Job offers are changing. Given the diversity of candidate profiles and the expectations companies have of their talent, the recruitment process needs to be aligned with certain principles. A good hire is a capital investment that ensures a company’s longevity. Here are a few key points to help you improve your hiring process and attract top performers.
What is the recruitment process?
Recruitment is essential to a company’s survival, and includes all actions taken to find candidates with the desired skills and qualifications.
Required for certain jobs, the hiring process comprises several stages: pre-selection (commitment to hire, preferred candidates), preparation and circulation of job applications, receipt and classification of CVs, selection of candidates and formal hiring.
In such a process, soft skills (a candidate’s behavioral, social and human competencies) also come into play. Knowing how to promote them is important, but so is developing them to meet recruiters’ expectations. Why focus on soft skills in recruitment?
Why should you optimize your recruitment process?
Improving your hiring process maximizes the possibility of finding the perfect candidate. The quest for improvement drives corporate human resources officers to inventiveness and innovation in the way they recruit. A clear definition of your needs and a unique approach to candidates, who are above all levers of your employer brand, guarantee a transparent and successful recruitment process.
Steps to follow to optimize recruitment
Step 1: Ask yourself about the hiring process
Comfort is generally taken as a guarantee of security. To be recruited is not to put oneself in danger, but to seize the opportunity to be challenged and to change. That’s why we need to take a step back and analyze our practices.
To do this, you first need to ask yourself the right questions:
- What steps in the hiring process could be improved? How can we improve the quality of the application received or the candidate hired?
- Which source performs best? Which do (top) candidates prefer?
- The ROI of recruitment tools and sources can be calculated. What are you looking for in candidates?
- Do recruiters agree on the desired standards? Are the right tools available to ensure success at every stage of the process?
The answers to these questions are the prerequisites for making changes to improve hiring. You can complete the list of criteria that you find fundamental.
Step 2: Leverage your corporate image
The image you project is generally proof of the trust you place in your company. The candidate experience you put forward is crucial and should not be trivialized. More and more web showcases are giving value to companies. The first thing to go is the careers page.
According to some studies, it takes an average of 41 clicks to apply for a job. A lengthy application process often scares off the best candidates.
However, when it comes to page design and animation, companies understand the stakes and are more concerned than ever about their brand image. So, to reassure candidates about the company’s values, and/or to align them with those values, it’s necessary to open the company’s doors before the candidate even crosses the threshold. Facilities, offers, employee presentations and testimonials, etc. Video comes into its own.
There are other ways to promote your image, such as a Welcome to the Jungle page that helps candidates find jobs. It’s a great window for candidates to get to know you better. They want to get to know the company and their future job. Hence the importance of content and important specific details, such as employee videos. Come out the best spokesperson for your company.
Step 3: Create clear, precise offers and make them easily accessible
Writing a job offer is very important. There can be no doubt as to the nature of the profile sought and the positions to be filled. Candidates are generally irritated if the job ad fails to mention the name of the company (all too often it reads “a local company or structure is looking for”). Beware of frustration. Any self-respecting company must have a name and accreditation.
Basically, they want to know more about their future employer, and don’t want to be taken for a Swiss Army knife. Consequently, job descriptions are an important element on which all efforts should be focused.
What’s more, according to the barometer above, finding a job offer on a CareerSpace shouldn’t be an obstacle for candidates likely to apply successfully if the position matches their profile. Career site chatbots are a great way to guide them, find out more about you and the opportunity, and even involve them directly in the selection process.
Stage 4: Candidate selection: video selection
The advantages of a video interview are manifold. Not only does it save you time, energy and money, but it also helps you to appreciate the candidate’s personality and overall skills, such as soft skills, which are not recognizable on a CV. You can then determine whether all this fits in with the company culture, the group and the target position. Pre-selection enables you to quickly put together a shortlist of the best candidates: representing those we consider relevant to meet.
It also encourages the involvement of players usually absent from the pre-selection stages. This enhances team collaboration and commitment, especially for managers who need to learn the best strategies for optimal video evaluation.
Step 5: Personalize your interview speech
Personalizing your pitch gives the candidate a certain value. In other words, it shows that they’re not just an extra in a pack, but that you’re interested in their background and personality. A successful job interview means noticing abilities and creating a certain affinity. The human factor remains the dominant priority between the candidate and the recruiter.
Step 6: Design a good questionnaire
This point is closely linked to the previous one. You need to personalize your pitch by asking pertinent questions that enable you to obtain essential answers. Spending time circling around the main question, challenging candidates on topics unrelated to the desired functions, or outright addressing questions that touch on the personal side of things can irritate a valuable talent and waste their time.
A good question is one that matches the criteria you’re trying to assess, depending on who you’re talking to. By habit, recruiters end up asking the same questions all the time, often at the risk of straying from the essential point: suitability for a given position. So be careful when creating interview questionnaires. Are all the questions useful? Can you assess all the criteria required? Taking the time to think about this will ensure your effectiveness. Potential detection: a sure bet
Step 7: Highlight case studies
In fact, it’s wiser to plan practical exercises (business cases) that put candidates in real-life situations (simulating a sale, answering phone calls, etc.). Candidates can easily lie on their CVs or sell themselves with fictitious qualities. However, it’s not so easy to lie in a real situation.
In real-life situations, it’s also possible to reveal specific talents that you wouldn’t expect and that only stand out when simulating an exercise. Here, both skills and experience are expressed. You can use Pack Office to set up your own business cases within a dedicated tool, making it easier to analyze results and gauge candidates against each other. And don’t hesitate to discover the Workplace Personality Test.
Step 8: Recruitment and integration
It’s important to remember that recruitment is not just about signing a contract. The effectiveness of a recruitment is measured over time. You can be proud of having signed a rare gem to your company. The real job is to make them want to stay long enough.
So you need to make sure that you are enthusiastic about having them in your organization, that they fit in well with the group, and that they are properly welcomed. To give yourself the best chance of success as a recruiter, you need to put the spotlight on the candidate experience. It’s up to you to make the most of this experience to improve the quality of the recruitment process. How do you know if your recruitment process is the right one?
Corporate recruitment methods
Companies use a variety of methods when recruiting. These include :
Traditional recruitment methods
Aptitude test
Aptitude tests assess candidates on jobs that match the skills required for the position. They include not only comprehension and analytical tests, but also psycho-technical recruitment and logic tests.
Personality tests can be used to assess a candidate’s interpersonal, emotional and positive qualities. They are very useful for refining a candidate’s knowledge of how he or she would react in a specific situation.
New recruitment methods
- Job boards dedicated to employment
Pôle Emploi, APEC and Indeed are just some of them. In fact, today there are many job boards dedicated to job search. Candidates often have accounts to receive direct e-mail alerts on jobs that interest them. You can also submit unsolicited applications to companies that interest you. For this reason, it’s important for recruiters to adapt to this new way of hiring. You need to be present on these platforms to advertise and source relevant profiles.
In addition, a number of software programs are available to help recruiters manage their advertising globally. This makes it easier to make a change at once and across all channels.
- LinkedIn and social networks
Candidates can not only be on social networks with personal accounts, but also have professional accounts by creating profiles on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. They are able to follow companies and share content on professional profiles and groups. So as a recruiter, it’s worth reaching out to them on these platforms. You can promote ads and source profiles using the Recruter application. LinkedIn Recruter offers a variety of search tools that target specific profiles. You can also get directly involved by contacting candidates in your network. This application can be harmonized with in-house recruitment software to better manage applications.
- Video interview
This approach enables recruiters to assess the candidate’s body language, the relevance of their answers, their demeanor, voice, intonation, stress management and much more in just a few minutes…
Video interviewing is part of the new recruitment trend, and offers numerous advantages for both candidates and recruiters. On the one hand, it saves time, requires no travel and is always possible. It also gives all candidates a fair chance. As a result, they are all judged by the same question. There are many applications that can be used to conduct video interviews. These include EasyRECrue, VisioTalent, InterviewApp…
- Recruitment by co-option
Co-opted recruitment is a recruitment technique that involves recommending someone in your network for a job. Specifically, you may recommend former colleagues and friends with the skills you’re looking for to fill vacancies in your company.
- Simulation-based recruitment method (SRM)
Also known as MRS, simulation-based recruitment is a method that dispenses with CVs and relies solely on the aptitude of potential candidates. It is increasingly offered by organizations and is designed to be as non-discriminatory as possible. This simulation-based recruitment method is based on a set of tasks to be carried out for the job, and aims to identify candidates whose technical or behavioral skills (soft skills) are perfectly suited to the position. Recruitment test: the advantages of recruiting without a CV.
Issues arising from the recruitment process
For the company
Recruiting new employees is first and foremost a strategic issue for a company. Finding people with the technical and behavioral skills the company needs to achieve its objectives is already a sign of success.
Every employee contributes to shaping the company’s image and communicating it to customers, suppliers and partners. Consequently, well-selected employees are conducive to the company’s internal and external relations.
The recruitment process enables you to accurately and transparently select the best candidates for the positions to be filled, the organization and its culture. It also gives companies an insight into the quality of the employer brand. Combine qvt and recruitment to create a complementary relationship.
For the applicant
There are many issues involved in the hiring process, even for candidates. They have to check whether the job and the company are right for them. They’ll be looking for information on the company’s mission, as well as the desire for day-to-day activities and salary satisfaction. Once they’ve shown an interest in the company, they’ll be better able to project themselves into it and choose it as their next employer. Candidates can also take an online personality test to find out more about themselves before committing to the hiring process.
The recruitment process is also an opportunity to get an idea of the employee experience through the candidate experience. If this is negative, it’s unlikely that the candidate will be enthusiastic about joining the company.
Interviews are an opportunity for employers to find out whether a candidate is a good fit for the job on offer, and a means of conveying a positive image of their companies to applicants. Recruiting new employees who fit the bill is far from an easy task. That’s why there are a number of steps you can take to optimize the recruitment process and find qualified personnel for every position.