As hiring managers, HR pros, and recruiters, we tend to make recruitment far more complex than it needs to be for ourselves and for the people we're hiring. To eliminate the mountain of tasks, and the overwhelm that comes with hiring, let's simplify the entire hiring journey into fundamental steps and make simpler recommendations for the recruitment process.

There are really only 4 steps to the recruitment process.

1. Identifying the need,
2. Sourcing candidates,
3. Evaluating prospective applicants,
4. Making a selection.

Now you may be thinking, "these four steps will never actually acquire top talent for my company," and you'd be right. The recruitment process example above is far from comprehensive, but it encompasses the elements necessary for successful hiring. Once we've removed the complexity, those four steps are all that's truly left.

Identifying the need is usually quite simple, a team leader pushes a request up the chain, the budget is approved, and the role is greenlit. But this is where things begin to get complicated. Now we have to write a job description, post the open role, and go through all of the normal steps to find quality people to fill it.

To simplify this step, reverse engineer what a successful employee would accomplish in that role over the next 12 months, and set that as your baseline. In other words, if you're hiring an AE, who's required to close $150K in deals per quarter to keep their job, what competencies will they be required to have to achieve this? I can guarantee that you'll make the hiring process simpler once you approach the job description from this angle, and you'll also increase your talent pool immensely.

This simplifies the process of sourcing and evaluating candidates as well. Start by sending a simple message and job description out to your entire team, and tell them they have 48 hours to find the best candidates before the role goes live. Incentivize them well for quality referrals since this shortcut could save you $100,000 - $326,000 dollars (the cost of hiring a recruiter, and the cost of a bad hire in tech).

Once you have a pool of qualified candidates, run them through a hiring process that starts with a phone screen, hiring manager interview, team interview, skills assessment, personality tests, executive interview (if required), and reference checks. Think about each step as a funnel and eliminate a certain segment of the pool at each step. We have a complete guide that can walk you through each step in creating an efficient hiring process, click here to see more.

If you do this correctly, you should end up with 2- 3 candidates who are not only qualified, but fit your company's mission, vision, and values - and also fit the team culture. At this point, it's up to you to decide which one to make an offer to.

‍Pillar's interview intelligence software can help you simplify your hiring process making it more efficient and effective. Our pre-baked process and library of interview questions can help you shorten your hiring process and eliminate complexity.

Hiring Process Example

We briefly covered an efficient hiring process in the previous section and if you clicked on the link provided, there's a complete checklist with resources for job descriptions and other tools to help you build the best recruiting process. Hiring process examples vary depending on the size of the company, but here’s a simple example that works for most small-medium-sized businesses.

How to design a better hiring process:

1. Identify the need – Determine job responsibilities, qualifications required, and potential compensation.
2. Source candidates – Post job listings on various platforms such as LinkedIn, Indeed, or Glassdoor; use employee referrals; or contact a recruitment agency.
3. Screen candidates – Conduct an initial phone screen to determine their interest level, skills, and qualifications for the role.
4. Interviews – Schedule in-person interviews with qualified candidates and use assessment tools such as personality tests, skills assessments, or coding challenges as needed.
5. Leverage technology - ATS systems, digital sourcing, Ai, interview intelligence software, and onboarding platforms all make life easier for the candidate and the recruiter by automating and providing helpful insights each step of the way.
6. Reference checks - Check references for each qualified candidate to ensure the accuracy of their resume and qualifications.
7. Make a decision – Once all of the steps have been completed, make a final decision on who should be hired for the role.
8. Offer letter - Draft an offer letter that includes salary information, benefits, and other details.
9. Finalize hiring – Complete all onboarding paperwork, set up new hire systems and accounts, and provide the new employee with resources to succeed in their role.
10. Follow-Up - After the initial onboarding is complete, follow up with them regularly to ensure they’re adjusting well to the culture and have all the resources they need to create a great onboarding experience.
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This is far more comprehensive than the initial list from section one but it's still simple and covers the core milestones that let the candidate and HR team know exactly where an applicant is at in the process.

Ways to Improve Recruitment and Selection Process

As technology advances, our society moves at an increasingly rapid pace. This is growing exponentially almost every single day. Meaning, that new hiring trends, technologies, platforms, and ideologies will continue to reshape recruiting in the future. To keep things simple and eliminate overwhelm, here are some suggestions for the recruitment and selection process to eliminate overwhelm even in the face of exponential growth.
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1. Realize that people desire connection and validation more than anything else when they’re job hunting.
Take the time to build rapport and foster a genuine relationship with candidates. Pay attention to details that you share in common with them - like their alma mater or influencers you both follow. Ask questions that give you a better understanding of who they are, what motivates them, and why they want to work for your company. These little relationship-building blocks will pay dividends as you build an agile team.
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2. Take advantage of technology by leveraging AI-driven technologies.
Data drives the world right now. It gives us access to insights we'd never be able to see on our own with our limited field of view. Using a tech stack that's fully integrated beginning with sourcing, then ATS, interview intelligence software, video interview platforms, and onboarding, you'll see patterns emerge that help you make better hiring decisions.

Step #2 is one of the biggest ways to improve the recruitment and selection process as technology can take hours of work each week off your plate to focus on Step #1.

Recruitment Process Improvement Plan

If you're still reading this, it's probably because your recruitment process isn't generating the results you'd like it to, and you'd like to see something change. This section will cover a recruitment process improvement plan that can help you identify problems and make the changes necessary to fix them.
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How to design a better hiring process:
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I like to use a first principles approach. In section #1, I broke down the hiring process into four steps in order to eliminate anything that wasn't absolutely necessary. This is step #1. Once you have the core steps, look for areas of improvement for recruiters, hiring managers, and HR teams. These can be task elimination, bias coaching, accessing interview intelligence questions as prompts to save preparation time, and the automation of tasks that don't absolutely have to be done by humans.
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Now, look for failure points in your current process. This starts by asking hard questions like, "Do we truly have the workforce we need to follow our product map and growth plan?" or, "How do we improve our recruitment strategies with the minimal resources we have access to currently?" You can always take steps to improve your hiring process, but it starts by asking good questions, coming up with a hypothesis, and creating an honest feedback loop.
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At this point, you can again ask questions to prove or shift your hypothesis - for instance, "How does the recruitment and selection process improve workforce competence and team culture?"
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Finally, make sure to measure the success of your recruitment process improvement plan. This can be done through feedback surveys, monthly reviews, or by tracking KPIs like the time-to-hire and hire/no-hire ratio. By following this process, you'll have a much better handle on where your current recruitment and selection process and be able to adjust to the needs of your organization.

How to Improve the Hiring Process

An effective hiring process is one that invites top talent into conversations, optimizes screening and interview processes, and results in successful hires who become enthusiastic ambassadors for the organization. To make this happen, companies should focus on making improvements to the five core components of their hiring process: job postings, candidate sourcing, interviewing and assessments, offers, and onboarding.
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How to design a better hiring process:
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Job Postings: When people search for job postings, they want to find ones that are relevant and easy to understand. Something we didn't discuss earlier is that companies should make sure that their job postings are optimized for search engines and incorporate keywords relevant to the industry. This way they're easily searchable and show up at the top of SERPs.
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Candidate Sourcing: This component of the hiring process involves a lot of research to find the right candidates for open positions. Before you post to Indeed or another large job board, look locally at the resources for your VC, city, industry, or title. For example - High Alpha is an Indianapolis-based VC that also lists all the open roles within its portfolio and studio brands. Top talent already works for these SaaS startups so it becomes a network of connections to source from.
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Interviewing and Assessments: Interviews should be designed to evaluate the technical skills, cultural fit, and critical thinking of a candidate. Questions should go beyond what's found on resumes to get an accurate assessment of all three. You might also want to consider A/B testing your interview questions so that you can see which ones are driving the best results and identifying great hires.

These are just a few of the steps we've used to help companies who've asked us how to improve the hiring process. If you'd like to see more, schedule a demo to chat with someone from our team. At Pillar, we're here to help you make better hires and have built a library of resources to help you do just that!

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