Best Practices in Recruiting New Employees

Recruitment is a process that can happen at any stage of a business or company’s operation and growth and is defined as a process that helps an organization develop a sizeable pool of qualified candidates for various positions. For this reason, recruitment won’t be successful unless the human resource management (HRM) has created a successful recruitment strategy. Depending on your business’ size and need for new employees, there are several options in the recruitment and staffing procedure that you can utilize.

Forecasting and Strategy

When the time comes where you are thinking of hiring and expanding, or other events in the life cycle of the organization, you will undoubtedly be tasked with forecasting elements like production levels, unemployment rates, competition, population shifts, expected employee separations and leaves, expansion plans, and sale fluctuations.

Once HR or the hiring manager has analyzed this data, you can better understand what will attract the best candidates. This aids in the recruitment strategy, because you better understand the current labor market. Have effective job descriptions and job specifications listed when you open a listing, and conduct more productive interviews.

Using Recruitment Channels

Another reason you want to forecast and make a recruitment strategy is the knowledge you obtain about want employees need, want, and the budget you have to make those things attainable. Then, look to the plethora of recruitment channels that exist, such as outsourcing, internet job sites like Indeed and Monster, employee recommendations and referrals, campus and local job fairs, social networking sites, blogs, and much more. The important thing is to remember that in the digital world, paper ads are going to function less effectively than online ads, so be sure to devote a larger portion of your time to those channels.

Vetting and Selecting

The final phase of recruitment and staffing is when you have enough candidates in the pool to be able to vet and select. During this period, you are reviewing the resumes and CVs, holding single and group interviews, meeting with the candidates, and seeking out those with the desirable traits your company looks for. Once the best candidates are selected from the pool, the decision on who is hired comes down to some components that show up in the forecast, such as your budget and overall need for new employees.

Avoiding Employees with Criminal Background

Criminals come in all ages, shapes and sizes. Unfortunately, you will not be able to tell if a person is a criminal simply by looking at him or her. If you want to hire a new employee, it would be dangerous and irresponsible for you to do this blindly. You need to know what this person has been up to in their past. If the positions you need to fill require this person to have access to money on a daily basis, criminal background checks are essential for safeguarding your business.

Avoid hiring thieves

Convicted thieves and burglars would like nothing more than to get access to your cash registers and the safe where you keep your money. They would also love to know the code for your security system. If you do not run a criminal background check on every employee you hire, you may have some serious problems down the road. You can have a criminal background check performed at your convenience. Use federal police or HR agencies to keep criminals out of your workplace. Do not allow them to steal the money and business you have worked so hard for.

Avoid hiring violent felons

While hiring a thief would not be a good thing, hiring a violent felon would be an absolute disaster. As a business owner, it is your responsibility to provide a safe workplace for your employees. Obviously, having a felon convicted of a violent crime would be putting the lives of all your employees at risk. Not only would this create a dangerous situation for every person at your business, it could also open you up to having a lawsuit filed against you. If your employees discover that you allowed a violent felon to work alongside them without notifying them first, they could successfully sue you. A lawsuit of this nature could bankrupt your business.

Avoid hiring computer criminals

White collar crime is also a major concern these days. If your business involves having access to sensitive client information, you do not want this information falling into the hands of an identity thief. You need to protect not only the information of your clients, but your employees as well. Therefore, any person who will have a job with access to this sort of information must be scrutinized very closely. A criminal background check will let you know if a person applying for a job at your business has any computer crimes in his or her past.

Other Options

For small businesses that don’t have a dedicated HR department or hiring manager, there are other ways to create a pool of suitable recruits, such as temporary employment agencies that match people to your needs as well as standard recruiting and staffing agencies. Should you wish to handle the recruitment process on your own, there is a number of HR and recruitment software available for purchase to make the task easier.

Now that you understand the overall gist of the hiring process, you should begin to learn how to develop an effective recruitment strategy. Remember the basic phases mentioned in this article, and you shouldn’t have any issues—but if you do, there is always help available.