If you want your business to do well and be as successful as possible, you need to make sure that you are hiring the right people for each role that you have, and that you have set up the kinds of roles that you are going to need filled too. There are actually many ways that you can approach this, but the important thing is that you are doing whatever you can to make the hiring process as easy as possible, and that is something that you can work on at any time. In this article, we are going to take a look at some of the things you can do to make your hiring successful, so that you can be sure that you have the best staff doing the best that they can for your business.
Creating The Roles
You first need to decide on which roles are actually going to be necessary in your business, which is not something that you are always going to find easy to do. By creating the roles that are important first, you will set up a decent framework, and you can then work on later incorporating newer and different roles into proceedings too. For this reason, start with the roles that are going to actually help you create the products and get them out there, while your business is still small.
Actually, this often happens in a very organic way. You might start off business with just you or you and your partner and one other. Then you find that you might need some help with creating a product, so you hire someone for that. Then you realize it might be a good idea to have someone looking after the phones and talking to customers, so you find a customer assistant. Then a marketer, and so on, until you start to bring in new customers and ultimately find that you need a whole office of people to keep things running smoothly.
This will happen more or less on its own, but the more aware of it you are, the more of a decent control you can get over it. You can therefore make sure that you are creating the roles that make sense, and ultimately that you are leading your business in the right direction in that manner. Create those roles and you can then start to fill them.
Advertising Jobs
When you have vacancies, you need to make sure that you are making the world aware of them, otherwise you are not going to get the same kind of response at all. Advertising jobs is an easy thing to do, but you might want to follow some specific protocols and procedures in order to ensure that you are doing it as well as possible. First of all, it is wise to advertise within your own company before looking elsewhere, if it is the kind of position that you might be able to promote someone into, or otherwise move them around from one department to another. It is fair to give your employees the first chance at landing this new role.
Then you can look further afield, and the places in which you advertise will be determined by what kind of person you feel is going to be suitable for the role. There are specific job boards for specific industries which you might want to seek out and use, or you could go for more generic job boards if you prefer. Some are paid, some are free, and the paid ones will generally have more features that you can use. That being said, the free ones are not necessarily any less likely to be successful for you, and you could probably still find someone who is going to be able to respond to it.
Generally, you’ll want to make sure that you are being clear in your advertising, so that you can’t be accused of being misleading – and so that you are more likely to end up with the right person getting the job. Make sure that you know what you really want in the ideal candidate, and what kinds of qualifications you are looking for in them too. If you are not clear on this, that will come across in the advertisement, and you will get a much more random array of people applying for the job, much less likely to be the ideal people for the role.
It just takes some thought in order to decide on what you want here. A lot of it starts with thinking about what kind of business you are running, and what that means for the kind of people you are going to want to hire. You might also decide to narrow your search only to those who are of a particularly high caliber, like if you are hiring medical staff and you only want those who have undergone the top online nursing programs. Or you might know specifically the kinds of places that you might want to look for people who are likely to do well for your company.
All in all, advertising the vacancies is an unmissable opportunity to get people on board, and you have to make sure that you are doing it right. It is a valuable part of the whole process, and without it you can’t really be sure that you are going to get the people you want on board.
Shortlisting
Once your application window has closed you will find yourself with a huge pile of CVs, cover letters and application pages to go through. In order to make this task easier, you are going to want to have a checklist of the things you are looking for, with the most important at the very top of that list. You can then check at a glance at someone’s application whether or not they are suitable in that respect, and if they are not they will unfortunately go on the ‘no’ pile.
This might seem brutal, but it is really the only way to get through the list, and you will find that it is going to help you get to the person you really need much quicker. Shortlisting is a vital process, and makes the whole thing easier for everyone involved, so make sure that you are not overlooking it. It actually helps to reduce the amount of time you spend on the whole process by a considerable degree.
Interviews
Now it is time to conduct the interviews with those you have shortlisted. This in itself is likely to be time-consuming, but if you can manage to have all the interviews over a one or two day period, then that is a good way to do it. There are many different philosophies on how you are going to approach interviews, but the important thing to bear in mind is that you should do whatever seems to work best for you. That could mean pushing your interviewee to really go for it, or it could be a more relaxed approach which helps them to come out at their own pace. In any case, it’s important that you are a fair and firm, and that you give each person a fair chance.
You will also need to ensure that there are at least two of you – ideally yourself and a member of HR staff, who can ensure that the interview itself is being conducted properly, but also help with the interviewing process too. This helps to keep the interviewee much calmer, and you will find that it produces better results all round. It is also in many parts of the world now a legal requirement too.
Once your interviews are done, you should have a sense of who you would like to hire, but it might not always be that easy. It is often useful to have one or two questions put in there for the sake of a tie-breaker, so that you can go for the person who answered that question correctly, if anyone did. That should make your decision easier.
Acceptances & Refusals
Now that you know who you would like to hire, you need to contact them to let them know. This process can often be messier than you expect it to be. You have to bear in mind that it is unlikely that your role is the only one that they were applying for. As a result, you might call them only to discover that they have accepted a job elsewhere, or that they have changed their mind, or any other reasons that might occur. You will therefore need to have second, third and fourth choices at the ready, as you never know how many people might have changed their plans.
All that can be frustrating, but it’s just part of the process. That is one good reason to list at least a dozen people in order for each space you want filled, as that way you can be sure you are calling those who you really want to join your team.
