1. Review your current hiring process

Homerun.co
Aug 25, 2017 · 5 min read

‘Review your current hiring proces’ is the first chapter of Understand, the first book of The Hiring Playbooks, 5 ebooks that will turn all your hires into wins. Created by the Homerun team.

This article will help you find and attract the right people to grow your team. Make hiring faster and more efficient.

Image by Studio Spass

Introduction
Before you start improve your hiring process, you first need to know where you’re at. That means launching a systematic review of how your company currently attracts, hires, and onboards new employees.

You’ll see exactly where you need to improve, learn what’s working and what isn’t, and gain a deeper understanding of your company’s current hiring culture. Basically, you’ll get all the info you need to build a really great hiring process.

That’s all about to change for you and your team. A better hiring process will help you hire better, starting now, leading to more success down the road. Hooray!

How do I review my hiring process?

With a simple 4 step process:

1. Identify pain points

AKA, which part(s) of the hiring process do you struggle with most?

  • Attracting applicants?
  • Finding qualified people?
  • Providing a good candidate experience?
  • Making the right choices about who to hire?
  • All of the above?

To find your pain points: layout your process, highlight the places you think you’re struggling, then ask yourself why this is. Go through all the potential causes and rate them on a scale of 1 (Really good) to 5 (Really bad).

For any step that doesn’t score a 1, ask yourself why, and think of how you could improve it. Document your ratings, reasonings and potential solutions.

If your selection stage is your weak spot, that might be because of the system you use to review candidates. If that’s the case, you should assess your system and, if it rates poorly, find a solution.

Here’s Homerun’s co-founder, Willem van Roosmalen, with some helpful advice:

“Homerun streamlines your hiring workflow so you don’t have to handle hundreds of emails. Using one platform makes it easy to communicate with team and candidates faster and more effectively. You probably already use something like Mailchimp for newsletters and Basecamp for projects, so why not use Homerun for hiring?”

2. Reflect

It’s easy to get wrapped up in the excitement of moving forward, but taking time to reflect on your company’s previous hiring efforts and, more specifically, how the people you’ve hired are working out, will save you a lot of time and frustration in the future.

Start by considering the last five people who joined your team. It’s time to be ruthless. Knowing what you now know about their skill and personalities, how many of them would you hire again?

Be brutally honest with these assessments and make sure you provide examples and explanations to justify your opinions. This will help you understand what it is that attracts people to your company, and what kind of people make for successful employees. It will also force you to take a hard look at how much your hiring process aligns with your company’s values and goals.

Thomas Moes, co-founder Homerun:

“Everyone agrees that talent is the number one asset that defines the success of a company, both now and in the future, but people rarely see the connection between talent and recruitment.”

3. Check your numbers

You probably have a lot of feelings about how hiring is handled at your company. It’s worth balancing out these intuitions by checking the numbers to get a data-backed understanding of where your hiring process stands.

Even if you don’t have sophisticated hiring software, you can still extract useful data from your previous hiring endeavours. For example, you can usually find the figures necessary for estimating your average time-to-hire (the average amount of time it takes you to fill a job opening) by delving into your email/and or messaging apps.

To calculate time-to-hire, look at your recent hires and note the number of days that it took from starting the hiring process until the job offer was accepted. Do this for each job, then add up all of the day-counts and divide the result by the number of hires. Once you’ve done this, you’ve got your time-to-hire!

Collect all the data that you find relevant to your hiring process, and compare those figures to your perceived pain points and reflections. Congratulations: you’ve now got an objective picture of your hiring process!

4. Be transparent

At Homerun, we firmly believe that hiring is a team sport. The team that hires together, works together and pulls together, will also win together. Everyone needs to be on the same page, and the more you involve your colleagues in this process, the more they’ll understand how hiring works, the more of a team spirit you’ll foster, and the better results you’ll get now and in the future. We’ll probably say this a few times (sorry) but here we go: Always. Be. Open. With. Your. Team.

And now you’re about to get your first opportunity to involve them in this process.

First of all, create a document with all of the findings, numbers, and notes from your hiring process review — then share it with your team. Don’t forget to provide a little context, a quick explanation of the contents, and permission to comment.

What do I do next?

Read the other chapters of Hiring Playbook #1 Understand.

All Images by Studio Spass.

The Hiring Playbooks

A step by step guide that will turn all your hires into wins, created by the Homerun team

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Homerun.co

Written by

Hiring is a team sport. Companies like Wetransfer, Bugaboo & Tidal use Homerun to hire great people. Follow us for inspiration on The Art of Work.

The Hiring Playbooks

A step by step guide that will turn all your hires into wins, created by the Homerun team

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