Hiring the right staff is one of your most important tasks – if you don’t have the right people in the right seats, it can have a real impact on success of your business.
It is important to hire people who share the vision and culture of your business.
Here, our intregrator Majida Burch, describes the steps we take to make sure we hire staff who meet our vision and values.
1. Identify your market
There is no point in wasting time and effort advertising in places which are unsuitable for your target market.
It is important to identify the best places to advertise before you start your search. The best way to do this is to consider the role and the type of candidates who would be most suitable.
As part of our process of looking for a freelance office assistant, we identified that the most relevant market would be mothers looking to return to work and had previous office experience, so we found places to advertise where these groups would search.
2. Engaging advert
If you want to guarantee you get a good response to your advert, take some time to ensure your advert is engaging.
An effective job advert will help you to encourage applicants and to enable you to reach the right people as quickly as possible. This will make the hiring process much easier in the long run.
With a small budget, we found that using Timewise Jobs was effective. We received over 130 applicants for our role.
Read more: Five hiring mistakes to avoid
3. Responsive
You need to respond quickly because good applicants will be snapped up in a week or two.
And do respond to all candidates, whether you are taking them forward or not.
If you don’t reply to candidates it can damage the reputation of your business.
4. Screening process
With 130 candidates, we needed a highly effective screening process to identify the right person for the job.
Our customised recruitment process had seven stages, and at each stage we filtered out those who didn’t meet our criteria.
- A “request for further information”
- Phone screening
- Competency testing
- A peer interview
- Kolbe testing
- An interview with Julia, the CEO
- References
Read: Three reasons why it’s good to know your Kolbe
We then offered the most suitable candidate a paid trial to see how they worked, and then finally an offer.
Our criteria for success included:
- A well written and non-generic cover letter, ideally referring to our company and area of business
- Bonus points given if they address any of the person specification/requirements within the cover letter
- A well formatted CV
- Speed of response to request for additional information
- Good customer service skills, who was enjoyed managing up and had a tenacious, “get things done personality”
The way our process was designed enabled us to automatically filter out candidates at each stage, so, of example, if they answered no to the question about having previous office experience, they would not progress to the next stage.