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The basic stages of recruitment, why senior roles take longer, and why telling candidates what to expect matters for your employer brand.
It is very important to tell candidates what each stage of the process will involve and to give feedback as you go. Taking care that people have a positive experience of your recruitment has a significant effect on how the organisation is seen as an employer.
What does the recruitment process involve?
Recruitment consists of finding suitable candidates, screening applications and selecting the best people for the job. That is a considerable simplification, of course, and the procedure does not always look the same.
The process differs depending on whether you are recruiting from inside or outside the organisation, for instance. With external recruitment we usually start by publishing the vacancy on the company website (in the careers section) and on job boards, or by sourcing candidates through LinkedIn. For difficult, highly specialised recruitment, companies often turn to professional recruitment agencies.
How many stages are there in recruitment?
Wondering where to start? Drawing up a timetable and setting out the stages is a good idea. The first thing you need before doing anything else is a job description, and from it a compelling advert.
The basic stages of a recruitment process are:
- reviewing candidates’ application documents,
- an initial conversation, usually a telephone screening,
- an interview, sometimes combined with an exercise,
- choosing the best candidate and making them an offer.
The more senior the role and the rarer the skills, the longer the process. Management and expert roles, or those calling for unusual skills, may involve additional stages – an assessment centre, a case study or a psychometric test. Recruitment of this kind can run to five stages or more.
What matters in a recruitment process?
The answer is simple – the end result: hiring the right candidate at a sensible cost. It is worth asking whether the company has recruited for this or a similar role before. What difficulties arose? If the role became vacant because someone left, good practice is to hold an exit interview. It may yield information that proves useful for the new hire.
It is very important to tell candidates what each stage of the process will involve and to give feedback as you go. Taking care that people have a positive experience of your recruitment has a significant effect on how the organisation is seen as an employer.
Recruitment processes can swallow a great deal of time and energy, which is why support from a professional recruitment agency is worth considering. Specialist headhunters have wide contacts in the sector and are usually able to reach well-matched candidates more effectively and more quickly than an in-house recruiter, and so to close the whole process sooner.
