How to recruit staff efficiently: Our best recruiting tips

If you’re wondering how to hire employees and looking for recruiting staff tips, make sure you’re making the most of the interview process.

Interviews are the best chance you have to evaluate a candidate.

So, avoid asking general questions.

Instead, ask stimulating questions that will allow you to see the candidate’s personality, and clearly assess whether they’re the right fit for the role and your company.

If you’re looking for top interview questions to ask candidates, check out our blog, or watch our YouTube video:

Tip: change the playback speed in the settings at the bottom right corner, to suit your learning requirements. Subscribe to our YouTube channel for more great videos!

One of our top recruiting tips is to recognise the importance of having a well-structured and effective onboarding process in place.

It is your responsibility to make sure your new hires feel welcome, well-trained, and able to settle in quickly.

This is beneficial to both the employee and the efficiency of the team they’ve joined.

The onboarding process should begin once the candidate accepts the offer, and continues well into their tenure.

Staff recruitment is a neverending process, and should be seen as something that includes the welfare and wellbeing of employees, who you now need to try and retain.

This also includes a full and considered offboarding process. A good offboarding process should include:

A healthy hiring process will work cyclically: the offboarding should help you effectively transfer important information and training to your new hires.

If you need help or support with your offboarding  process, we’ve put together our complete guide to creating an employee offboarding process for your business.

And click below to check out our onboarding checklist!

One of the most important ways of recruiting employees for your business is to have an accurate, detailed, and attractive job description.

A job description is the first insight a candidate will have into your role and company life, so it’s crucial you’re using this to your full advantage.

Jobseekers will be reading a lot of job adverts every day, and will therefore be scanning to look for certain things. Make sure your description has them!

For example: what the role involves, what skills, requirements, and experience they need, and how your company can benefit them.

Here are some of our key tips:

Whether you’re hiring junior staff or trying to find someone more senior, it can be a good idea to work with a talent pool.

This is a collection of candidates who look like good applicants to work at your company.

Talent pools help you establish a hiring strategy and facilitate better planning. By lining up candidates for future hiring, you can be more agile in your recruitment and tap into both active and passive jobseekers.

To create a strong talent pool, you need to attract candidates to your business and employer brand.

One of the main ways to do this is through your social media presence:

Need to hire for a role quickly?

Establishing a relationship with a staff recruitment agency is undoubtedly the quickest and most reliable way to hire efficiently.

If you need a candidate to start work on a project right away, need to replace a candidate, or need to recruit multiple candidates for graduate schemes, an external recruiter is a sensible answer.

Find a recruitment agency that specialises in the industry or type of candidate you’re looking for, as they’ll have access to talent pools you might struggle to reach.

Recruiting staff online is now one of the most common and established ways to hire new staff, from application to interview process.

This has transformed social media into an effective jobseeking channel. Particularly, of course, LinkedIn.

However, there is arguably no more effective way to hire online than by advertising on job boards.

Particuarly if you find a niche job board that suits your specific needs, it can be a quick and cost-effective recruitment solution.

Here are some of the key reasons for recruiting staff via job boards:

This means utilising the resources you have, including your current staff.

Another way to reduce the cost of your recruitment process is to ask your current employees to refer potential applicants. 

A great way to champion this internal recruitment is to offer an incentive scheme (such as an amount of money) if their recommendation is placed in the company.

As your internal staff already understand the office culture, their recommendations can help you get access to appropriate and suitable applicants.

As well as this, it’s also important for internal team cohesion.

Make sure that appropriate parties are consulted about certain hires, and that those who need to be are present in the interview.

Hiring new staff affects many areas of your business, so it can be good to consult a variety of existing employees about potential candidates.

Listening to your team’s opinions and thoughts can help open up your perspective and identify any subconscious biases.

By extension, this collaborative hiring can help with staff retention, by demonstrating that you value the opinions of your staff.

You should be championing a fair, diverse, and inclusive recruitment program.

Having a diverse and inclusive team is a sign of being a responsible and fair employer, but it also has myriad benefits to your employees and your company.

Diverse teams can boost employee engagement, increase confidence in your staff, and see you have a broader spectrum of creativity, skills, and experience in your teams.

When recruiting staff, it’s crucial you’re working to eradicate any unconscious bias in your processes. Ensure you’re recruiting solely on a candidate’s skills and experience and not due to any other factor.

Include a company diversity and inclusion statement on your job descriptions, showing new staff you are a responsible employer and that you operate a fair recruitment process.

Here’s our example statement:

If you’re struggling to work out how to hire employees that are right for you, reflect on how upfront you’re being with candidates.

One of our simplest hiring tips is to implement clear and realistic timelines.

It’s important to communicate to candidates your expectations about timing from the start.

Let candidates know how much of their time you will likely require, how many interviews there will be, and when you plan to make a hiring decision.

This will allow candidates to plan and organise their job search accordingly.

It will also help them have a positive experience throughout your hiring process, which may further encourage them to accept your job offer and share your company with their network.

If your hiring process requires a test or a set task, make sure to clearly communicate timeframes for these.

Give candidates enough time to complete it so they’re not blindsided or unable to complete it to their best abilities in the given time.

Our recent research supports this:

Our tips for hiring employees don’t stop here.

Across our site, we offer extended advice on all of these points and more!

Explore the rest of our recruiting tips below, or get in touch to see how we can help your hiring directly.