Perfect Your Hiring Process: Five Tips to Building the Right Team

For start-ups and entrepreneurs especially, the hiring process can be a grueling period in a company’s life. Those first few weeks where you’re trying to look for great talent but are also desperate for a workforce of any level calls for an immediate trimming and systemization of a proper hiring process.

Getting people to sign up to a job with your company can be tricky when you’re just starting out – and it gets even harder when you’re looking for quality people. But with a few tips, you can get out of the rut and into a great kick-off for your business, and in the process build a team you can be truly proud of. So, read up on these tips and get to hiring!

Diversity of thought and perspective is essential for a high functioning team.

Announce Your Hiring Process

The first real step to getting the applications flowing is to announce your hiring process. The goal is to spread it around everywhere – on social media, on your company’s pages, on your website, through your personal contacts, and on classified websites. According to Capterra, employers who used social media saw a 49 percent improvement in candidate quality. LinkedIn is an essential place to look for competent candidates, as well.

Then, once you’ve got an even spread, concentrate on industry-specific targets – go on Alexa.com or an equivalent and look up the top passion blogs in your industry, then casually ask the blog’s owner if they’d like to help promote the industry by giving the company a shout-out. If your company appeals to the right influencers – especially those who are truly passionate about your niche – you may get one! Forums are a good place to look as well, especially in the tech industry.

Choose Your Right Candidate Source

The next step to getting candidates is to choose a source. Candidate sources come in many shapes and forms – one is through spreading the announcement of a recruiting process, like above, but another is to use one of the multitudes of common online candidate sources to grab the attention of eager talent.

For a nominal fee, you can submit an ad for your job opening to several beacons of freelancer job offers – websites like Monster, Naukri, Indeed and Freelancer.com are all great recruiting tools, and some of them offer free ad spots as well. Niche-specific job portals are also a great place to go for candidates – ask around on forums for the one most writers/graphic artists/developers/managers use to find work.

Use Surveys to Prescreen Candidates

Surveys make for a great prescreening method to weed out any candidates that won’t meet your requirements. Survey services can help you sort out candidate survey results by level of qualification, or by specific answers. This will save you the time of going through each and every application and resume, instead letting you focus only on the applications that made it through the prescreening survey.

Then, the actual screening comes into play. An obvious litmus test is to require a custom trial project to prove a candidates competency, although you can elect to do that prior to the interview if you’d like to. Otherwise, you can send out a trial project to ensure you’re only interviewing candidates with proven competency.

Streamline Your Interviews Through Video

Face-to-face interviews are a must for any quality hiring process – even one that recruits freelance talent from overseas. The solution to spending a lot of time and even more money in staging an on-site interview is by utilizing any number of premium video conferencing services, such as those offered by Blue Jeans.

By getting yourself a premium service, you’re often guaranteed a secure connection, a private data center for all communications and file transfers, and several infinitely useful features such as HD screen sharing, file sharing, video plays and presentations during a video call. This, and other reasons has boosted video calling use in the hiring world, as the WSJ points out – 10 percent of survey respondents used video calling during hiring in 2010, and just about a year later, that number jumped to 42 percent.

A tip during interviews – make sure you’re asking the right questions. Questions like “where do you see yourself in five years” or “what can you do for this company/why do you want this job” are vague and overused. Hit the spot with your questions, such as by asking a candidate what his or her greatest talent would be, or what part of their job they enjoy doing most – that way, you can ascertain a candidate’s potential in their role and net yourself some trust and understanding.

Do Thorough Reference and Background Checks

The Internet is a scary place – partially because everything you say and do is recorded, and a large portion of it is available for anyone to look up. In the age of social media, it’s important for companies – especially startups – to do their due diligence on potential employees.

Finally, hit up a background checking service to dig beneath the surface, and discover anything about the candidates on your shortlist that you should most definitely not miss. If you’ve gone through these steps and streamlined your process with automated surveys and quick video interviews, you’ll get yourself the team you’re looking for quite quickly.