If you’re looking to hire new digital marketers in the coming year, now is the time to start streamlining and improving your recruitment process.

From being ghosted, to rude hiring managers and interviewers, the recruitment process for employees can be a negative and difficult experience. A recent survey from BambooHR found that 83% of employees surveyed have had bad experiences during the recruitment and onboarding process.

But the same survey also found that 75% of employees admit they’ve considered looking for a new role in the past year.

Which is why it’s crucially important that your recruitment process is efficient, flexible, and helps you to hire quality candidates while reducing the risk of bad hires.

Without further ado, here’s 15 strategies and steps you should have in place in your recruitment process.

1. Create Your Company Pitch

Using your company culture, mission and values to create a pitch that you can use to sell your business, the position, and to separate yourself from the competition.

Doing this as early in the process as possible helps to position yourself as different to the rest. Because recruitment and hiring is a two-way street.

The highest quality candidates know their worth, and they’ll be interviewing you just as much as you are interviewing them.

2. Identify Exactly What You Need From Your New Hire

Defining exactly what you need from your new hire is easier if you’re replacing an employee who has recently left. But this is also your opportunity to re-evaluate the position, and perhaps even improve on the employee that you’re replacing. 

For example, what is the company’s goal for the next 5 years? And how will this employee fit into this vision? And what skills and experience do they need to support this?

This obviously becomes more difficult if you’re hiring for a brand new position, or vastly changing the responsibilities of the role.

3. Write a Detailed Job Description

Writing a job description is an essential part of the recruitment process, and is a document that you’ll likely refer back to again and again.

Once you know what the company needs from this new hire, it’s time for you to define what skills and experience the person needs.

This can mean sitting down with hiring managers and the team the person will be joining to gain a better understanding of which skills they need. Which can mean asking a variety of questions, such as:

• What will the day-to-day responsibilities of this new person include?
• Which skills and experience do they need to have to complete these responsibilities?
• And which skills and experience would you like them to have, but are flexible on?
• How will the role evolve and change as the person in it grows?
• What will their individual progression and training look like?

Which will help to identify which areas you can be flexible in within your recruitment process and the areas where you shouldn’t be flexible in.

Of course, if you have a job description template then it is simple enough to swap in the details you need for this specific job. Read our guide here on how to write a detailed job description template that you can use again and again.

4. Write and Distribute the Job Advert

Now you’ve got your job description, you can use it to craft a brilliant job advert that brings you qualified candidates. 

When you’ve written your job advert, it’s time to distribute it. 

Posting your job advert on as many job boards as possible will obviously bring in more applications. There are free job sites that you can take advantage of like Reed, LinkedIn and Indeed, however some charge money and can be quite expensive.

You can also share that you are hiring on social media sites like LinkedIn and Twitter. These are the most professionals focused platforms, and are another great way to get the word out about your new job for free.

If your hiring is urgent, you can also use paid advertising to boost your outreach. However this can quickly become expensive and if you receive an influx of unsuitable applications, then it means a lot of time spent sifting through unqualified applications.

Which means you also need to assign a person to review CVs and resumes, qualify candidates, and schedule interviews.

5. Actively Find and Reach Out to Candidates

Searching for candidates on your own, can be incredibly time-consuming. However, it can also be rewarding, by giving you access to candidates who aren’t actively looking on the market.

This can include:

• Contacting people in your network or industry.
• Checking your internal database for anyone who has previously applied to work at your company.
• Searching through LinkedIn for appropriate candidates with your specific requirements and experience.
• If your company pays for access to job boards, then you can look for relevant CVs on places like CV Library.

Using these avenues you can message, email, and call potential candidates who aren’t actively applying elsewhere. Meaning you’re in less competition and can find greater success within the recruitment process.

6. Filter Through the Applications and Move Fast

Now that you have candidates and CVs to choose from, it’s time to evaluate which candidates you should progress to the next stage. So here are a few questions to ask when evaluating CVs.

1. How long has the candidate stayed with each company?

Some clients we work with at Herd don’t like candidates who have CVs that look “jumpy”. It can be a red flag to employers if someone regularly switches jobs, and hasn’t seen genuine progression or a promotion at a company. 

2. What does your network say?

If you work in a niche industry (like we recruit here at Herd), you may well have mutual connections or acquaintances with the candidate. You can always reach out to ask for a reference or introduction, to find out a little more about the candidate and get some insight.

3. What have they accomplished in their previous roles?

When candidates purely list the responsibilities they had in their last role, it can be a sign that they coasted along doing the bare minimum, and didn’t actually achieve much.

4. What evidence do they have for their hard skills and soft skills?

The best candidates will focus on both hard and soft skills, and be able to provide evidence that backs up their claims of both. 

7. When You’ve Made Your Decision, Move Fast

Once you’ve evaluated CVs and decided which candidates you want to interview, it’s time to move fast. Because while a candidate is interviewing with you, it’s not uncommon for them to be interviewing with 2 or 3 other businesses.

This can mean you need to have a flexible recruitment process, interviewing candidates when it’s most convenient for them: This can be before or after work, or even during your lunch break.

But if it means that you can interview those candidates two or three days earlier, that can be the deciding factor. Being the first business to make a candidate the job offer isn’t everything, but it can make a huge difference!

8. Conduct Your Initial Phone Interview/ Screening Call

We always recommend having an initial phone interview that is more of a screening call than an actual interview.

This should be a chemistry meeting to help decide whether the potential candidate would be a good fit for your team, and to make sure they are who they seem to be from their CV.

These should still be at an arranged time like a normal interview so you don’t catch the candidate off guard, but should be more informal: Which should also be conveyed to them.

9. Have a Fast Interview Process

Remember that while you’re interviewing the candidate, so are plenty of other businesses. And every stage of the interview process you have, is another chance to lose out to your competitors for great candidates. Additionally, candidates may just drop out of an interview process if they become fatigued and lose interest.

We would generally advise having no more than 3 interviews in your recruitment process. This can be less for a junior position, or more for the most senior positions, or positions where you are having difficulty deciding between a few candidates. 

Any longer, and it may look like you’re not really sure what you’re looking for from your new employee.

10. Make Your Best Offer First

We always advise making your best offer first, instead of trying to save the company a little bit of money by offering a lower salary than previously discussed.

It shows the candidate that you’re serious about the offer, you’re putting your best foot forward, and not trying to lowball them.

We suggest giving the offer via video call or even better, face-to-face. This allows you to gauge their reaction, to answer any questions they have around benefits and perks.

Then to follow up with an email outlining everything they need to know in the offer letter, salary, benefit, and start date etc.

11. Given Interview Feedback to the Unsuccessful Applicants

Giving interview feedback to unsuccessful interviewees is a crucial part of your recruitment process for two main reasons:

1. It helps preserve your business’s industry reputation, and maintain strong relationships with professionals in your industry.
2. And it helps to evaluate and improve your own recruitment process.

Giving interview feedback does take time out of an already busy time for you and your business, but we think there’s huge amounts of value in it. And it’s also just a nice thing to do for someone who has given up their time to interview for your company.

12. Coach the Candidate Through Counter Offers

When a candidate has accepted your job offer, your work doesn’t stop there. Because there is always the risk of your candidates accepting a counter offer.

We advise starting these conversations even before you make the job offer, to properly prepare a candidate on what to expect.

This will include telling them what to expect from a counter, and explaining these reasons that counter offers aren’t all they’re cracked up to be:

1. The candidate’s employer will still be looking for their replacement, because 80% of candidates who accept a counter offer still leave within a year.
2. Training and development opportunities will be few and far between, as employers choose to invest in employees who are seen as less of a “flight risk”.
3. You’re less likely to receive career progression, as the business won’t want to make you harder to replace if they’re worried about you leaving.
4. Most employers just throw money at the problem, and it’s likely the reasons the candidate had for leaving in the first place won’t change.

13. Stay in Touch Through the Notice Period

We also advise staying in touch with the candidate while they work through their notice period.

This will prevent the candidate from being tempted to accept a counter offer, help to build a relationship with the candidate, and start the onboarding process before they actually join the company.

14. Onboard Your New Employee

Which leads us to the final step in improving your recruitment process, onboarding your new employee.

The onboarding process is the first step in the process of employee retention, as how an employee starts their new role is a good indicator of how much they will enjoy their time there. In fact, a strong onboarding process can make your employees up to 18x more committed to your workplace!

15. Or Skip Most of These and Work With a Recruitment Partner…

One of the best ways to support your own hiring needs is to work with a recruitment and talent solutions partner. Here at Herd we take care of most of the time consuming and difficult work for you:

From head-hunting potential candidates both in and outside of our extensive network of digital marketing professionals, to qualifying potential candidates and taking care of initial screening calls/ interviews: We make sure that you only spend your valuable time interviewing candidates who are a potential fit for your business.

And because we’re experts at what we do and take care of the legwork for you, you risk less money, time and resources on potentially bad hires, and can concentrate on growing your team and expanding your business.

If working with a recruitment partner to either replace or to work alongside your pre-existing recruitment process sounds like something that could be right for you, have a look at what we can offer your business here.