Recruitment Guide

Recruiting Candidates

Regardless of size, sector, or location, every company wants to build the strongest team possible, to successfully drive its business forward and meet all of the organisation’s goals and objectives. To do that, they must have a clear vision of the type of people they want to work there, and an understanding of how to identify top candidates to fill vacant roles. As the company grows, and its needs become more complex, so too does the acquisition of the kind of talent that will support that growth. Talent acquisition is a long-term planning strategy, mapping out the human capital requirements of the business to remain competitive and flourish. The recruitment process is the major part of talent acquisition, but by no means the only one, and a sophisticated HR team will include specialists in talent acquisition as a separate function from the hiring team.

Not all companies can afford a diversely skilled HR team, instead relying on one or two individuals to plan, recruit and onboard new hires. But no matter how the HR team is structured, all businesses can lay the foundations of a smooth recruitment process, by putting in place a few key policies and activities to make their company more attractive to top candidates:

Employer Branding

The term Employer Branding encapsulates a company’s reputation as a place to work, and its ability to attract the best talent. Just like a company’s brand is an intangible perception by outsiders of the company’s values, and their experience of the company, the employer brand is an intangible perception as a place to work, held by would-be employees, current employees and former employees. When those three groups of stakeholders’ perceptions are aggregated together, the resulting employer brand is a powerful lever to attract the best candidates.

How to Create an Employer Brand:

Understand the current employer brand perception – which involves working with internal and external stakeholders:

  • Hold senior management workshops to define their perception of the brand
  • Internal audits and employee surveys
  • Analyse and describe the company culture
  • Hold external focus groups – past employees, applicants who were rejected, value chain partners, etc.
  • Map the candidates’ journey from application to onboarding

Analyse the findings in the Understand stage – build a picture of the current employer brand and create a vision for the future brand.

  • Define the attributes of the brand that make it what it is.
  • What is better about your brand?
  • Create an employer value proposition – based on what the company can promise to deliver to its employees and what it expects from them.

Roll-out and Communicate

  • Decide how the new employer brand is to be implemented in the organisation – eg using the brand promise in job adverts, or the “Work for us” page on the company website, as part of the onboarding process, etc.
  • Internal launch of the brand – gather buy-in at all levels
  • Appoint brand ambassadors – for example all personnel with whom potential candidates may come into contact – HR team, heads of departments.. 
  • Other communication channels to be used – eg Social media.

Measure and maintain the results

  • Check the progress of the new brand through employee surveys and external surveys.
  • Over time, measure employee churn rate improvement
  • Audit the business to ensure everybody lives and breathes the brand
  • Constant reviews to improve areas of weakness, or find new ways to promote.

Ensure you promote Diversity and Inclusion

According to the 2021 Global Culture Report from human resource consulting firm OC Tanner  O.C. Tanner (octanner.com):

“Inclusion celebrates and leverages diversity, allowing organisations to discover new possibilities that only emerge when perspectives, skills and talents of unique people are represented, respected and integrated.”

There are legislative reasons to promote D&I in your organisation, but sometimes that legislation can be used to restrict the amount of D&I too. So D&I must become a core value of the company, driven by all employees.  Employing staff with a variety of backgrounds, experiences and opinions, increases creativity and leads to better problem solving, more interaction of ideas, broader thinking and improved decision-making. So a diverse and inclusive organisation performs better and can gain a critical edge over companies that are not so culturally open.

Once the company has decided to positively promote D&I, there are several key components to embedding a culture of equality and the practice of inclusion in the workplace. Here are just 10 to consider:

  • Appoint D&I champions – at senior and lower levels in the organisation
  • Agree on what platforms to use internally to discuss D&I issues
  • Set up a D&I embracing recruitment process 
  • Create a safe, non-judgemental work environment
  • Make D&I a strategy for the business
  • Engage staff at all levels with D&I training 
  • Develop inclusive leadership role models
  • Check D&I Policy Statement (and all company documentation) for stereotypes
  • Set up fair and transparent reward and recognition processes
  • Create a flexible and inclusive work and after-work culture

Conduct great interviews

Conducting a great interview is a skill that is often overlooked when promoting personnel into management roles, where recruiting becomes part of the job description. However an enjoyable recruitment experience is a vital part of the employer brand, and even candidates who are not hired can still give you high marks as a potential employer if you’ve treated them well in the interview process.

Here are some guidelines for preparing to give your candidates a fulfilling experience:

Review the Job description

Having spent the time writing a knock-out job description, make sure you know exactly what skills, knowledge and experience you are looking for and define your ideal candidate. This should include reviewing previous holders of the position and what they excelled at, and thus what performance indicators align with the job.

Prepare your questions 

This helps you to structure the interview and take it in the direction you want to go. There are several categories of questions that you should consider asking:

Icebreakers – to set the candidate at ease and to help build a rapport which will hopefully oil the wheels of the interview. For example:

  • How was your journey here today?
  • Did you find our office easily?
  • Would you like a drink?
  • Tell me a bit about yourself.

General Background Questions

Again these will help to put the candidate at ease at the beginning of the interview,  as they are typical questions that they should have prepared for:

  • What’s your greatest strength and your biggest weakness?
  • Tell me about your experience in .. (key skill or competency requirement for the job) 
  • What attracted you to apply for this vacancy?

Behavioural Questions

Allow you to get a much better understanding of the candidate and how they react under certain situations or pressure

  • Tell me about a time you had to work closely with someone you didn’t get along with. What did you do?
  • What accomplishment are you most proud of in your career? How did you achieve it?
  • How Would You Handle Being Faced with an Aggressive Customer or Client?
  • If we were to hire you, what is the first thing you would do?

Cultural Questions

These help you to select candidates who are best suited to perform well in the company. That means finding the candidate whose values, behaviours, qualifications and ethics align with the organisation’s. The most successful candidates will fit both the job and the workplace culture. Examples:

  • What does work/life balance look like for you?
  • What’s the biggest challenge in most offices today?
  • What did you like most/least about your last company?
  • Describe the best/worst team-building exercise you have ever participated in.
  • How do you handle stress or tight deadlines?

Deciding who to appoint

After conducting the selection process everybody who interviewed or met the candidates, should meet in a selection panel and consider each applicant.

Ask the participants to score each candidate against the defined ideal candidate criteria. Make sure that the key criteria are given adequate weighting at this point, to avoid a simple linear scoring system, otherwise candidates who do well in less critical tasks or abilities but are not as competent as others who do well in the key criteria could still be selected on pure points scored. 

If the selection panel chooses a candidate who did not score the highest ranking points, make sure the reasons for their selection over the higher scorer/s are documented.

It’s also important to ensure selection is made on a non-discriminatory basis, or due to other biases. 

Finally, use DCV to blend other recruitment tools and procedures into your recruitment process: Social Media, Applicant Tracking System, Passive Candidate Search and a robust, flexible long-term talent acquisition strategy.