The Gotcha Guide To Do-It-Yourself Recruitment
Recruitment is hard. Yet, sometimes it’s not possible to outsource it to someone else.
If you want to go it alone, here’s your easy guide to managing the entire process from start to finish.
Remember, here’s how to not discriminate when you’re recruiting.
Good luck!
Stage 1: Define what you need.
Recruitment is an opportunity for you to hire like-minded people with skills that are missing from your organisation. Remember, what you need today may change as your business grows and it makes sense to consider your business direction when writing your job spec.
Here’s what you need to do:
- List the tasks that need to be done by this person.
- List the hard skills they need to have and would be nice to have
- List the soft skills they need to have and would be nice to have
- List who they will be working with.
- Decide what qualifications they’ll need to have.
- Define how much experience they should have and where.
- What else should they bring to the business?
- What extra talent will you need in the longer term?
- Using the above information, write your detailed person specification.
- Decide what their salary range will be.
- List any other benefits in the package.
- Now you can write your job specification.
Stage 2: Find people who are a good fit.
The wider you cast your net, the more applicants you’ll have but the more work you’ll have to do to find the good ones. Also, remember that a job advert is exactly that – it’s an advert. Write it properly and make sure your company sounds like a good place to work.
This is what you need to do to attract the best:
- Post your comprehensive job specification on your company website.
- Let your LinkedIn network know you’re hiring and post the link.
- If you have an active Google+ page post the advert there too.
- Let all your staff know you’re recruiting.
- Leverage your own contacts – in other words, ask your professional friends if they can recommend anyone.
- Post your job on a job-board such as Monster.co.uk
Once the CVs or recommendations come rolling in, you’ll need a quick way of discounting the unsuitable ones and ranking the good ones. We suggest generating a skills spread-sheet. Along the top you can list all the skills, qualifications and experience by necessity.
You simply rate each CV on your spreadsheet – any person who doesn’t have all the essential skills is immediately rejected, and everyone else can be ranked in order of suitability.
You’ll end up with list of candidates from best to worst and can choose the top five or so for interview.
Stage 3: Getting the most out of interviews.
Before you even begin to interview in person, we recommend to conduct a quick phone interview first, this will help you to weed out non-starters early. Here, you can go through your list of essentials and make sure your candidate has the basics covered, such as their salary expectations. Then you can move on to the face to face interview.
Here are our tips for successful face to face interviews:
- Decide on your questions beforehand; they should be open questions.
- Make sure your questions relate to the skills and experience you want.
- Put the other person at ease – you want to see the ‘real’ them.
- Let them know how long the interview will take and who they will see.
- Make use of personality assessments and aptitude tests.
- Ask your questions, asking for specific examples if they’re being too generic.
- Give them a tour, some people will open up away from the formal setting.
- At the end of the interview, let them know what will happen next.
Second interviews are similar, but the candidate may meet with more people or give a presentation your team. Ensure they know what to expect ahead of time and once again, make sure you prepare your questions properly. With a second interview you can direct questioning towards specific concerns you have from the first interview.
Stage 4: The job offer.
If you’ve made a decision – tell them as soon as possible. You gain nothing by hanging back. If they’re actively job hunting then they might have found something else.
- Call them to give them the news.
- Answer their questions.
- Check references.
- Follow up with a written contract and set a start date.
- Contact them prior to the start date to discuss practicalities.
- Make sure you’ve got everything organised for when they start.
- Make sure they get off to a good start.