The Recruitment Process – Where Do I Start?

Organisation Analysis & Workforce Planning

It is important to recognise your organisations succession planning and career development strategy to make sure you recruit the most appropriate candidate unto your organisation.

Recruitment is part of a much larger process that repeats itself and translates into a workforce plan. By defining your organisations aims you’ll identify current and future vacancies.  Once you have a workforce plan in place, it is really useful in planning for staff development, training and how you induct new employees into your business.  It helps to identify areas where new roles need to be filled as well as areas where staff may need training and developing to ensure you have an appropriately skilled team.

Strategies change of course and as staff leave and as new strategies are implemented your workforce plan will also need to be revised!

So – you need to recruit someone new to join your team – where do you start?

Complete a Job Analysis

Job analysis is a structured way of recording and analysing the key tasks that make up a particular role, the demands it makes, what its contribution is to the organisation, and how the results of the job holder are measured.

When an employee decides to leave your business and a new vacancy arises, it’s really important to review things. Do you need the same sort of activity to be performed or does the role need to change to fit in with current business needs?

Write a Job Description

Analysing the job will form the basis of a job description which has 3 main purposes:

To help the interviewer understand the vacancy
The give the applicant full details of the job
To provide a record of the different jobs within the business

Create a Person Specification

What kind of person do you need to fulfil the demands of the job, what are the characteristics and attributes in “human terms” considered essential or desirable in the ideal candidate.

Attracting Candidates

Once you have determined and defined the job description and the person specification you’ll need to decide the best way to find the right person for the job.

You may have an established policy to consider internal candidates first before looking outside of the company, however if you do decide to advertise the vacancy, you’ll need to plan time frames, consider cost, decide which media you’ll use and produce any advert copy.  Recruitment Agencies, on-line recruitment, Job Centres and Career Services can also help you recruit the right person.

Application Pre- Selection

Pre Selection involves analysing the applications and information you’ve received from all applicants and making a short list of those you’d like to interview.  You may have a CV, an application form, covering letter or if you are using a Recruitment Agency, a supporting profile to assist you.

Assessing Candidates: Interviewing/Testing

There are many methods of assessing applicants: interviewing is the tool most commonly used.

You’ll need to prepare for any face to face interview and think about the questioning styles you are going to use.  You may also want to consider more objective measuring systems such as testing.

The Selection Decision

The most crucial part of the recruitment process! The selection decision should be straight forward, as long as all previous stages have been carried out effectively!

If you have carried out a well-structured interview, compared the candidate against your job description and person specification you should have all the information you need to make the right choice.

If you can, make a decision as soon as possible after the final interview stage. Many employers have lost the best candidate due to a long time lapse before making a decision.

If you can’t make a decision from the interviews you may need to think again and review your job description, interview process etc.

If you need help with any of the above – call or email Lynne or Keith