Hiring Process Tips: Building a Strategic Recruiting Process

Whether you own a restaurant, retail store, or a franchise, companies just like yours are struggling to get the right candidates to fill positions. It's becoming more difficult to identify and secure the right candidates. Therefore, you need to give yourself the best advantage by making continuous improvements to your strategic hiring process.

Improving the hiring process steps makes recruitment easier and helps you source the right candidates for your company. The use of smart devices and appliances is on the rise. Job applicants are comfortable using smartphones, smart fridges, and other forms of technology. Consequently, it's important to embrace new technology and implement smart hiring to avoid losing the best candidates to your competitors. Improving your strategic recruiting process should be an aspect of your business development strategy, as it underpins one of your most vital business assets – your labor.

Keep reading for our seven hiring process tips for improving your strategic recruiting process.

Define the Strategic Recruiting Process for Different Roles

Take some time to think about the different types of roles and workers your company needs. The stages of recruitment will differ according to the type of worker you are hiring. For example, an important hiring process tip is to differentiate your strategy for hourly workers and people who perform gig economy jobs. Different roles will need to be filled by candidates with specific experience and qualifications. A single recruiting process strategy for all your roles will lead to confusion for you and the candidate.

Most companies state the differences in roles when creating job descriptions. However, they fail to follow through in making these distinctions throughout the entire strategic recruiting process. The hiring process for most companies is made up of the following stages:

1. Planning to hire
2. Attracting the right candidates
3. Reviewing candidates
4. Making an offer

You should aim to define and personalize the strategic hiring process for the different stages of recruitment listed above. Your application form should be tailored according to the level of the skills required.

Building separate hiring process methods for different roles is necessary but can also be time-consuming. This is especially the case if you operate a small business and take care of hiring needs yourself. Fountain removes the confusion of managing separate hiring processes for different candidates. Our workflow feature ensures every active job posting has its own workflow. This functionality makes handling different roles easy and simple.

A Simple Hiring Process Tip: Create Clear Job Descriptions

Writing and promoting the job description is the step in the hiring process that introduces your company to future employees. Although it can be tempting to add every detail of the role to the job description, this may be counter-productive as it could scare away potential candidates.

Here are some hiring process tips for writing a job description that will engage and entice the right candidates to apply for your job opening:

Update old job descriptions.

If an existing employee is leaving, ask them to create a list of the actual duties they performed. Compare this list to the old job description and make updates where necessary. You may find that some duties have been made obsolete because of new ways of working. Additionally, there may also be new duties that have been added to the role.

Use simple job titles.

Your job title should indicate what the job is about. There are many jobs vying for applicants’ attention, and these applicants might not take the time to figure out what job titles like ‘Logistics Wizard’ or 'Warehouse Rockstar' mean.

Keep details specific.

Talk about only the most important aspects of the role. List the different projects and duties the candidate will be working on.

Differentiate requirements.

Separate requirements as ‘nice-to-have’ and ‘must-have’. This approach will help to attract candidates who have the core skills to perform the job and are willing to learn secondary skills while working.

Avoid jargon.

Unless you are recruiting for a highly specialized role, you should stay away from using jargon in your job descriptions. Avoid acronyms and use the second person as this language communicates directly with potential applicants.

Sell your company.

Promote the positive aspects of your company to encourage candidates to apply. You should include details of your achievements, employee development opportunities, benefits, and perks.

Focus on Enhancing the Candidate Experience for Your Strategic Recruiting Process

According to Capital H Blog, candidates are becoming more demanding and want recruiters to be highly responsive and provide customized information about the role and the company. We refer to this fast-growing trend as the new service economy.

To improve your strategic hiring process, you will need to shift from company-centered recruitment to a candidate-centric approach. A smooth and seamless recruitment process that prioritizes communication with candidates can help reduce applicant drop-off rates.

The following strategic recruiting process tips will help you increase the number of positive interactions between your company and candidates.

Streamline the application process.

A survey found that 60% of applicants abandon online job application forms because they were too long and complicated. Reducing the time required to complete your application form will help you attract more applicants.

Refresh your careers page as part of your hiring process strategy.

Ensure that the careers page on your website is updated with the latest jobs. Your careers page should be user-friendly, informative, and portray a real image of your company. Use employee stories, images, and videos to describe the advantages of working with your company and encourage people to apply.

Accept applications via mobile to improve your strategic recruiting process.

Seventy-seven percent of the U.S. population owns a smartphone. You can improve your strategic recruiting process by keeping up with this trend and making your hiring process mobile. Enabling mobile-based applications will allow candidates to respond to your job listing quicker.  

Fountain's mobile-first, high volume recruitment software makes it easy for candidates, recruiters, and hiring managers to engage with the hiring process on the fly!

Prioritize Communication as You Build Your Strategic Recruiting Process

It is important to keep the lines of communication open during the hiring process. You should incorporate standard messages at different stages of the hiring pipeline. This communication could include confirming the receipt of an application. You should also dedicate resources to answering additional questions from candidates.

Given that most of your candidates have mobile phones, an easy and reliable method of communication is SMS. Fountain provides the functionality to keep in touch with your candidates using SMS messaging.

You can use SMS messaging to:

• Schedule interviews
• Send prompts to upload documents
• Set up follow-up after interviews

Watch the video below to learn how Recruitment Manager at BrightStar Care, Jose Watson, leverages SMS, emojis, and even GIFs throughout his strategic recruitment process.

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Enhance Your Candidate Sourcing

The more sources you utilize to fill your job vacancies, the higher the chances that you will get quality candidates within your specified timeframe.

Use the following sources to widen the net of qualified candidates.

Post to the best job boards.

The results of a survey found that more than half (52.17%) of all applications come from job boards. Therefore, to improve your recruitment process, you need to devise a strategy to post your job openings on the most relevant job boards.

Ask for referrals.

Tap into your existing network to find out whether some of your connections can point you to suitable candidates. To incentivize people to make referrals, offer a referral bonus when employees refer a qualified candidate.

Build a strong social media recruitment strategy.

One of the most obvious social media platforms for finding job candidates is LinkedIn. You can include “we’re hiring” in your bio or post an update to your timeline with the details of the role you're recruiting for. If necessary, make use of LinkedIn Talent Solutions to better target your ideal candidates.

Go to industry events.

Search for events that are relevant to your industry to meet fellow professionals who may be interested in a new role. Conferences and informal meet-ups are ideal places to make contact with potential employees. 

Use Analytics to Improve Your Strategic Recruiting Process

Analyzing all of the steps in your hiring process is key to improving how you hire workers. The right analytics will enable you to identify what areas are working and the hiring stages that need to be improve. With Fountain as your recruitment software, you'll have access to the hiring metrics that your company should focus on.

 Hiring process analytics will help you to answer the following questions:

• What is causing blockages and delays?
• Which hiring managers are struggling to recruit?
• Which hiring sources are the most valuable?

Fountain’s analytics give you the answers to the above questions and much more, including:

• How much each candidate costs your company
• Where your candidates drop off in the hiring process
• The best time of the week for candidates to attend interviews
• How long it takes for a candidate to move through your recruitment pipeline

Improve Overall Efficiency of Your Hiring Process

Making improvements to your strategic recruiting process does not necessarily need to include big and expensive changes.

You can improve the general efficiency of the recruitment process in the following ways.

Introduce recruitment software.

Switching to recruitment software could make the biggest difference to streamlining and improving your hiring process. Using recruitment software like Fountain saves you time and money with features like video interviews and Instant Hire.

Record standard processes.

Your hiring should be process-driven to ensure that all candidates receive the same great experience. An easy way to record processes is to make a checklist of the relevant steps. You will need to delegate a manager to update the checklists when steps are added to or removed from the process.

Improving your recruitment process is no longer just about a better experience for your hiring managers. Candidates are increasingly using the hiring process to make an assessment about whether they should proceed with the application.

Fountain is used by businesses of all sizes to improve their hiring processes. Request a demo today to find out how Fountain can make recruitment easier and simpler for your team and your candidates.