Great teams make great businesses and the first step of building a great team starts with a great recruitment process. Here are some of the recruitment tips that we have learned after spending years recruiting great people and building awesome teams on improving your recruitment process.

Understand what you want

The recruitment process starts even before you open the position. Recruiters and hiring managers often fall prey to defining their ideal candidate by the way of defining skills and qualifications. While skill and qualifications are necessary, they are not sufficient to get a grip over what you want from your ideal candidate.

This is not an easy task to do and especially taking the time out to articulate and document it for a hiring manager might just not be possible. We think this is much easier done if you can articulate what the desired candidate will achieve in the next 3 months 6 months and 1 year. Include this in your job description and set the expectation for the candidate. Work out skills and qualifications required to achieve the goals. This methodology helps bring clarity to everyone.

Plan interviews diligently

Create an interview plan for each position where everyone has clarity on what to measure in each interview. An interviewer should walk into the interview with adequate knowledge of what she is supposed to measure in the interview and how to measure it. For example, you want to check if the candidate is comfortable with long working hours and uncertainty in the role. You can guide your interviewer towards what is the best way to understand priorities in a candidate’s life and her approach to work-life balance.

Be responsive to candidates

We have all been through it. Interviewing for a job is a stressful affair. However, little gestures go a long way in building trust and building a stellar candidate experience. Be prompt and courteous to your candidates. When the candidate walks into the office, make them feel at home and offer them a coffee! These small gestures go a long way in building trust and camaraderie. Some of these small gestures can be automated using Recruiterflow recruitment CRM software.

Quantify your evaluation process

The interview process is rife with biases. Because of that, increasingly, we rely on unbiased algorithms to do at least one level of candidate qualification for us. Using pre-built recruitment tests one can not only screen candidates for you but also lessen the effort it takes from your team to go through the recruitment process.

Identify bottlenecks and work hard to remove them

It helps to keep a regular tab on your recruitment process. Recruitment is extremely prone to getting stuck due to biases, inefficient processes, and lack of focus and aggression. Be aware of bottlenecks that are creeping up and proactively try to remove them. Keep your recruitment machine well oiled and running.

Keep them close

If you are doing your recruitment fantastically, that means you will have a few great people to choose from. This is extremely hard to do. However, you should stay close to those you have rejected. If you have been able to provide them with a great experience, they might interview you again sometime later or even just give you some great referrals from their colleagues and friends.

You can also help these candidates by leveraging your network and providing a doorway to other opportunities at other companies. Good karma goes a long way and now both the other company and the candidate owe you one and will help you in turn.