choose Recruitment Tools

Of course, you cannot always identify the perfect candidate by resume alone, and you are likely to get hundreds of applications from those that are not necessarily perfect candidates. That’s why you’ll also need to know the person’s profile in order to select the right recruitment tools. For example, is it the type of position that is going to require a background check? What about skills testing or reference checking? What about some type of intelligence or “hard working” test? These answers come from understanding the profile of the ideal applicant.

Your Perfect Candidate is Out There

There really is such thing as the perfect candidate, and with millions of job seekers (and millions more employed individuals willing to leave for a better job), statistically there is going to be a perfect new hire somewhere that you’ll be able to reach, impress, and hire.

But before you can figure out who that candidate is, you really need to take the time to develop a profile and figure out what that person is like, and what you’re genuinely looking for.

2. Where to Advertise Your Job Once You Have a Candidate Profile

As discussed in the previous chapter, your ideal candidate profile is everything. It will help you figure out how to identify the perfect candidate, how to write in a way that reaches them, and of course – how to advertise your job.

Advertising your job effectively means two things:

• Getting it out there to as many people as possible.
• Ensuring that your ideal candidates are within that reach.

You don’t want to reach only one or two people, but you also don’t want to reach a million people only to have your ideal candidate be 1,000,001. You’ll want to find the right balance, where you try to get your job posting out there for people to see and apply to, while also making sure that you’re advertising in the areas that the people you want to apply for the job will see it.

Examples of Places to Advertise Your Job

• Social Media

Social media is easily the best and most convenient way to advertise a job. That is because social media is free, simple, and you can reach out to others that will repost the job themselves.

For example, if you have an open position for a landscape contractor, you can not only Tweet out your job or share it on Facebook – you can contact other Twitter users, have them retweet it to their followers or share it to others, and make sure you get the applications you need.

With LinkedIn and industry-specific social media also available, your ability to reach out to a wider audience for free is unparalleled with social media. You can even target candidates directly and ask them to apply, and chances are they will if you’ve proven you care enough to reach out to them.

If you want to reach even more people through social media, platforms such as Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook all offer paid advertising. This allows you to target potential candidates based on location, demographics, job title, level of education etc.

You can read more about paid Facebook advertising here.

• Online Job Boards

Job boards are perhaps the most common place to advertise. Job boards are large, well marketed websites that are widely known to job seekers. Examples include CareerOne.com.au, CareerBuilder.com, Seek.com.au, and many others.

Online job boards are useful for reaching a broad audience. They are not always the best choice for targeting your online advertisements, and in some cases they can have one big drawback: they provide you with too many resumes, making it difficult to find the ones you want. They are also used too often by other companies, and in recruitment if you do everything the same way your competitors do, you’ll hire the same people.

Nevertheless, they are easily available and a great place to showcase your advertisements.

• Niche Job Boards

Basic online job boards, however, are not specific to the job or the potential applicants. Your applicants are likely to be looking at niche job boards that are tailored to their industry, because they’ll have more faith that those putting applications into niche job boards understand their industry and really want someone like them.

With niche job boards like nfpjobs.com.au, bluecollar.com.au, traveljobs.biz, we noticed that the jobs in the niche job boards would receive better applicants than the same jobs on all-job job board. Why? Because applicants were looking for those that wanted THEM. The niche job boards were more attractive to quality applicants because they knew the employers knew what they wanted and were specifically asking for it in a place that focused on that specialty.

Niche job boards still get a lot of less qualified applicants, but they are also more likely to attract the very qualified applicants, and so they can often represent an even better location to advertise your job.

• Print/Newspaper

One of the classic places to put an open position is now one of the least widely used. Print news used to be the best possible place to advertise a job. Any time someone was unemployed, they would get the local newspaper and look for open positions. There are still pros to using a newspaper to advertise your job, but there are more cons than there used to be as well.

Pros: Fewer people now advertise with newspapers, which means you’ll have much less competition for your job opening. They’re also a great way to attract more experienced workers that may not yet rely on online jobs as often, and they give you an opportunity to reach those job seekers that you didn’t reach using your online means.

Cons: Newspapers tend to be more expensive than online means. They make hiring take longer because you cannot instantly post. They have a very short shelf life, very little space, and no ability to search. Most newspaper readers aren’t looking for a job, and newspapers do not reach as many people. So the odds of you reaching that perfect applicant are much smaller. Nevertheless, if you have the budget, they reach local individuals that may not have been reached online.

You can also improve your odds by targeting niche newspapers and print. For example, if you’re looking for someone to work on cars, an advertisement in a mechanics or cars magazine may be a decent place to advertise. But the more niche the magazine, the more expensive advertising is, and niche print papers/magazines tend to take months before they are printed.

• Google Adwords

Another way you can advertise is with Google Adwords. This is where you pay Google for clicks when people search for keywords in your industry. Because you have your candidate profile, you can also consider paying for keywords that are relevant to the person that is searching, even though they are not necessarily related to the job.

Google Adwords, and other Pay-Per-Click advertising services, can help your job application thrive. You create a job and post it somewhere, ideally your own website. You then create an account with Google Adwords, and use your candidate profile and the job description to guess what your ideal candidate is going to search for.

For example, perhaps you have a job in Sydney in IT. Your candidate may search for things like “Sydney IT Jobs” or “Sydney PHP Programmer” or “Sydney Help Desk Support Open Position.” You can figure out what search terms your ideal candidate will use, and then you’ll show up for that search in the advertising space on Google. You’ll be able to ensure that your ideal candidate will have an opportunity to click on your job description, and you’ll only have to pay for those that click on ad.

Google Adwords is not a perfect system and involves a lot of guessing and trial/error. But the more you use it, the more you’ll be able to immediately target potential employees and send them to your own website in order to collect their applications.

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Learn more about Google Adwords here

Finding the Right Places to Advertise

Where you advertise has a very substantial effect on the quality of your advertisements. While you can, in theory, find the perfect candidate anywhere you post if you’re lucky, the best companies know how to increase those odds and the better you advertise your jobs the more likely you’ll get those amazing applicants you hoped for.

3. How to Write the Job Ad

So you have your candidate profile and you’re ready to create your job. Now you have to make sure you create the job in a way that appeals to that profile.

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Before you create your job ad, there are a few things to note:

• Your job advertisement may not be static. You may need to change it often, especially if you’re posting on multiple sites that represent multiple people. Just like applicants are instructed to consider changing their resume to appeal to the company they’re selling to, so too should you consider changing the job ad to help attract people in different markets.
• Your job advertisements needs to consider what you really need, and what you really don’t need. Remember, for every “qualification” you ask for, you’re potentially telling a great employee “I don’t want you.” For example, if you say you require 3 years of experience, but a perfectly qualified individual only has 1 year, they may not apply even though they’re perfect for the role. However, you also don’t necessarily want to make it too broad, because if you genuinely need someone with 3 years of experience you do not want all of the 1 year individuals applying.
• Your job advertisement needs to brand your company as a great employer. Figure out what you can say that will make people want to work for you. Focusing only on what you need and not emphasizing why someone want to apply to your job will turn off some people that know they’re valuable talent.

You don’t necessarily want your job ad to be just like everyone else’s. You want it to be uniquely written for you, and given the proper care and attention necessary to ensure that you’re going to get the applicants you genuinely want.

Base Your Job Advertisement on the Candidate Profile

Your job advertisement needs to be written with the candidate profile in mind. Try to figure out what key words and phrases the applicant is looking for when they are applying to the job. These are going to be tailored to each industry, and they need to consider all of the potential keywords the applicant is looking for.

For example, in the world of online marketing, there are a lot of terms for roughly the same techniques (just a different emphasis), such as “SEO,” “Content Marketing,” “Inbound Marketing,” and “Online Marketing.” Your ideal applicant may be someone that is looking for only one term, like “Inbound Marketing,” and if you use the term “SEO” you may not get this applicant to apply.

Attention to keywords is very important. Most job ads can be found via keyword searches, so you want to make sure that you have the keyword that your ideal applicant will use, otherwise they may not find your job ad. Even if they do find your job ad, the right keywords tell an applicant “that’s me!” and make them want to apply to the position.

Of course, it’s not just keywords about the position either. Your ideal candidate may want to see words like “Company Car” or “Merit Raises Available” or “Ability to Work From Home.” If that’s what your ideal candidate is looking for and it’s something you can offer, it should be considered.

Your candidate profile should drive every decision you make, because your candidate profile is your ideal candidate. Make sure you’re applying that profile to the entire description.

Starting Off – A Good Headline

It starts off with a good headline. Headlines are often all that someone will see, and if you’re trying to get the attention of a potential applicant, that headline needs to really speak to them. Headlines should have the following qualities:

• Keyword – Ideally, the headline should have the most important keyword that you’re hoping the perfect candidate is looking for. Often this is part of the job or job title, like “Inbound Marketing Coordinator,” where the title has the position that the ideal applicant is likely looking for. But it may not. You’ll have to carefully consider your headline.
• Great Title – Your job title will also attract better applicants. Specific, valuable sounding job titles can vastly increase the amount of respondents you receive – for example “Marketing Assistant” will sound worse than “Marketing Associate” or “Marketing Director” or “Senior Marketing Analyst.” If you want to get valuable talent, a great title may be what you need.
• Perk – You should also see if there are any perks you can show in the title that make people want to click. Examples include “Flexible Hours,” “6 Weeks Vacation,” or “Free Gym Membership.” These are perks that will draw people to learning more about your job and your company. Any perk that you share will brand your company as one that cares about rewarding employees.

Job titles should not be very long, but they are a chance to increase clicks and get interest in your job. Here are two different job titles to show the difference between a good and bad title:

[box style=”1″]Bad: “Telemarketer/Appointment Setter Wanted”[/box]

[box style=”1″]Good: “Customer Service Specialist Needed for High Paying Career. Flexible Hours!”[/box]

The difference between these two is pronounced, and the latter will draw in more potential talent despite both jobs being the same.

Writing Your Job Description

Of course, you’ll still need an awesome job description, and that’s where it becomes a bit harder. Every single job is different, and your employee profile is different as well, which means that your great job ad may look nothing like someone else’s great job ad, because their ad was written for a completely different audience. However, a great job ad should have the following qualities:

• Positive Energy – When someone reads your job description, they should feel excited. They should see that you’re excited to have them. Anything you write should be brimming with positive energy, so that others are excited to work for you as you are to have them.
• Background of the Company – Whether you’re a well known name or not, let people know about your company, including what you do, any successes you’ve had, and possibly even the rough number of employees or upcoming advancements.
• Excellent Formatting – People scan. You should make sure that your job description is very easy for someone to scan and get an idea of what’s expected. Remember bullet points, subheadings, and bold whenever it’s valuable.
• Realistic Needs and Qualifications – Using your candidate profile, figure out exactly what you need (and what you’d like but don’t need) and place those in easy to read bullets. As discussed in the previous chapters, make sure that you’re certain about your needs – the skills you absolutely want, and none of the ones that you don’t.
• Pay and Benefits – You’ll also want to clearly entice people to your career. “Pay commensurate with experience” or “competitive pay) may be too broad to attract the applicants you’re looking for. Applicants are looking for an answer to “why you?” and clearly defined (and excitedly written) information about pay and benefits can really help you.
• Call to Action – So now you’ve gotten their attention. Tell them where to go. Excite them to apply. Tell them what to send, and make sure that they’re given exactly what they need to apply for the job.

Individual jobs will have many differences, because a factory worker isn’t going to have the same language or information as someone looking to be the executive at a technology company. Nevertheless, these keys should always be there, to ensure that you’re creating a job ad that attracts the employees that are going to make a difference at your company. When we do recruitment advertising for our clients, we pay special attention to how these job ads are written to make sure they’re getting applicants.

Common Mistakes

In a moment we’ll show you some examples of good and bad job ads. But before we do, let’s go over some of the common mistakes that people make with their job advertising:

• Pompous Writing – Many companies already feel that job seekers should want to work for them, and that if they get hired the company is doing them a favour. Companies need to earn great talent, not vice versa, so make sure you’re not writing in a pompous style.
• Extraneous Qualifications – Many companies also throw in qualifications that aren’t necessarily needed. For example “experience with Microsoft Powerpoint” for a job that doesn’t use PowerPoint. You should always make sure that you’re only listing what an employee truly needs, because otherwise a great applicant missing a “skill” that they don’t need may not apply.
• No Details About Company or Benefits – If you post a job with only details about what you need, you’ll probably get a lot of applicants. But you won’t get the right applicants. You’ll get resume spammers that want to send in an application to you because you’re available, but not the top tier talent that are carefully considering their options.

So keep these ideas in mind when you’re writing your job ad. There are definitely examples of good job ads and bad job ads out there, and you need to be certain of your audience and the applicant you are trying to attract when you list a job opening.

4. How to Keep on Top of the Applications

Once you have a job ad up, you’re likely to get applications – and lots of them. In fact, highly competitive jobs that are well advertised can get as many as 1,000 applications, and it’s not uncommon at all to get at least 100 if your job is in visible places and many people “qualify.”

Indeed, in the age of the internet, “resume spam” is a very serious problem. On major job boards, especially, many people will not even read an application. Most will simply send in a resume to any job that vaguely resembles the job they are qualified for, and then they’ll cross their fingers and hope that something comes of it.

So while your candidate profile is there to describe the right applicants, and your excellent job ad should attract them to your company, you’ll still have to stay atop of all applications to ensure that you’re identifying those great applicants and rating them accordingly.

Why to Have a System

In order to keep on top of applicants, you should have a system. There are many benefits to creating some type of candidate management system. A small sample of these benefits include:

• Missing No One – If you’re filing applicants and reviewing them accordingly, you’ll never miss the perfect applicant.
• Additional Talent – Candidate management systems allow you to locate additional talent and consider them in the future. You may find someone that could help your company in a way you hadn’t considered, or if someone in your company leaves you don’t have to start from scratch replacing them.
• Organisation – Your company has to appear professional as well. Correctly calling candidates, identifying the ones you want, and keeping track of contact is crucial.

Candidate management systems are a great way to ensure the recruitment process isn’t overwhelming and pays you back a great deal over time. They are the key to excellent organization within your company, with both short and long term benefits.

Candidate Management Systems

Candidate management systems vary in functionality. Some small businesses that do not have many applicants for open positions may opt to use a simple program like Excel. Simply create a template that contains information like name, phone number, application date, important information on the resume, etc., and fill in the names you receive at the bottom.

Other companies that need a more advanced software should look into something like SCOUT. These types of candidate management systems have tools that make recruitment easier, such as:

• Job portals for applicants.
• Ranking ability.
• Status and workflow systems.
• Smart forms.
• Calendaring features.
• Reporting capabilities and more.

Candidate management software makes it possible control all components of recruitment, thus creating a more streamlined workflow that can help your company manage any number of applicants you receive with greater efficiency and thoroughness.

Filters and Scanning Software

If you have the tools, you can also consider creating filters and ranking systems that will help you filter candidates quickly – especially valuable for high profile, high application jobs, where you need to make sure you’re identifying the candidate’s quickly.

Programs like SCOUT already have their own features to handle this installed. But if you work with someone in IT and they have the time, you can also have them develop search and reporting features that will help you filter through candidates at a much faster speed, and make it easier to identify the best applicants without much additional work on your part.

Doing so will allow you to analyse more applicants faster, and while it can be a bit difficult to creating a filtering system from scratch without help (otherwise you could accidentally filter out great candidates), a well-designed filter system can help you save countless hours and spot candidates that you desperately need.

Keeping on Top of Applications

Every application matters, because even less qualified applications could be valuable for your company, and because you never want to accidentally skip over the best applicant because you’re too rushed or busy. Your ability to manage applications and create a pipeline of talent in your organization is going to be the key to finding the best applicants.

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5. How to Choose the Right Applicant

At this point in the recruitment process, you have now begun to collect applicants. Maybe you have already collected all of the applicants and you are now reviewing them. At this point it’s time to start the decision making process.

That can be a difficult task. At Employment Office, we’re often hired to provide shortlisting services because reviewing multiple applications can take days, sometimes even weeks, and going through each one with an objective eye is tough when you’re reviewing one after the other.

Choosing the Right Applicant is Tough

There are many reasons that choosing the perfect applicant is difficult. One is simple – biases. It’s extremely important you do not go with gut feelings because gut feelings are often based on a person’s own subjective beliefs and experiences, and not objective analyses.

Some of these are more obvious. A study conducted a few years ago in the US showed that when an employer receives two identical resumes, and one has a generic, stereotypical white male name (e.g. John Smith) and one has a stereotypical black name (e.g. LaShonda Jackson), the “White” resume is more likely to get call backs by a substantial margin. That’s a bias.

But not all biases are so obvious. You may feel as though the confident go-getter is the best applicant when in reality the shy intellectual is the best applicant. Your gut may be that the individual that used Calibri font in their resume is a better hire than the one that used Times New Roman. You may be right, but you also may be wrong. You also almost certainly do not want to:

• Hire Without Testing – You’ll want to do background checks, check references, and perform searches to learn more about a candidate. Interviews alone and “gut hires” can go terribly, because how someone acts at the interview is often not at all like how they act as an employee.
• Skip Over a Contributor – Talent is talent, and the best businesses know that it’s not about where someone comes from but whether or not they can contribute to your industry. You do not want to skip over someone that could be well qualified just as much as you do not want to hire the wrong person.

Indeed, it’s all about not hiring the wrong person. There are significant costs involved to making that kind of mistake. When you hire the wrong person, you lose:

• Thousands in Training Time – Even if you catch that you hired the “wrong person” early, you’ll still have wasted weeks of training time and weeks of hiring to get that person in the obvious. Rarely does any company realize someone was the wrong hire from the beginning.
• Thousands in Lost Production – In addition, very few companies have enough tools available to know if someone is the “wrong hire” for years, and most early progress reporting tools are unlikely to be accurate because it takes a while for an applicant to get settled.
• Lost Talent – The talent that you missed out on because you hired the wrong person is also going to go to a competitor. That means that they’re getting the production that you could have received, and losing out even further.

If you’re like most companies, you also rarely, if ever, get rid of a less productive employee. That’s because in many cases you can hire someone that’s productive, but just not as productive as your “ideal” employee. Since the cost of replacing a new employee can be as much as 3 times the employee’s salary, you’ll never replace the less productive employee because, in general, they’re productive “enough.” But you could have had an ideal employee in their place had you made better hiring decisions.

Hiring the wrong employee is costly, whether you hired a good but not great employee or you flat out hired a bad employee. Businesses live and die by their ROI, and every time you miss out on that next great contributor you’re putting your company are greater risk of future problems.

The Minimum You Should Do

Hiring on a gut feeling, or because of just a good interview, is simply not the best way to ensure you’re hiring a great employee. At minimum, you should consider the following:

• Background Checks – These are a given. Find out about their criminal history, their background, and any information that may make employment with your company a bad idea. A candidate’s personal history may not always play a role in the workplace, but it can, and it’s something you at the very least need to know and consider.
• Reference Checks – These have fallen out of favour in recent years, but they shouldn’t have, because a well done reference check can play a very important role in determining who is the right employee for your company and who is not. Companies like Employment Office can also handle reference checks for you, in case you simply feel too awkward doing them or are worried about legal repercussions.
• Google Search – Of course, a simple Google search should be a part of every candidate evaluation. There are some ethical issues about looking too deeply into someone’s past and character (remember, Googling their name could bring up photos that create biases) but sometimes the first few results in a Google search of a unique name can tell you a lot about the applicant.

These are the bare minimum ways to analyse an applicant’s true eligibility, and should be a standard part of every recruitment practice no matter how big your company or how important the role.

The Additional Options

Of course, “bare minimum” implies that there are other options as well, and sure enough there are a lot of tools that you can use to evaluate whether or not a candidate is truly worth your time. Some include:

• Skills Testing – You may not be able to put an employee to work for free to see how they do, but there are skills tests that can analyse the talents of the candidate and what they bring to the table.
• Behavioural Testing – Like skills testing, there is also behavioural testing. This is where you can learn more about an applicant – who they are, what they act like, how they handle certain situations and more.
• Leadership Testing – For those that are applying for leadership positions, there are also leadership tests. These are great tools for finding out if someone is a true leader, and knows how to handle being in charge.

These are all tests that are available to those that request them – all of which allow the employer to learn a great deal about the applicant and whether or not they’re the “right hire” that they have been looking for.

Making Smart Decisions

Bad hires are costly to the company, and while you can still find productive employees even from inadequate shortlisting, there is a difference between a good applicant and the “perfect applicant.” Make sure that you’re giving every applicant a thorough check to ensure you’re not making the wrong decision.

6. The Interview Process

You’ve done it. You’ve created your shortlist. You’ve managed to go through your entire list, narrowed it down to few applicants, and now you’re ready to start the interview process.

Interviewing provides your first opportunity to meet the applicant as an individual – where you get to ask them personalized questions and decide if you want to hire them.

There are two ways to interview:

• On the Fly – Where the interviewer comes up with questions to ask on the go depending on where the conversation takes them.
• Planned/Scheduled – Where the interviewer has an action plan, and knows exactly what they’re asking.

Holding interviews without much planning has its merits, because interviewers have the opportunity to ask questions they may not have originally planned. But it also has many downfalls. First, you may not be able to ask any questions of value. Second, you may not be able to brand your company well because you have a sloppy interview.

But perhaps most importantly, interviews that aren’t well planned also make it harder to evaluate across talent. For example, let’s say you end up interviewing a candidate that is incredibly personable. They are telling you stories about their experiences, they are getting into conversations about workplace culture, etc. They don’t tell you much about their history, but they tell you a lot about themselves.

Then you have another candidate that is a bit less personable. Questions are focused on abilities, and the candidate’s abilities are strong. Who do you hire – the one that was never asked about abilities or the one that was given more of an opportunity? How do you compare across candidates when the interviews are not the same?

This is why you need to plan the entire interview process – not only the questions, but how you interview, how you plan to identify great candidates, and so on. There are many different ways to interview, and there are many different questions to ask. You have to make sure that you’ve mapped out each portion so that the strongest candidates are identified and hired.

Phone Interviews

It starts with a phone interview. This is a common way to shortlist candidates. All “good enough” candidates are called in bulk. They are asked a series of questions, almost always set-questions. In some ways, these should actually be your most important questions – the ones that make or break whether or not a candidate can be hired by your business.

Using your candidate profile, set up your “must haves” – the candidate history that you simply cannot be without, and the ones that you have to have if you’re going to make a hire. Then run through them with each candidate.

It’s always a good idea to avoid as many questions that could create biases as possible – removing questions that have too subjective answers. That is because when you do phone interviews, you’re often rolling through candidates at a rapid pace. You want to make sure that you’re not accidentally missing a great candidate simply because you just got off the phone with another great candidate and their answers weren’t quite as good, nor do you want the tedium of phone interviews to affect how you view an applicant’s answer. Some personality and subjective questions are fine, but most important is using it to rapidly shortlist candidates by finding out their answers to your company’s most crucial questions.

BONUS INFORMATION: Video Interviews

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While not relevant to every company, you can also consider holding video interviews using programs like Skype. These are sort of a combination of phone interviews and face to face interviews. They’re a bit less personable than phone interviews and prone to similar misunderstandings (video interview software can be buggy), but you’re given the opportunity to talk to the employee directly, see their face when they answer, and ask similar questions.

Video interviews are ideal for individuals that live a distance away and are unable to come for an in-person interview. They are also useful for highly-technical companies that want to conduct phone interviews in a more personal way. They are not always easy to implement, but for companies that know they are going to have a lot of out-of-area applicants, you may want to consider putting them in your interview plan and figuring out how you’re going to analyse them.

The Face to Face Interview

Even though you asked some of the most crucial questions at the phone interview, the in-person interview is always going to be the most important. Traditional in person interviews are your opportunity to get to know the candidate directly. You get to ask more questions, talk more about their experiences, introduce them to the office and see how well they feel like a fit.

If you’ve ever recruited before, you have likely handled face to face interviews before, and entire books are written about the art of interviewing. Nevertheless, when it comes to your interview plan, the following are important tips for evaluating applicants:

• Have “Must Ask” Questions – Like the phone interviews, there are certain questions that you should make sure you ask every candidate, to compare them against each other. You can adjust a question given a different experience (ie, when you worked for Facebook, what was your experience with…” for one candidate and “When you worked for Google, what was your experience with…” for another), but you should at least have equivalent questions to ensure you’re correctly comparing candidates.
• Plan With Other Interviewers – At most in-person interviews, the applicant meets with multiple interviewers. Make sure you plan with all of them, so you’re not asking the same questions over and over, or wasting time with analysis. Every interviewer should know their role in the interview process, what they’re going to ask, and what they’re evaluating.
• Brand the Company – Interviews are also where you want to become more attractive to the applicant, so you’ll also want to brand yourself as well. Let them know what work is like, what they get, and why they’d want to work for you. See their interest and make sure they genuinely want to work there. This is also important after the interview is over, in case you attract a talent with more than one offer.
• Create Challenge Questions – Questions shouldn’t only be focused on past experiences. Make sure you have questions in there that tell you something about the person’s character and problem solving ability. Some prefer “wildcard questions” which are questions that have no real answer, like “why are manhole covers round?” But behavioural interview questions and problem solving interview questions (“imagine you have an angry customer, what would you do if….?”) are all valuable.
• Use Your Candidate Profile – Finally, don’t forget your candidate profile. You’re looking for someone that matches that profile perfectly, and you need to make sure you’re asking questions and making decisions that will increase the likelihood of finding that person. Of course, there may be candidates that are perfect that don’t match your initial profile, and that’s okay too, but at least the interview should be focused on the ideas that you set forward for yourself.

These are the keys to a successful face to face interview. There are a lot of questions and ways to conduct an interview, and they would take millions of words to share here, but if you follow the above tips your face to face will be successful.

Bonus Guide: Powerful Interview Questions

Selecting the Right Candidate

Once you have your information, how do you select a candidate? You try to find the one that matched the candidate profile, showed the behaviours and personalities that you were looking for, and had a history that makes you confident in their abilities.

It’s recommended that you do anything you can to evaluate applicants objectively. One strategy that is very effective is having interviewers and everyone involved in the process share their thoughts via survey, rather than in person. In person, people are prone to the biases of others. But in a survey, you’ll be able to read who people prefer as their ideal candidate, why, the qualifications they have, and so on, and this will give you a more objective analysis tool from which to hire.

One of the reasons we offer shortlisting services at Employment Office is so that you’re already selecting from a pool of upper tier candidates. If you do everything right, you should be able to find an applicant that performs above to well-above expectations.

Bonus Webinar: How to Pick a Winner

7. Candidate Care

At this point you’ve probably decided who to hire, and you’re ready to make them an offer, start talking salary, and figure out the next steps. But you have an interim step before then – responding to those that did not get the job.

[responsive][/responsive]Remember, part of quality recruitment is about branding and marketing your business. Recruitment marketing ensures that the best candidates want to apply for your company, and that you’re a company that cares about its employees.

This is where candidate care comes in. All candidates are important, even the ones you don’t want to hire. Someday they may be the perfect fit for a different job that opens up in your company. Or they may see an open job someday for a position that their friend is qualified for, and you want them to willingly and happily forward it to their friend. Or they may leave your company a review on websites like GlassDoor.com, and you want it to be as positive as possible.

No matter what, you want every single applicant for your company to feel as though you care about their candidacy, because someday it can pay off with your recruitment advertising efforts.

How to Make Sure Applicants Feel You Care

• Reply to All Unsuccessful Candidates

As stated above, every candidate should feel special, and you should make sure that you go out of your way to reply to every unsuccessful candidate – even those you never contacted for a phone interview. At the very least, they should receive a thoughtful and well written email (it can be a stock email if you get too many applicants, but it should still be a kind one) and make them feel like you genuinely reviewed their information.

Make sure you’re specific to the level they reached. Be more personal to those that had phone interviews, and even more personal to those that had an in-person interview. Rejection is hard for everyone, and the further they went in the interview process the more sensitive they’ll be to your rejection. Treat every applicant as though they’re special.

• Call or Provide Number to Call

If possible – especially for candidates that went through the interview process – call them and let them know of the rejection. This personal strategy can keep relationships strong and make them want to apply again in the future.

But for all applicants – at least those that reached the phone interview stage – you should try to at least provide a number to call in case they want to find out why they did not get the job. Many candidates will have questions. Those that know you’re willing to offer explanations will feel less offended and may even learn from the experience and apply again in the future when they are more skilled.

• Sign Then Up for Your Database

Offer to sign candidates up for your candidate database – a database where you keep and maintain the CVs/resumes of all of the candidates that have applied for your company.

If you do not have a CV database you should strongly consider starting one. Great companies develop talent pipelines so that as soon as any job opens in the company, they already have people that they can invite and call. CV databases allow you to quickly and easily find potential candidates that are in need of a new career, and reduce resume spam by keeping candidate information on hand and considering it for all careers.

Most candidates will love to hear that their CV will stay in your company, because it means that you’re interested, and letting them know that they can sign up for your CV database will both:

1. Give them the power to choose whether they want to be a part of your company, and
2. Give you more data and information for all future openings.

Starting a CV database benefits your company as well as the candidate, and is easy to start via programs like Excel, Google Docs, MailChimp, etc. You can also contact Employment Office and we can talk to you about starting a CV database with our talented staff.

The Importance of Candidate Care

Every candidate matters, because each one could be a future contributor or affect your ability to hire other applicants in the future. Your business should brand itself as one that cares, and no matter whether you decide to hire a person in your company or not, you should always prove you care using the tips above.

8. Hiring the Candidate/On Boarding

Congratulations! You have managed to find an excellent candidate – one that matches your candidate profile perfectly. Hopefully you’ve managed to come up with a fair and/or generous salary and benefits package, and the employee is happy to be on board.

It would seem that recruitment is complete, but there is actually another step, and this step is arguably more important than even hiring the right candidate – helping the candidate adapt to their new environment and preparing them for the role.

What So Many Companies Do Wrong

There are a lot of companies that have learned how to hire well. But there are a lot more companies that have not learned how to help those new employees adapt to the work environment.  You can find a candidate that matches every single quality you want in the employee, but if you don’t properly help them adapt to the work environment, you may not get what you expect from the candidate.

Known as on-boarding, you should have a process that helps new hires assimilate to your company easily.

What Happens if You Don’t Train

When you hire a new employee, the hope is that the employee is talented enough that they can sit down on their chair and get started right away. But unfortunately it doesn’t quite work that way. Every company is different. You have different processes, different needs, different technology, and different expectations.

Even within identical technology (for example, SalesForce software), different companies use the products differently, so someone that has worked with the program before may still not know how to “use it” the way you expect.

Similarly, your company is not exactly the same as every other company. Even if the employee knows their job perfectly, they may not know who to contact in the event something goes wrong, or where the sticky notes are, or where you all meet up for meetings.

The better you train a new employee, and the more you prepare them for the job ahead, the more successful they will be. Studies have shown that it can take as long as 24 months for an employee to be “fully productive.” That means that even if you found the best employee, it may still take 2 years before the employee starts to be as productive as possible. One of the primary reasons for this long delay is poor training – throwing someone in the role before making sure they’re ready.

If you don’t fully train your employees, it can badly effect your new hire, and thus your recruitment. Poorly trained employees:

• Have Worse Productivity – The most obvious problem is simply productivity. An employee that hasn’t learned your company yet is going to be one that struggles in the beginning, because they simply don’t know what to do next or how to contribute. That’s on your company, not on the employee, and so in order to get the most from your employee you need to make sure they know exactly what to do. Imagine finding the “best employee” and causing them to be less than the best employee because you didn’t onboard them correctly.
• Have Worse Satisfaction – Even more problematic is satisfaction. A true talent knows they can contribute, but they’ll become stressed and frustrated when they don’t know what to do. They may see it as a flaw in your company, and they may regret some of their choices to take on the position. Even great pay won’t make up for stress as a result of being unsure what to do on a daily basis, or feeling like you left them out to dry.
• Have Worse Loyalty – Finally – and this is what relates to recruitment – an employee that starts out stressed at your company is going to have less loyalty to your company than one that starts out feeling confident and fully trained. Not only can a newly hired employee still take a new job if it’s offered (don’t forget that many new hires still have resumes out to other employers), but the strongest bonds between you and the new employee are made by first impressions. Start off poorly, and you’re going to have to make sure you’re an excellent place to work if you want the talent to stay.

They’ll also take away from the productivity of others, because they’ll need to ask people for help constantly and interrupt other employees that are also doing their best to be productive.

As soon as an employee doesn’t start off to their strengths, it can create a domino effect for their entire experience. An outstanding employee gets hired but isn’t well trained. Their co-workers and supervisors do not see them as a great employee, and do not treat them with the care and respect they deserve as a true talent. The employee becomes unhappy, doesn’t work as hard, the cycle continues, and they eventually leave – all because they didn’t get the proper training.

This story has been told a million times. It’s up to you and your company to make sure the transition to productive employee is seamless.

How to Help Your New Employee Thrive

So now you know what not to do. But what about what your company SHOULD do?

It all starts with training. Train as if the employee has almost no experience in the position. Thorough training doesn’t take as long as it sounds. Sit them down with a skilled employee, and talk to them about what’s done, how to do it, etc. Even though you hired them because they know the role already, the reality is that they can still use that confidence that comes from starting a new career. Showing a willingness to assist them thoroughly can help give them that confidence.

There are also many other ways to improve your relationship with the new hire from the get go. Some of these include:

• Forging Personal Relationships With Co-workers

A great way to get someone acclimated to the new environment is to give them an opportunity to bond with the people around them. Give them opportunities to talk to their new co-workers. Let them build relationships, and show who they are.

You can do this through events, or through better introductions (for example, time with each co-worker instead of simply saying their name and moving on), reminders of names if they appear confused, and projects they can work on together.

The better the introductions, the better the employee will adapt to the new environment.

• Give Them “Day in the Life” Experiences

Earlier we mentioned the fact that even the perfect employee – one that knows exactly how to do their job from the moment they start at work – will still not know the day to day basics of working for your office. They probably won’t know where the copy room is, or who they’re supposed to report to if they have a problem with work, or who they call if they’re sick, etc.

They will also be curious about the dress code. They’ll want to know about work events, and whether or not people are allowed to leave early/come in late if their work is done.

So giving them the opportunity to thoroughly get to know the processes inside of your company and doing your best to introduce everything that the candidate will need to know about how your business works will ensure that the little minute that make up working in a new company will not hinder their development.

• Their Growth Potential – And How

You may also want to start motivating them for the future already. Teach them how they can grow, what they can do to earn more salary, how often raises/merit raises are handed out, what their future position may be, and if there is anything special they can do to get there.

Explain all of the growth options you have available (like additional schooling) or if there is a place they can go to be groomed for a better position. These expectations and this knowledge can keep them motivated towards working harder and understanding of what’s out there for them, and while not all positions have this type of growth potential, those that do should consider it a major part of onboarding.

• New Employee Checklist

Another strategy you should strongly consider – and one that is part of a new employee plan – is the creation of a new employee checklist. With the new employee, you go through everything that they may need to start their job. For example, their computer, their phone, when/how to answer the phone, login information, directories and computer information (knowing where important documents are in the folders), and more.

Going through a checklist of all of the things the employee will need in order to get started will ensure there are fewer delays and frustrations. Ideally, the items on the checklist should be ready before the employee has even been hired so that you can showcase your organizational skills.

Researching and Following Up on the Candidate

No matter how much you plan and how hard you try, you’re going to have a very hard time accounting for everything and making every single employee feel welcome and prepared. But that’s okay. You can try to learn from your mistakes and grow, and ultimately perfect your onboarding process.

It’s with that in mind that you should also strongly consider a new hire survey – a survey that goes out to all of the new hires in your company and collects information on the onboarding process anonymously, giving you more data from which to change/alter your onboarding procedures.

These surveys need to be:

• 100% Anonymous. Consider having them sent to a 3^rd party, and only reviewing the results of the survey once every few months so that they can’t get back to the employee.
• Incentivized – This should be an important part of the new hire’s job, since it will help you with all future new hires. Make sure they have dedicated time for it and that they are rewarded in some way for taking it so that they understand how important it is to you.
• Timely – New hire surveys should be given at the right time(s). They should be provided after the employee has completed their training to get fresh information, but not before the employee is given a day or two to adapt. You can also consider giving the survey on more than one occasion, to see how the training has paid off in the short and long term.

The on boarding process is too important to trust that it is working effectively, so these new hire surveys give you a chance to evaluate how effective they are from the new employee’s perspective, and possibly figure out what changes you can start making in order to improve upon the survey in the future.

The Importance of Onboarding

All of this information should make it clear – onboarding is not only important, but it is still a part of recruitment. You can hire all of the best candidates the employment pool has to offer, but if you’re not getting them ready for the job and teaching them what they need to do to succeed, you’re putting them in a position to fail, or to not provide the output that they are capable of providing.

With the improved likelihood of turnover for employees that do not feel comfortable and the loss of production for your other employees, there are simply too many reasons to make sure that onboarding is your company’s priority, and a significant part of the recruitment process.

Concluding Thoughts

Recruitment is one of the areas that your company can succeed. But in order to be successful, you need to treat it like more than a simple “send in your resume, I’ll take a look process.” You need to make recruitment a priority:

• Using some of the available tools.
• Creating action plans.
• Figuring out your true “ideal” new hire.

From the creation of your candidate profile to the way you treat that employee after they’ve been hired, you need to make sure that you’re giving your recruitment all of the attention it deserves.

At Employment Office, we’ve worked with hundreds of companies, and we can tell you that before we started augmenting their recruitment strategies, many of them were hiring based on nothing more than a bit of information, an unplanned interview, and a gut feeling. Considering how much each employee represents as an investment to your company, that method of hiring will rarely deliver the results you want.

So make sure you’re integrating the types of strategies that will help your company be successful. Use tips found in this guide, and call Employment Office today if you’d like to learn more about products, services, and the many solutions that we have for recruitment.