Hiring is more than just filling positions, it’s finding the right fit. When the recruitment process is rushed or poorly planned the ripple effect can be costly. In fact, 75% of employers admit to making a bad hire that costs them an average of $17,000 per bad hire. This misstep leads to teams being misaligned, projects grinding to a halt, and both employee and company growth opportunities coming to a screeching halt.
The good news? With a well thought out hiring strategy these challenges are completely avoidable. If companies invest a significant amount of time in the beginning to create a structured and intentional process for hiring, they can reduce turnover drastically, build a stronger, more cohesive culture and set their teams up for long term success.
In a market where competition for talent is fierce, your hiring approach must be refined, not because it’s a nice to have, but because it’s a necessity. If you’re having trouble finding and keeping the right talent, here are a few concrete steps you can take to change your employee selection process.
What is the Employee Selection Process?
Employee selection is a simple enough concept — it’s literally a series of steps from the point of job posting to offering a position. The real work happens in between those steps. But each stage has its own challenges and opportunities to assess candidates, and help you make the right hire.
This model doesn’t have to be rigid, and what many recruiters may not realize. Sometimes, the best option is to hire someone you know — a past colleague, for example, or a reliable freelancer even if it doesn’t precisely fit the traditional model.
None of this is news to seasoned hiring managers. The classic selection process is understandable, but some pieces in it, such as the cover letter, are out of date. The way we hire is constantly evolving, and so should the way we hire.
Just like with everything else, recruitment is adapting. The steps may be the same, but the strategies we use to get through them are different. AI, skills testing tools, are changing the way we assess candidates and transform the hiring process into a more precise and efficient process.
7 Steps in the Selection Process of Employees
The employee selection process can be compared to crafting the perfect recipe — it requires the right combination of elements to ensure success. Finding the ideal candidate is not just about matching skills to the job but also about ensuring they align with the team and company culture. A poor hiring decision can have lasting consequences, much like relying on decaf when you need that extra boost of energy. To avoid such pitfalls, following a structured approach is essential, and the 7 steps of the employee selection process offer a clear path to making informed and effective hiring decisions.
The employee selection process in HRM involves a series of carefully designed steps to identify and hire the most suitable candidates. Organizations typically follow a structured approach that includes seven key stages in the selection process for hiring:
Application
When companies rely on traditional job descriptions and job platforms. Vague or overly complex descriptions can actually negate the effect of your ad by failing to draw the right candidates, while poorly placed ads will also limit your talent pool. Also, job descriptions that include non-inclusive language or are so heavy on formal qualifications can turn off the right applicants, including people who have the right skills but don’t have the right degrees or experience. Companies should avoid these pitfalls by creating clear and concise job descriptions that outline essential responsibilities and skills needed. It will also help to avoid long winded texts and to use inclusive language which will engage a broader more diverse audience.
However, the next step of modernizing the candidate sourcing phase should focus on skills more than just qualifications. By using customized skills assessment, employers are able to assess candidates on what they actually need to be able to do the job, instead of relying on traditional resumes, which offer less valuable insights.
Resume Screening
Even in the age of digital formats, hiring managers still have to wade through resumes in order to weed out the unsuitable candidates. Resuming screening is vital but labor intensive and common problems are to pay enough attention to each applicant, set too vague requirements, and be too restrictive in filtering out candidates. More often than not, recruiters are missing out on potential hires by only paying attention to resumes and not taking into account skills assessments or unique capabilities. Poor resume screening can waste time and bring in the wrong candidates for an interview.
Recruiters can use screening tools to automate resume reviews and to include basic skills assessments to make the process better. InterviewVector Quickscreen can even make this even simpler by quickly narrowing down the candidates that fit the exact skill criteria, allowing companies to save time and increase the overall efficiency of their hiring process.
These tools allow us to identify promising candidates with the right skills. With this streamlined process, we make the hiring process more efficient and effective.
Screening Call
Screening calls are a great way to quickly screen candidates, and give hiring teams the opportunity to ask targeted questions and determine whether or not a candidate should be moved forward in the process. But there are challenges with these calls. Interviewers don’t always ask the right questions, and miss opportunities to see how a candidate’s personality and soft skills measure up. Moreover, time constraints prevent the collection of enough valuable insights. So that interviewers are able to perform effective screenings, there needs to be a clear structure and a clear idea of what makes a candidate fit for the role.
Phone screening is helpful, but it’s not the whole story. But a more complete evaluation process can be created by combining phone calls with other methods such as video interviews, skills assessments or even email interaction. To get a better view of candidates, try out brief homework assignments that mimic real job duties. Even if those assignments are only 30 — 60 minutes, they can tell you so much about strengths and weaknesses, which can help you make more informed hiring decisions.
Assessment Tests
Assessment tests are a key part of the hiring process, usually being run before formal interviews to test that candidates are right for the job. But there are a few things to keep in mind. The first thing is to determine the non negotiable skills for each role, the most important skills for success. The length and scope of the test should be carefully balanced in addition to that. The tests should not be too long, but they should also be deep enough to get a sense of what the candidate can and can’t do. Another element of flexibility is that assessments shouldn’t be too rigid as it is just as important how candidates approach the tasks as much as their final scores.
Using professional assessment tools is highly recommended in order to streamline this process. InterviewVector, for example, provides expertly crafted tests designed for particular roles, so that you get quality evaluations without burdening the candidate. By integrating technical assessments with tests of problem solving, cognitive skills, hiring teams can get a bigger picture of a candidate’s strengths and make better hiring decisions and save money in the long haul.
In-Person Interviews
Recruiters at the interview stage, run multiple rounds to test the candidate before making a decision. But this step can get problematic without a structured approach. Common problems include insufficient consistency resulting in subjective results, or asking irrelevant questions that reject qualified candidates. Furthermore, poor hiring decisions may occur when you focus too much on surface level traits like body language, instead of key skills. Deterrents such as multiple interview rounds and committees with little diversity or subject matter expertise may all keep them from choosing the right person for the job.
Here we suggest implementing a structured interview process, to address these challenges. Using a standardized approach makes it objective because we ask the same questions to all candidates in the same way. Using a combination of behavioral, situational, and role specific questions, recruiters can assess a candidate’s technical skills, work history and soft skills. In addition to helping us assess how candidates will perform in the future, this method makes sure that candidates fit with the company’s culture and values, which ultimately results in better hiring decisions.
Background Checks
During the process of hiring, HR teams accept responsibility for having verified the credentials of shortlisted candidates, to ensure they are accurate and fit for the role. Skills testing is a good way of assessing a candidate’s capabilities, but may also need further checks according to the certain needs of the position. It goes with roles that have access to confidential information, for example, thorough background checks on previous misconduct in handling data must be included. Just as is the case with working with children, positions that require working with children require a comprehensive safety check to protect them.
But one of the biggest problems HR teams face is the need for information without violating candidates’ personal privacy. Criminal record reviews and drug testing may be appropriate checks, but requiring a candidate’s credit score is often too much, too intrusive. HR teams should avoid falling into this balance by putting in place verification measures that are relevant and appropriate for each role and that respect the privacy of candidates throughout this process. However, this is a careful approach to leave a trustworthy hiring environment and allows secure personal information.
Decision and Job Offer
In an ideal world the hiring process should result in discovering the ideal candidate who swiftly accepts the job offer and goes through an on-boarding process with ease. But when things don’t go as planned, new employees can find themselves frustrated and turned off, something no organization wants to have happen. This is the stage upon which you can reassess candidates and make thoughtful decisions.
At this point, there are several challenges. One of the primary reasons why companies fail to attract candidates is that they typically don’t meet candidates’ expectations about salary and benefits, which are usually absent from job ads. Moreover, a weak employer brand can scare top talent who by default gravitates to companies that project confidence and positivity. But it’s also important not to rush the decision making process and to make sure candidates are genuinely excited about the role. Companies should enhance this stage by offering a package of tailored benefits which address the different needs of employees. When researching competitive salaries with PayScale or Glassdoor, you can make sure offers are attractive and if your preferred candidate says no, it’s an opportunity to rethink job descriptions and employer value propositions for clarity and transparency.
How to improve employee recruitment and selection process
To refine the employee selection process, organizations have the opportunity to adopt a range of best practices. A particularly effective approach involves crafting a precise job description that distinctly articulates the responsibilities, skills, and qualifications essential for the role.
Training the hiring managers and decision-makers cannot provide an effective selection process in human resource management. These training programs should include topics like structured interview techniques, recognition of unconscious bias, and body language interpretation. If interviewers are granted skills and knowledge, organizations benefit through having an uplifted caliber of candidate assessment.Use various selection methods to give a comprehensive view of the candidates. This means combining interviewing, assessment tools, work samples, and reference checks. The organizational value of using different techniques is that they increase one’s chances of finding the right fit both for the job as well as the organizational culture.
Good communication is essential to maintaining candidate engagement throughout the recruitment selection process, so that applicants are kept informed of their status, even in the absence of new information, so that top candidates do not become discouraged or have second thoughts and take offers elsewhere.
Finally, organizations must continuously review and improve the staff selection process. Gather insights from both candidates and hiring managers by critically reviewing data or reports about recruitment results; get updates on industry best practices, then companies can refine their methods and adapt to changes in needs and situations.
Conclusion
An employee selection process has a significant impact on the growth and success of an organization. The structured approach with specific steps ensures higher prospects of acquisition of excellent talent for companies. The proper procedure involves screening of applications, interviews, assessments, and background checks that enable the recruitment of the right candidate for every position.
In summary, the process of selection improvement is an ongoing process that calls for continuous testing and upgrading. The usage of such metrics as time-to-hire and quality-of-hire allows organizations to evaluate their performance in their recruiting practices. There are also best practices, including creating such detailed job descriptions, standardization of procedure, and the use of a selection method or selection methods, that will lead to better hiring decisions, and consequently, a more effective workforce.
