Sorting through talent pools to identify the ideal candidates for the job can be daunting. But if you improve your candidate selection process, it can bring your company substantial rewards. Start hiring better today!
What’s a Candidate Selection Process?
Candidate selection describes the process of finding the right candidate for a role in your workplace when you are hiring someone. It includes the entire process of finding potential employee options, considering potential candidates, and making the final decision about whom to hire. This can include the process of receiving applications, resume screening and skills assessments, screening calls, interviews, background checks, and more.
Candidate Selection Process Steps
1. The Job Application
What’s important here is that the qualifying questions in your application forms line up with what success looks like in the role you want to fill. It’s also important to test the forms. Over 70% of applicants abandon a form if it takes longer than fifteen minutes to complete.
2. Screening of Resumes
What’s important here is efficiency. Going through resumes manually to identify the best prospective employees is not only time-consuming but also ineffective. Our natural biases can cloud our judgment and make finding the right quality of hire challenging.
For this reason, applicant tracking software that aligns with your hiring strategy is essential. It can help you shortlist qualified candidates without bias.
3. Skills Assessments
The right hiring strategy can help you complete assessments of the skills of candidates that pass the screening phase after their initial application. Cognitive ability tests and other important skill assessments can be completed with the help of experts like Mint Kulca to keep natural biases in check.
4. Call Screening
Call screenings are similar to phone interviews, but the call plays a more strategic role. It helps you better assess the qualities and skills possessed by the screening candidates. They form an essential part of the recruiting process.
5. Face to Face Interviews
Interviews are an essential part of the process, since meeting the individual face to face can give the hiring team insights into potential hires. If your hiring strategy is set up correctly, interviews do not have to take time or be an uncomfortable experience. With the right strategy and execution, they can help lead you directly to the best hire for your unique situation.
6. Background Checks & Reference Checks
Background checks and reference checks are vital. Person to person interviews may give you a picture of the person painted by themselves, but speaking to previous managers, clients, and colleagues can often give you more insight into their character and work ethic. It’s important not to skip this step to avoid a bad hire.
Why Is an Effective Candidate Selection Process Important?
Finding the best person for the job is the goal of your recruitment process and candidate selection. Someone who fits in with your company culture, is highly skilled and motivated, and shares your core values will most likely contribute more to your organisation. They’re known as top performers, and they are coveted by all businesses.
It may surprise you to know that many companies hire underperforming employees even though they want only top performers. As a result, their bottom line can be impacted. A team of top performers gets more done and helps a business reach their goals.
If your candidate selection process isn’t aligned with your organisation’s strategic goals, it could result in a bad hire. Bad hires don’t only affect the productivity of a team; they also cost you money. The cost of the onboarding process is only the beginning.
Your recruitment efforts need to align with your business objectives in order to be successful. It starts with a strong recruitment strategy. Thereafter, effective and consistent execution of the strategy by hiring managers and the entire team can help you hire better more often.
Where Do Many Hiring Processes Fail?
Many hiring processes fail in efficiency, assessing candidates’ skills adequately, and by disregarding the candidate experience. A lack of efficiency in your process equates to wasting resources, like valuable time and money. It could also mean being too slow to act.
When we allow our biases to play into selecting from a list of qualified candidates, the result can be less than optimal. It is essential to understand what success looks like in the role and to build a strategy that will deliver results. Finally, it is important not to disregard the experience of the candidate, so that they maintain a positive perception of your company or brand.
How to Improve Your Candidate Selection Process
By addressing these issues, you can improve your hiring process so that you hire top performers more often. Here are steps you can take to address these issues:
1. Process Efficiency
To increase efficiency in your process, it’s important to be clear in your job posting about what the role requires and to lay it out plainly for applicants. You can also improve the flow of your form to improve the experience and get more suitable candidates in the process.
For example, qualifying questions should appear at the top of the form. That way, applicants don’t have to spend time filling in a lengthy form, only to learn later the position isn’t suited to their situation. Finally, do everything you can to keep the process simple and avoid over-complication.
2. Effective Screening Calls
You can make the most of your screening calls by being prepared and asking predetermined questions. Don’t squander the opportunity this step of the recruitment process presents to get to know the candidate. The results of this call should influence your interview selection and even your hiring decision.
It’s important that questions remain the same for all candidates and that answers are noted down to keep the process fair and unbiased. Your hiring team will then be able to compare notes afterwards to inform their further decisions on the application.
3. Accurate Skills Assessments
Many interviewers are faced with strange assessment tools and questions that don’t necessarily give a good picture of their capabilities. Instead of relying on outdated methods, you can speak to experts about a skills assessment strategy that will help you narrow your list of candidates accurately and efficiently.
You can consider hard skills and soft skills and even technical skill when assessing each potential applicant. Some applicant tracking systems come in useful at this point, offering screening tools that can inform your review process. Talk to us today about recruiting software and the best strategy for assessing skills in your candidate selection process.
4. Effective Interviews
The former steps in your recruiting efforts can help make your interview process more efficient by helping you select a low number of potential candidates to interview. You can also save time by doing video interviews, a practice that has become very normal since the pandemic. Finally, it is essential that your hiring strategy informs the interview process.
From the questions asked to the direction of small talk, each element needs to be planned strategically and executed accurately to get the best results. It’s important to avoid biased decisions by remaining focused on the goal of the interview. You can plan elements such as the people who need to be present, how long the interview will be, where and when it will happen, what candidates should bring, the questions, and important things to look for beforehand.
5. A Positive Candidate Experience
It’s important to leave even candidates you don’t choose feeling valued. Their candidate experience should, therefore, be positive. Part of improving a candidate’s experience with your company or brand is frequent, clear, friendly communication.
6. Simplify and Automate
Yes, you can automate a lot of the steps in the candidate selection process. Automation can often have the added benefit of simplifying the process, too. You can also reduce costs and improve efficiency by using automated tools for resume screening, performance evaluation, skill assessments, and tracking applicants.
Be careful to ensure the hiring process isn’t entirely automated, so that your brand reputation doesn’t get tarnished by a cold, impersonal experience. A good mix of automated tools and careful strategy is most likely to deliver the results you need.
Smart Candidate Selection Starts Here
You can improve the quality of hire and reduce recruitment costs with an optimised candidate selection process. Although identifying the right person from a list of quality candidates can be challenging, a streamlined process and strategy will help you hire top performers more often.
Let us help you improve your candidate screening process by aligning your recruitment goals with the entire hiring process, from application to the interview phase and more. We can help you hire top performers 90% of the time! Learn more.
