The different stages of recruitment are a clever workflow that is a best practice that even entry-level recruiters will use. The included preparations, sourcing, conversation with the applicant, selection processes, the interview, referencing, and hiring. Employers want to make sure they are attracting the brightest and best to ensure their process is running to the best standard. For that, you need to break down each of the recruitment stages and optimize them. 

There are numerous different options based on your needs, the frequency of hiring, the complexity of the recruitment process, etc. You could outsource your recruitment process to a consultant, or implement some basic internal recruitment processes within your existing teams by ensuring you are asking tailored questions for particular roles such as questions for an e-commerce consultant. 

If you are focused and want to give it a go on your own, there are some things you may want to make sure you implement. Let’s have a look at the six stages of recruitment you should follow below: 

Prepping For Your Perfect Candidate 

Maybe just as important as finding candidates for your job role by posting it, it’s making sure you get the right candidates to apply. It’s all about quality, not quantity. Although it can be nice to see loads of people interested in working for you, if they don’t fit your needs it’s just a waste of time. It can also lead to the wrong hire, or worst no hire. You need to develop your idea of your ideal candidate profile first. Otherwise, you will be posting to no avail. 

You need to ask yourself exactly what your ideal candidate profile looks like. This person is going to be the person who has the abilities, skills, and knowledge to achieve the goals of the role. In other words, you need to think about how you would write a job description that would include these KSA’s. Do you have any organizations or sites that you can network or market in? What are the most likely to respond to and be interested in? How can you reach the people you want? Once you know what these are, you can utilize the candidate profile for effective targeting, attraction, and outreach. 

Attracting And Sourcing Talent 

In this stage, you need to be resourceful and focus on your candidate experience. You shouldn’t frustrate candidates by lack of communication and no response, or by taking too long to make a decision. You should also avoid making them jump through hoops or have unrealistic expectations. You need to create a process that is communicative, reportable, efficient, and standardized so you are able to keep track of your applicants.

There are many basic low-cost tracking tools out there to choose from, you should be able to work with one of them to configure a workflow without too much trouble. At a minimum, you should be able to have an automated screening that can knock out unqualified applicants and produce automated emails to communicate things such as application status and keep them in the loop. They need to know where they stand. You will also have the capability to communicate and disposition with applicants in bulk with pre-written email templates. 

You will need to have a good sourcing strategy to hand that enables you to proactively find talent with a variety of resources. If you have a flexible budget you may want to think about using a LinkedIn recruiter to headhunt and spot potential applicants.

There are also other ore reasonable recruitment resources you can use too. Sourcing can be a time-consuming function, but having a source who is dedicated to finding the names is certainly going to increase your chances of filling the roles you need with the right people. 

Converting Applicants To Employees 

On the most basic reporting level, you are able to evaluate your process by looking at your conversion rates and/or click-through rates. This is the percentage or number of applicants that move from one stage to the next. If you have a stage that has a high fallout or no fallout, you might want to have a look at them again to prevent you from getting too many or too few people through to success.

If you find that one stage is throwing too many people out or the screening is getting rid of people who may have made great candidates look at it again and make the adjustments you need. If a step has no fall or little fallout, is it doing the job that it should? You might even want to get rid of this stage altogether if it’s not adding any value.

You can also relook at and evaluate your processes by looking at the overall time it takes to fill an open position. You also need to consider the time it takes to complete each stage, if you don’t get it right, you may end up having successful candidates choosing roles elsewhere because they are waiting to hear back from you. You can’t really afford to do this so, if you find the candidate that fits the role and has passed all the stages, offer them the position as soon as you can. 

All of the management will help you to ensure that you provide a quality candidate experience as well as gain great employees. Doing this will also help you to make sure you are attractive to the best candidate throughout your hire. You should make sure you track the number of clicks your job post gets compared to the number of people who apply. If it is a low conversion you may need to look at your post and improve it. Below ten percent means you need a lot of work in this part of the recruitment process. You should aim to achieve between 3o and 40 Percent. 

Selecting and Screening Candidates

When it comes to selecting the right candidates, it is essential that you are diverse and set expectations. The full hiring process shouldn’t be hidden and each candidate needs to have it explained to them. You can even include this in the job advertisement.

There is nothing worst than applying for a position and not knowing what to expect next, even if it is something as simple as letting them know you can’t reply to them if they are unsuccessful so if they don’t hear from you in two weeks time then, unfortunately, they haven’t been successful. Or if they are successful in letting them know that they need to be available for an assessment day on certain dates. Make sure you are respectful of their time and they will be of yours. 

The Interview Stage 

You need to have a strong focus on efficient convenient scheduling. Speed is really important in this stage. You should eliminate the time and effort of going back and forth to arrange a phone screen and interview dates. It may be a good idea to have a closing date for applications and set the expectation that you won’t get in touch with anyone until you have screened all the applications. This way you can email the unsuccessful candidates and call the successful ones to arrange interviews. It works really well if you are able to allow the candidates to self-schedule themselves onto empty slots for interviews.

Although you want to make sure you have time for a break and lunch, try to offer some slots during these times or even after normal working hours so you can accommodate anyone who is current;y employed. You don’t want to lose the right candidate just because they couldn’t get time off from their current role. 

Reference Checks

Make sure you don’t decide on your top contenders until all of the conditions have been met, ideally this needs to be done before a final offer and start date has been provided. References can shine a light on a lot such as someone who constantly has a lot of time off work sick, or has been dismissed for something that affected the business.

You may also want to consider drugs tests and a background check depending on the role that is been offered. You also need to be aware that anything can change at any time. Candidates may change their minds, accept an offer somewhere else or fail the pre-employment tests. When this happens, you need to ensure you have backup candidates that are ready to fill the position if you need to. Stay in touch with them and create a reserve list. It is always harder to bring someone back once you have rejected them. It’s up to you how you do it. You could let them you haven’t got an update just yet or offer them go on the reserve list. 

Having a solid recruitment process that is well designed to meet your exact needs that can be measured will help you to continually improve your recruitment process. It will also ensure that all of the above steps are covered and you are creating a standardized experience for every single candidate.