Hiring 101: How to Plan, Build, and Improve Your Hiring Process

Attracting top talent doesn't need to be complicated. We've written a series of articles designed to walk you through the entire hiring process—from writing your first job description to onboarding new employees.

Whether you're hiring for the first time or looking to turn a good hiring process into something great, this Hiring 101 Guide offers all of the expert advice you'll need to find, attract, and recruit the best candidates.

Better Hiring Process, Better Hiring

Creating a repeatable hiring process—a set of steps for hiring managers, recruiters and candidates to follow—is the most effective way to consistently attract top talent. It makes hiring faster, more efficient, and more enjoyable, and helps you do three important things:

• Standardize the candidate experience. Every interaction between company and candidate has a big impact on offer acceptance rates, reapplication rates, and even recruitment costs. Create a consistent recruiting process and you ensure that every candidate has a positive experience.

• Create opportunities for improvement. By following the same steps with every candidate, it becomes easier to identify bottlenecks and turn feedback into opportunities for improvement, whether that's simplifying your application form or expediting the offer process.

• Measure hiring performance. Metrics like time to hire and offer acceptance rates are more useful when they're measured consistently month to month. By following a standard hiring process, it becomes easier to compare monthly benchmarks and identify meaningful trends in your data.

To get started, we've outlined a comprehensive 12-step process for turning great applicants into perfect hires.

12 Essential Hiring Process Steps

Ready to improve your hiring process? We've pulled together all of our Hiring 101 articles and templates into a single guide to walk you through each step of building your hiring process.

1. Decide how to structure the role

The decision to outsource roles to freelancers and agencies or to insource them to employees impacts a company's financial health, quality of work, available skills, and workplace culture. In this article, we share a straightforward decision-making framework for evaluating the pros and cons of outsourcing or insourcing your next vacancy.

Article quote:

“In practice, though, outsourcing is no guarantee of improved performance or lower costs. Both approaches are useful in certain situations; ultimately, the 'right' choice will depend on the role you're looking to fill and on your company culture and your recruiting vision.”

Read the Article: Insourcing vs. Outsourcing: How to Make the Right Hiring Decision

2. Write the job description

A job description is your first chance to make a great impression on new applicants and build excitement for the role. Everything from the structure of your job description to your choice of language can impact first impressions. This article—and free template—is designed to help you create standout descriptions using Google's own best practices.

Article quote:

“At Google, all of our job descriptions use a simple four-category framework: area, role, responsibilities, and job qualifications. Together, these sections offer a complete overview of the role, from the 'big picture' to the day-to-day responsibilities.”

Read the Article: The Anatomy of a Successful Job Description (+ Free Template)

3. Advertise your job opening

While job boards abound, it isn't always easy to reach qualified candidates in a cost-effective way. This roundup of 50 free job boards, newsletters, and social media groups will help bolster your advertising strategy and make it easy to share your next job listing with a wide audience.

Article quote:

“Thanks to a growing number of job boards, job search engines and social media sites, it's easier than ever to promote job openings to thousands of potential hires. Better still, many of these sites allow you to advertise open jobs for free.”

Read the Article: 50 Free Job Posting Sites to Help You Hire Faster and Smarter

4. Proactively source candidates

In today's hypercompetitive job market, even great businesses with great vacancies struggle to recruit. Thankfully, the solution is simple: proactive sourcing -- seeking out and connecting with ideal applicants. In this article, we share five high-leverage recruiting strategies to help source qualified candidates for every one of your job openings.

Article quote:

“While other companies take a passive approach to hiring, and wait for candidates to come to them, you have an opportunity to take your job openings directly to the people who are most qualified.”

Read the Article: Sourcing Candidates: 5 Strategies to Fill Your Hiring Pipeline

5. Efficiently review resumes

Work hard to promote your latest job opening, and you're likely to end up with hundreds of promising resumes. To make the most of your recruiters’ time, and unlock the potential of each and every applicant, it’s necessary to develop a structured resume screening process. In this article, we share a simple four-step process for efficiently screening resumes.

Article quote:

“For the sake of a few hours spent refining your resume screening process, you can dramatically improve the experience of recruiters and applicants alike.”

Read the Article: How to Build a Resume Screening Process

6. Phone screen applicants

Whether your latest job opening generates 100 job applications or just a handful, a phone-screening process allows you to efficiently qualify applicants in advance of an interview. This step-by-step guide will help you run efficient, focused phone screens by using 15 screening questions to shed light on a candidate's skill set, experience, and interests.

Article quote:

“Creating a structured screening process reduces unconscious bias, helps generate actionable insights, and contributes to a consistently great candidate experience.”

Read the Article: How to Screen Job Candidates Over the Phone

7. Interview candidates

With the right interview questions, you can quickly and easily surface a candidate's motivation, work ethos, and communication style. While it's helpful to run a structured interview process, asking similar types of questions across candidates, there's no need to stick to the same tired script. This interview guide pools advice from Google recruiting leaders to create a list of seven insightful interview questions.

Article quote:

“Great questions are unexpected and thus difficult to script answers for—they’re not just the common interview questions every candidate knows to prepare for, like 'tell me about yourself' or 'walk me through your resume.'”

Read the Article: 7 Proven Interview Questions—and What to Look for in the Answers

8. Craft a standout compensation package

With the right planning, your decisions about salary, bonuses, insurance, and time off will work together to win over candidates, boost job offer acceptance rates, and improve employee retention. In this article, we'll show you how to craft a complete compensation package, from setting the right salary to correctly structuring bonuses and benefits.

Article quote:

“There's one surefire way to increase your chances of getting a 'yes' from your candidate: offer them a standout compensation package.”

Read the Article: How to Craft a Standout Compensation Package

9. Make an irresistible offer

When you've made your hiring decision, infusing your offer letter with personality and laying out clear next steps can have a big impact on your candidate's ability to say yes. To help improve your acceptance rates and leave your new hire a little bit happier, we've outlined the 11 elements every offer letter should contain.

Article quote:

“Your job offer letter is the last interaction a candidate receives before making the decision to accept or reject your offer. With a few simple changes, you can write an employment offer letter that builds excitement and instills confidence—turning a good offer letter into a great one.”

Read the Article: How to Write a Job Offer Letter (Plus a Free Template)

10. Send thoughtful rejection letters

Treat an applicant with courtesy and respect in their rejection letter, and they’re more likely to perceive the experience with your company as positive and share favorable reviews on job sites. In this article, we cover six steps for writing rejection letters that strengthen your employer brand, boost the candidate experience, and help applicants improve and re-apply—including a free template you can use to simplify the process.

Article quote:

“Rejection is a chance to help the candidate improve. A letter with thoughtful and honest feedback can help a rejected applicant become a better fit for future openings at your company.”

Read the Article: How to Write Rejection Letters That Boost Reapplication Rates (+ Free Template)

11. Turn happy employees into expert recruiters

Eighty-two percent of employers rate employee referral programs as the best recruitment channel at their disposal. It’s no surprise: an effective referral program turns happy, engaged employees into active, expert recruiters—able to find and persuade top talent. In this article, we cover a step-by-step process for building your own referral strategy.

Article quote:

“Every great company spends time and energy creating a rewarding workplace for their employees. That investment pays dividends: happy, engaged employees are any company's greatest asset, and by building a straightforward process for encouraging referrals, those employees can become your greatest recruiting asset too.”

Read the Article: How to Scale Recruitment with an Employee Referral Program

12. Track and improve performance

Recruitment metrics flag problems at the first sign of trouble—whether it’s a bottleneck in the hiring process or a shortfall in applicants—and offer concrete opportunities to build a better, stronger recruiting process. In this article, we share five essential metrics every hiring team should track, analyze, and improve to build a healthy hiring funnel.

Article quote:

“Recruiting metrics allow everyone—recruiters, hiring managers, and executives—to take a step back from the day-to-day tasks of hiring to get an overview of the effectiveness of their hiring process. They ensure that every decision serves a broader company goal, with every dollar of recruiting spend translating into meaningful company growth.”

Read the Article: 5 Core Recruiting Metrics Every Hiring Team Should Benchmark

A Hiring Process Helps Attract Top Talent

Attracting and hiring top talent isn’t easy, but having the right hiring process can make all the difference.

By working through each of the Hiring 101 articles, you'll be able to create an efficient workflow that turns great candidates into great employees. You'll have clear insight into which parts of the process work, and which need improvement, and you'll create a candidate experience that gets better each and every month.