How to Identify your 2021 Hiring Needs and Fill them Quickly

Everything you need to know to build your team just right

Maryann Superlano

Published in

Recrooit

5 min readFeb 2, 2021

How to Identify a Hiring Need

An adequate, effective, and valid hiring process represents a step-by-step systematic procedure for hiring a new employee. Every hiring process should have a meticulously prepared structure and some unavoidable steps regardless of the size, industry, and arrangements within a company. The first inevitable step of a hiring process is identifying a hiring need. Knowing the actual recruitment necessities eases the entire process, ensures a positive outcome, helps recruiters find a suitable candidate, and fulfill short-term and long-term company goals.

Hiring process — steps

Every organization commences the process by identifying its talent necessities. Suppose they are facing some internal shortages, issues, or lack of specific skills, knowledge, and expertise. In that case, employers usually choose to hire new employees who can fulfill their business needs and match their requirements, values, and culture.

A successful hiring process consists of several crucial steps:

Identifying a hiring need
Developing a recruitment strategy
Writing a job description
Advertising the position by posting the job description to job boards, various social media channels, and other valuable places job seekers frequently visit
Sourcing candidates and recruiting them
Reviewing the obtained applications or solid referrals
Conducting phone or online screenings (performing the initial interviews)
Interviewing process (its length and steps vary depending on the company and its hiring goals, preferences, needs, and recruitment plan)
Background check and reference check (not every organization includes this step into their hiring process; still, it is considered by many hiring teams and managers that this step represents another relevant insight)
Decision making
Sending a job offer to the most qualified and fitting candidates + negotiating with candidates
Hiring (the administrative part that comes after a candidate accepts the job offer)
Onboarding a new employee

Identifying a hiring need

The positive outcome, financial benefits, and reputation of a business depend mainly on its employees and their skills. For this reason, the hiring team or the employer must identify their recruitment needs timely and accurately. It is essential to take the time to look into the real hiring needs and examine them now and then. Before you choose to start recruiting, make sure to have all the facts, priorities, goals, aspirations, and potential problems in mind. Here’s a check-list that can help a company know its hiring needs.

6 steps to identify a hiring need

There are several accurate ways and steps to identify and fulfill hiring needs. It is important to be dedicated, analytical, and to be realistic while deducing regarding hiring necessities. The most efficient way to achieve hiring goals is to start from the beginning.

Step one: Requirements

Being thorough, analytical, precise, and realistic regarding your expectations, needs, and demands is essential when contemplating hiring. If you require a qualified new team member, make sure to have the list of necessary hard skills and soft skills, experience, background, and desirable candidates’ aspirations in order. Before you start searching and recruiting, you must define these facts to know what exactly you are looking for. Requirements and fundamental responsibilities associated with a role are significant. You would also need to distinguish preferences from the “must-haves” to properly inform the candidates and job seekers, and to help recruiters focus on what matters the most.

Step two: Job Description

Once you have internally agreed on what your hiring aims are and you’ve discussed the candidate persona with recruiters and members of a hiring team, you should write it all down and promote it. Writing a job description is a tremendously important part of every recruitment process. A job description must have a clearly defined job title, a job overview, an intro with the company, a list of principal responsibilities, daily tasks, and required skills. It should also inform the candidates regarding the benefits your company offers. In an ideal scenario, it should contain the salary range you are willing to provide for a specific job.

Step three: Finances

Even if you choose not to be fully transparent regarding the salary range, your recruitment team needs to know about it. Before the recruiting starts, it is much necessary to look into the market, gather the information, research other similar companies, and learn about candidates’ expectations regarding salaries. The salary range varies depending on different factors, and seniority level is among the most important ones. Every new skill you add to the job description, and each year of relevant professional experience you seek in candidates, will most likely increase the financial remuneration they would ask for. The compensation you can provide to a new hire must be aligned with their knowledge and skill-sets, it should be competitive, and yet it must not burn all your cash. Financial planning should be done carefully both on this side and the cost per hire side on your end.

Step four: Evaluation

Before hiring new staff, make sure to estimate the current state of affairs accurately. You should know about your most reliable features, the advantages of your team, and the skills and expertise you already have on board. Every team has its strengths and gaps. If your in-house team lacks a specific skill or there’s a domain they are not familiar with, the center of your recruiters’ attention should be finding an individual or several new people who would contribute to those particular areas. When you evaluate the current situation of your workforce, prioritize. Look for candidates who can cover the most significant parts of what now falls short.

Step five: Short-term and long-term goals

When you start considering how to enhance current projects and how to plan the incoming projects, it’s the ideal time to think about your hiring needs and separate them into two categories. These categories represent hiring for short-term collaboration (usually project-based) and long-term collaboration. Short-term cooperation can involve freelancers or finding an outsourcing company that will provide specific services and takes charge of some duties instead of the in-house team. These two options lead to different results, and they require different approaches and separate recruitment strategies.