Honing Your Employee Recruitment Process

1 of 11 in Series:
The Essentials of Hiring Employees

Recruiting employees is probably the most challenging stage of the hiring process. It's a lot like fishing: Your success at recruiting good employees depends not only on how well you do it, but on where you do it and on what bait you're using. When recruiting new employees for your business, keep these general guidelines in mind:

• Make recruitment an ongoing process. Businesses known for their ability to attract and hire good employees are always recruiting — even if they have no current openings. At the very least, you want to keep an active database of the names and resumés of qualified people.

  
  



• Create a plan. Always have a general idea before you start any recruiting effort of how you intend to conduct and manage the process. A good way to start is to set a deadline for when, ideally, you want to see the position filled. After the deadline is set, you can then establish a sequence of steps, each with its own deadline.

  
  

  No one plan is right for everyone, so keep your options open at all times. Don’t become so locked into one strategy that you become unable to see that it’s not working for you.

  
  



• Be honest: Continually recruiting for your business doesn’t mean overselling it to attract more candidates. If you misrepresent your business’s scope or capabilities, you’ll feed false expectations for employees who decide to join you, leading to later job dissatisfaction once they’re on board. Clearly communicate what your business is, as well as what it wants to become and why you need capable, committed employees to help it reach its goals.

  
  



• Be systematic. If you don’t get your arms around the purely administrative side of recruiting early on in the process, you’re asking for trouble. Before you start the search, set up a protocol — a predetermined, systematic procedure — for how you intend to process applications, resumés, and cover letters.

  
  



• Keep tabs on your progress. Monitor your recruiting efforts on a daily basis and evaluate your progress not only on the number of inquiries you receive, but also on the quality of those inquiries.

  
  



• Be flexible. If the initial response to your recruiting efforts ends up a big zero, you need to have a contingency plan on hand. Be prepared to revisit the job description or even explore the possibility of restructuring the job in an effort to attract more (or better) candidates.

  
  

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Source:http://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/honing-your-employee-recruitment-process.html