If You’re A Recruiter, Following The Complete Recruitment Cycle Can Help You Source Better And Fill The Critical Positions In Your Organization.
But before we talk about it in detail, let’s understand what is a recruitment cycle. Typically, the recruitment cycle has different stages. These include identifying the requirement, sourcing, screening, interviewing, shortlisting, verification, offer, and joining formalities.
Knowing about each stage in depth can you give an edge over your competitors and help find the most suitable candidates. Let’s understand each of these stages.
Identifying The Requirement
Any recruitment process starts with identifying the requirements and understanding the role of the hiring manager. If you do this bit right, you end up hiring better candidates. Keep a checklist prepared that should include the educational qualification, technical skills, seniority level, years of experience, budget, and other relevant details that can help you narrow your search.
Define Candidate Persona
Remember, before anything else, preparation is the key to hire successfully the right candidate that meets the job roles and fits in the workplace culture. Start with defining your candidate persona and job description.
An ideal candidate persona should have the right mix of skills, characteristics, and behavioral attributes. Having a candidate persona handy means your end-to-end recruitment process becomes easier.
Sourcing
Once you understand the requirement, you need to source the right talent from the vast pool of talent available in the job market leveraging job boards, social media, career websites, and so on. It is better to expand your sourcing from multiple channels instead of limiting to a single channel.
Screening
Once you have sourced your potential candidate lists, it’s time to screen and shortlist based on certain parameters. Timeframe (how soon the candidate can join), profile (how suitable is the candidate for the job role), motivation (why the candidate is looking for a change? Is the reason justified enough?) are some of the probable parameters that can help you screen candidates for the initial interview.
Interview
Following the screening, arrange for telephonic or face-to-face interview round to further assess the candidate. Have a list of questions prepared beforehand that you intend to ask. Review and analyze the candidate’s profile well to ask relevant questions and avoid asking obvious questions.
While taking the interview, take down notes to summarize your conclusion. Keep the note handy along with the profile for future reference.
Feedback
If the candidate is shortlisted by the hiring manager, communicate the same. If the candidate does not qualify, share the feedback, and keep a note for future reference.
Verification
Once you decide to hire a candidate, gather relevant references to process the background verification as per the company laid guidelines.
Offer
Based on the outcome of the verification process, roll out the job offer to the candidate. Once you share the official confirmation, call and brief the candidate about the offers and clarify all the doubts that the candidate might have to help him/her make an informed joining decision.
On-Boarding
The recruitment process does not end at the employee accepting the offer. On-boarding and getting the employee started at the workplace is the final leg of the recruitment journey. Gallup says that only 12 percent of employees say that their employers have a great onboarding experience.
Creating a positive onboarding experience is the key to employee retention. A great onboarding experience starts with an introduction to the team, followed by an orientation of the candidate to the new ecosystem, and finally ending with training to get the person started with the new job role.
As a recruiter, it is important to know the recruitment cycle well and how each stage can be improved. Every stage is crucial to source the best candidate who can value the company and stick around for a long time.