December 26, 2018
Planning Ahead – Tips for 2019 Hiring Needs
by Chris Winterboer
As you set goals and agendas for hiring in the new year, we wanted to provide a cheat sheet as a guideline of what is trending in the coming year. Everywhere you look you can find articles regarding tips for the job seeker, but less information is available for employers. With that in mind, here are six helpful tips to guide your hiring process and strategies in 2019:
Know your process. Candidates love to know what to expect. Especially if they are interviewing with multiple companies. If two opportunities are similar and one has a much more formal and efficient interview process, it is an almost certainty that candidates will be drawn to that. This does not need to be overly complicated. Key components include knowing who will participate in the interview process, in what order, what profiles tests are used, if any, when reference checks are completed, and overall estimate of the length of the process.
- Set a target start date. Even if you are considering an opportunity hire, it is critical to plan out the timing. When candidates ask “When are you hoping to fill this position?”, you better have an answer ready. Even if it is a window of time like “sometime in the first quarter”, that is sufficient. Candidates want to know that it is a commitment to make the hire.
- Cater social media platform to hiring. Most companies at this point have a social media platform, and many use it effectively to send a powerful message to clients, employees, and more. But few create a specific plan on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc. that pertains ONLY to hiring. Don’t hear what I’m not saying – we still want to see all of the pics from the holiday party and what your culture is on a daily basis. Just focus the message to cater to prospective employees. Let them know this is what it is like to work here and incorporate that into the interview process. Be intentional.
- Stay in touch. Here at Capstone we try to create a user experience for candidates that includes more content and updates from us. They can sign up for alerts, follow us on social media, read our blogs, and much more. Allow candidates to have multiple touch points with communication so that they can keep in contact with you. A great candidate may not come work for you today because there is not an opportunity to match perfectly, but that candidate can come back to life quickly down the road if you have provided an avenue to stay in contact.
- Consider remote. This is a topic that has risen in popularity in recent months and is continuing to trend in the direction of more work-from-home opportunities. With technological advances, it is becoming easier and easier to integrate. Most companies still shy away from this as a recruitment strategy, but it remains a powerful one. You can create a strategy that allows for it over time, integrates slowly, or is combined with an unlimited PTO bank that empowers employees to work from home when a child is sick, an emergency pops up, or inclement weather.
- Provide training for hiring managers. This is actually something we plan on doing more and more in 2019 and beyond at Capstone. By providing hiring managers with a clear and concise path to proper interview and recruitment strategies, you will free up more of their time and energy to doing their real job. Very few companies do this, and you are missing a golden opportunity. Candidates pick up quickly on an interview process that lacks definition. Whether fair or not, by proxy they will think that this is how you operate on a daily basis once hired. By pro-actively cleaning this up a little you will set yourself apart from the competition, you will free up valuable time for these hiring managers, and your closing ratio will increase when extending offers to prospective candidates.
For further dialogue on how to successfully implement any of these policies and procedures with your 2019 hiring and recruitment needs, please call us any time in the new year!