Preparation is the most critical part of the recruitment process. Before you start hiring, you need to find the answers to “Why?” and “Who?” questions.
These answers come along together. If you can determine why you need a new hire, it will be easier to define the ideal candidate persona; in other words, who to hire.
Knowing why and who to hire, now you can write the job description. The job description should be attractive, readable, and engaging.
The last step of the preparation is creating a recruitment plan. Decide which strategy you will be following, choose your team, and delegate responsibilities. When everything is clear, you are ready for the next step: Sourcing.
Let’s look at these steps once again and dig deeper into each one of them:
- Identify your needs.
- Determine the success definition and measurement
- Define the ideal candidate persona.
- Write the job description.
- Create a recruitment plan.
Identify your needs
In most cases, you will be hiring for the following reasons:
- To fill a vacated position.
- To manage a team’s workload.
- To expand the reach of organizational tasks.
No matter what the reason for your hiring need is, to find an answer for the “Why?” question, you need to analyze the workflow and the gaps.
That being said, identifying your needs is a never-ending task. Therefore, you need continuously to:
- Figure out the gaps in the current team. Ask yourself if you can solve these with a better delegation of tasks or a new hire. Check if you have further needs in terms of ability, performance, or personality.
- Keep track of your team’s tasks in terms of inputs vs. outputs. See if there is an increase in workload that needs to be addressed by hiring.
- Regularly analyze performance and make a list of missing qualities, qualifications, skills, and proficiencies that you need to add to your team. You will have a better track of a new hire’s need, whether changing a team member or adding a new one.
- Be aware of the time for scaling the team.
Every time you recognize a hiring need, start the process before it is too late. Write down all the needed tasks and responsibilities; you will use them while writing the job description.
Determine the success definition and measurement
How do you intend to measure success for the position? What KPIs do you need to be able to call the person in this role successful? How will you measure it?
When you understand what a new hire will need to do to be successful, you can look for relevant qualities in potential candidates. Likewise, when candidates know what a position requires, they can honestly evaluate if they’re willing and able to meet those standards.
As an example, if you are hiring a Customer Success Manager, you can determine success as:
- Keep the Churn minimum.
- Drive a constant increase in Monthly Recurring Revenue.
- Decrease Customer Acquisition Cost.
If we put it into a sentence: Your company is looking for a Customer Success Manager who will keep the Churn minimum, secure a constant increase in Monthly Recurring Revenue, and decrease the Customer Acquisition Cost.
Your measurement for this can be keeping the current numbers in the onboarding process, which is generally 90 days, and then setting up goals. It is important to stay reasonable and not to believe in magic.
Combining these first two steps, make a list of tasks that will be performed by the new hire to reach the success goals.
Define the ideal candidate persona
In this step, you will be answering the “Who?” question.
Identify the must-haves and nice-to-haves in terms of skills, education, experience, characteristics, and physical facts, along with your budget for an attractive salary.
Being completed the “Identify your need” step, you now know the new hire’s responsibilities. Therefore, you can start by writing down the skills needed to be successful in this position.
Next, determine the education and experience needed for the necessary skills and company culture.
As physical facts, you can include location to help your decision-making process.
Think about the traits that you love and dislike in your team before setting up the new hire’s characteristic needs. Narrow them as much as you can, use the most loved ones and the opposite of the most disliked ones. Even though it is not that easy, if you follow the simple loved-disliked rule, you will have a better idea of what kind of person you want to work with in the future.
Deciding the salary or salary range for the role is an essential part of the preparation step.
- If you already decided on must-haves and nice-to-haves, the salary range should be from X (lower) to Y(top), where X is for those who have only none of the nice-to-haves, and Y for those who have all nice-to-haves in addition to must-haves.
- If you have specific needs and do not consider any nice-to-have, you should have a particular salary for the role, but not a range.
Write the job description.
Writing a job description is about setting the right expectations and attracting suitable candidates. That being said, before starting this step, let’s have a look at some facts (Source: LinkedIn):
- Shorter job posts receive 8.4% more applications per view than average.
- 61% of candidates say the salary range is the most critical part of the job description, but don’t let it outshine the opportunity.
- Only 28% of candidates want to learn about your company culture in the job description.
- If your job’s tone doesn’t match your culture, applicants are 2-4x less likely to apply.
Keeping all in mind, you need a trending structure for the job description that will keep it short, focus on what matters, engaging, and joyful to read. In other words, keep the BS out of your job description.
Bonus Tip: Record a video, and address to candidates. Keep it short, 1-2 minutes, engaging, joyful, and most importantly, intimate. Include the link at the top of the job description. ( If you use YouTube, upload the video to your channel as unlisted, then you can see how many times it has been viewed and more insights)
Here is the template that I use as a job description (Job Description Template – Google Docs):
- Title: Clear and attractive.
- Summary: The video, success definition, and salary-salary range, the hiring process
- About The Position:
- Main objectives/KPIs
- Tasks
- Working hours
- Tools being used
- Salary information
- About The Candidate:
- Skills
- Personality
- Requirements ( location, education, etc.)
- About The Company:
- Mission
- Vision
- Website
- Social links
- Conclusion and CTA
Create a recruitment plan.
Creating a plan and delegating the tasks will save you time and energy. First things first, decide how the process will look like. Define the steps and, if possible, set deadlines.
The good news is that you already know your hiring needs, you have defined the ideal person to hire, and your job description is ready.
The next thing you need to decide is: When?
Make it official in your plan that the new hire will start at a specific date. From that date to backward, determine the process and timeline.
While there are many approaches to the recruitment process, I find the following best:
- Sourcing
- Screening
- Initial test and resume
- 1st round Interview
- Assessment
- 2nd round Interview
- Trial Period
- Hiring
- Onboarding
Let’s say you will go with the process above, and you want the new hire to start eight weeks from now. Next, set the timeline and delegate the tasks to your team members.
Now that the plan is done, you are ready to push the start button.
