Recruitment can be expensive and time consuming but choosing the right employees for your organisation is essential for your success. Recruiting the wrong people for your organisation can lead to increased staff turnover, increased costs for the organisation, and lowering of morale in your existing workforce. Therefore, your recruitment and selection processes need to be efficient and well managed. Here, we look at recruitment and selection from the beginning stages of choosing the recruitment criteria through the advertising, interview questions and finally selection through evaluation forms.
The stages in recruitment involve identifying the key recruitment criteria, using your position descriptions to create the advert used, having your interview questions prepared and having an interview process to include reference checking and evaluation forms. Let’s look at each of these in a little more detail.
- Identifying the key recruitment criteria:- These are the steps that happen prior to selecting candidates. This is the planning of the recruitment and selection processes and analysing the open job to determine the recruitment and selection criteria and then developing the key selection criteria. In this stage you evaluate the need for the position, finalise the key selection criteria (essential and desirable), decide on the skills, knowledge, attitudes and aptitudes needed for the position, prepare the position description and plan the recruitment process (in house, external agency, referrals, headhunting, advertising etc). Often organisations use a standard set of questions that may have been used for some time and for several different positions. This can be both helpful and also constraining when recruiting for a position. While it is important to have standardised questions to assess a candidate’s fit with the team and/or the business, it is also important to ensure that some questions are targeted specifically to the requirements of the position. Developing a set of Key Recruiting Criteria and incorporating these criteria into your recruitment process can assist you greatly in this process.
- Creating a position description for the role:- This involves reviewing the Key Result Areas (KRAs) for the role and these forming the basis of your recruitment criteria which then can be used in your advert. For example, if an administration role has the following 5 KRAs:
a. Time management
b. Intermediate MS Office suite skills
c. Customer service orientation
d. Business management support for senior managers
e. Diary management
Then the 5 recruitment criteria may look like this:
- Ability to manage own time without close supervision
- Intermediate MS Office suite skills
- Capable of managing customer enquiries and complaints
- Previous experience supporting a minimum of 2 senior managers, including generating reports
- Ability to manage a diary in line with managers business priorities
These 5 recruitment criteria then form the basis of your assessment items. Your first interview would include some questions that enable the candidate to demonstrate (or not demonstrate!) their skills and experience in each of these recruitment criteria. Behaviourally based questions are the best way to make this assessment (Tell me about a time when…). The second interview would include questions that enable you to explore these areas further.
- Evaluation forms and reference check forms:- These should also be developed around the recruitment criteria to ensure that you are getting feedback from the interviewers and referees that is consistent with the areas that are most important to you in the role. For example, if technical skills are important these can be verified through interview questions, reference checking, and/or through skill testing. Psychometric testing is another option that you may choose to use and have aligned with your key recruiting criteria. The beauty of this approach is that once the candidate is employed, they can see the relevance of the selection process to the position they now hold, as evidenced by the position description that they will receive. It closes the loop on the recruitment life cycle and then sets up the performance management process for the employee as they progress in their new role.
Is this something that could be an issue at your place? Inspire Success is all about implementing practical solutions that help create high performing workplaces which are customer focussed and free of conflict - no matter what size your business is. Contact Rae Phillips at Inspire Success for further information raephillips@inspire-success.com