Build a First-Rate Hiring Process By Bruce Tulgan

How does your organization get the right person in the right place at the right time? Whether you build these capabilities internally or you look for an outside vendor, these are the key steps in a first-rate hiring process:

Step one: Build a powerhouse employer brand. You need a killer employer message that answers the question, “What’s the deal?” With that message, you can create a widespread impression about your organization through effective marketing. For example, RES (Recruitment Enhancement Services) works with clients to turn their workplace culture into a brand and sell that brand through print, electronic, and interactive advertising. The focal point is a candidate-friendly career website. All marketing efforts drive traffic to this website, which facilitates candidate processing and relationship marketing.

Step two: Create a partnership between staffing professionals and hiring managers. RES provides its clients with relationship coordinators to work with hiring managers, technical specialists to manage integrated technology systems, cybrarians to perform web-based talent searches, recruiters to network via telephone and email, and support staff to tie it all together. The team is available around the clock to facilitate candidate convenience.

Step three: Create a user-friendly requisition process. In the RES system, hiring managers complete new-hire requisitions through an easy-to-use online process. RES receives the requisition and an RES staffing professional immediately contacts the hiring manager to clarify the hiring need. Once the need and the corresponding requirements are crystal clear, the RES staffing professional and the hiring manager agree on a tentative timetable and RES goes to work.

Step four: Tap multiple sources of talent. RES maintains a proprietary talent database for each of its clients and begins every search there. The proprietary talent database may include former job applicants, internal job searchers, candidates from employee referrals, and former employees who departed on good terms. If the internal search does not yield a sufficient number of qualified applicants, RES cybrarians begin mining web-based sources for available qualified applicants. Meanwhile, RES recruiters start working their own talent networks through telephone and email contacts. When it makes sense, RES will market positions through print, electronic, and interactive media. RES then directs responses to their streamlined online and telephone applicant-management system. This system feeds a single proprietary database and allows RES recruiters to engage applicants immediately in a dialogue.

Step five: Select the best and close the deal. RES prescreens candidates until a sufficient number are available for hiring managers to consider. RES recruiters sell the opportunity to these candidates and work with hiring managers to schedule interviews, facilitate the hiring and on-boarding process, and generate metrics to evaluate the process for each new hire.