The Perfect Recruiting Process: How to Easily Win New Employees!

1. What is meant by recruiting?
2. Why do companies need a recruiting process?
3. How does a recruiting process work?
4. How can a recruiting process be optimized?
5. Which tools support the recruiting process?
6. Final word on recruiting processes

The applicant market seems fished out, most interviews end in rejections - by the applicants who are job hunting. Optimized recruiting processes are therefore more important for companies today than ever before. Because one thing is certain: Recruiting is in fact not that easy, and applicant markets are now becoming a reality. Also, one has to struggle with high competitive pressure from other companies. People also talk about the War for Talents.

In this post, our guest author Sascha Zuther answers frequently asked questions about the recruiting process. As part of this, he tells you what typical phases a recruiting process has, how the individual steps can proceed, and which recruiting strategies and tools you can use to manage recruiting.

What is meant by recruiting?

Recruiting describes the process of a company's personnel procurement. Recruiting generally involves finding new colleagues for the company through internal and external channels and inspiring them about the advertised vacancy during their job search. All this ideally with the goal of winning over the candidates who bring the best possible fit for the company and the job advertisement.

For me personally, recruiting primarily means one thing - joy. During the steps of recruiting, you get to know many new people from all corners of the world and engage in valuable conversations. Even if it doesn't lead to collaboration in the end, valuable synergies and learnings arise elsewhere during the recruiting and application process.

Why do companies need a recruiting process?

Unfortunately, despite the shortage of applicants and the War for Talents, optimal application procedures are rare. Again and again, applicants encounter processes that are simply annoying and time-consuming during their job search. These include exaggerated expectations on the part of companies, complicated and lengthy application processes, and inadequate communication in the form of late or even missing responses. This has consequences. According to the results of a representative study 28 percent of applicants said they withdrew their applications, because they found the company's selection process to be too long or unsatisfactory.

Lack of recruiting processes not only leads to annoyances on the candidate side. It also ensures that HR has less capacity for other important tasks. In addition, a lot of time and therefore money is lost because the steps and responsibilities are not clearly communicated and the budget is not used in a targeted manner.

Lack of professionalism in the process can quickly attract negative public feedback, which permanently damages the reputation of the company. In the worst case, this can not only seep in to the applicants, but in the end also to the customers. A well-planned recruiting process helps you to counteract these risks and contributes to a positive candidate experience and thus to effective employer branding.

How does a recruiting process work?

Honestly? There is no general statement, because a recruiting process is a highly individual affair. One thing is for sure. Recruitment should be as short as possible and only as long as absolutely necessary.

During my professional life, I have come across various processes. Be it as an internal recruiter or as a consultant with customers from all over Germany. The way the recruiting process is designed in detail depends on the job advertisement, the company size, the company structures, and the resources. The process should be tailored as closely as possible to your own company and the target group being sought. This is especially true for the part of candidate search and candidate selection.

But even if there isn't a single process, there are at least typical phases that you go through during recruiting that you can use as a kind of recruiting guideline. Based on these phases, I would like to give you helpful tips from practical experience.

Analysis of the requirement profile and job description

New personnel requirements usually arise from a company's business planning or due to employee turnover. These initially vague needs need to be concretized. This is where the task of recruiters typically begins. In close cooperation with the specialist department, a skill matrix with the required profile for the final job advertisement is gradually developed. In the process, you should question the urgency of individual skills and thus open more doors - for the company and for the applicants. It needs to be investigated which of the requirements for the position are indispensable from the beginning (must-haves) and which can also be conveyed later (nice-to-haves). This gradually results in a job description with realistic requirements and realistic chances for the subsequent search.

Candidate search in the recruiting process

Once the skill set and job description have been worked out, it's time to search for candidates. This is where the wheat is separated from the chaff. The goal is to play as many different recruiting channels as possible and thus generate suitable applicants for the vacancy. As in other situations, the motto here is also “the mix makes it”. Not all channels are equally suitable for all target groups.

Among other things, there are the following channels that you can use in the recruitment process:

• career pages
• Online job boards and job search engines (e.g. Indeed, Stepstone, Jobware etc.)
• Social media (e.g. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Tiktok, Snapchat)
• Career networks (e.g. XING or LinkedIn)
• Forums (e.g. Github, Stackoverflow)
• Employee referral programs
• Career fairs (online and offline)
• Internal personnel development
• Headhunters
• Print media

With the plethora of possible channels for recruitment, it's not easy to make the right choice. Remedies can be, for example, Candidate Personas. This marketing tool, when applied to recruiting, is the creation of fictional applicants who represent your target group.

Specifically, this is what it looks like: you create avatars for the different target groups, so to speak, and assign them professional and personal characteristics. The goal is to be able to address this group of people more specifically with employer branding and recruiting measures.

This undoubtedly means more effort at the beginning. Because in order to create these avatars, you first have to collect a lot of data and find out what is important to the target groups and on which channels they are active. But it's worth it. Once you've developed such candidate personas, you increase the likelihood that applicants will respond to the job advertisement and the company through targeted communication.

Candidate selection within the recruiting process

If applications have come from the various channels, it goes to the selection of suitable candidates. This section of the recruiting process is as individual as the candidate search. Before you start the selection for recruitment, you should define objective criteria based on the requirements profile in order to be able to make a fair and factual decision and to create a good comparability with regard to the candidate selection. Then off you go.

As a rule, there is initially a pre-screening. This means that you make a pre-selection of the most suitable candidates whom you want to invite to a first interview.

Here's a good tip: when screening, don't just think about the current vacancy. If the application does not fit the advertised position, see which alternative positions the applicants could fit into instead of hastily sending a rejection. With this approach, I have been able to bring some people on board who were not originally identified as in need of personnel.

After the pre-screening, a first interview usually follows with different participants, e.g. HR, department, and applicant. From these discussions, the favorites are then selected again. From here on, the paths vary. Some companies are content with a single conversation for finding suitable candidates. This is often the case in the blue-collar field. For the academic field, there are usually several steps. Some conduct a deeper second interview, some even a third interview. Other formats are tests, assessment centers, trial days, and many other formats. In the end, the recruiting process must not be too long and it must fit you and your requirements. It is also important to give the candidates quick and binding feedback during the selection process.

Personally, I have found that more than two process steps significantly increase the dropout rate for us. For the first interview, I use online interviews for more flexible and faster implementation. The final second interview on site then represents a concretization of cooperation and aims to clarify any remaining questions on both sides. Depending on the vacancy, this is often done in combination with a case study or a trial day. As a rule, both parties then have enough information for the decision.

Decision phase and contract negotiations

After the selection process, the heat is on. The candidate and the company decide after a short period of reflection either for or against the opportunity. In a positive case, the company makes a contract offer. Ideally, the candidate accepts and the onboarding can start.

How can a recruiting process be optimized?

Once you have implemented a recruiting process, it's important to keep a close eye on it. The best recruiting strategy is of no use without proper success control. Because to optimally influence your recruiting success, you need to measure the entire application process.

How well do the individual channels actually work? How long does it take for suitable candidates to come into the process or be hired? What is the dropout rate and at what point do candidates drop out? Is it advisable to turn off or swap individual channels? Do we still need to fine-tune internal processes? Several questions arise during a recruiting process.

You can answer these questions. This is where recruiting KPIs come into play - the so-called Key Performance Indicators. You've probably heard of terms like “Time-to-Hire” or “Cost-per-Hire”. These key figures answer, for example, the question of how much time passes from the personnel requirement report to the filling of a position and how much costs per job filling average on the company. You can use the recruiting KPIs to uncover weaknesses in the process and further optimize it. You can usually easily pull the data to evaluate your KPIs from your HR software.

Which tools support the recruiting process?

Modern tools simplify work in the HR department in all areas and are indispensable today. You can find a comparison of various HR software & tools at OMR Reviews. From applicant management tools to onboarding tools there are individual software solutions that help you simplify your recruiting processes or downstream processes, saving valuable time and resources that you can use better elsewhere. In my professional history, I have already come into contact with various tools. By now, they have become an indispensable part of my work. Especially during my time as a consultant for HR software, I dealt intensively with the topic.

Applicant management systems

Let's take as the central building block in the recruiting process applicant management. Some companies still use solutions like Excel spreadsheets to track applications even today. However, once a certain number of applications have been received, this becomes a considerable additional administrative and time-consuming effort.

To optimally support the recruiting process, you should therefore rather rely on systems that have explicitly specialized in e-recruiting. From my own application, I know lever, d.vinci and rexx,. Optimal is if the applicant management software is capable of digitally depicting and controlling the entire recruiting process up to the contract.

The many advantages of such recruiting software, are obvious. An applicant management system contributes to a more structured, faster and above all GDPR-compliant communication of all persons involved in the process. All applicant information and all digital communication are centrally managed in the system and are not lost in a flood of e-mails. By being able to see the complete applicant history in an applicant management system, a more transparent decision-making process is also made possible. This in turn saves a lot of time, because by storing all information in one place, an applicant management system eliminates redundant work steps. The software also does many routine tasks like acknowledgments of receipt fully automatically and thus relieves you of administrative tasks. Ideally, this also includes the automatic creation of employment contracts based on existing application data, with which you can create employment contracts in no time at all from individually adjustable text modules.

You can also manage and control the posting of job advertisements on various portals, SEO optimized, centrally from your system and then view the success of the advertisements directly in the analysis area. Channels that perform well or poorly are quickly identified and you can therefore allocate your budget more sensibly and distribute it to the right channels. You can also use additional data that you have fed into your applicant management system for your evaluations and KPIs to further optimize yourself.

Chatbots for the recruiting process

In addition to applicant management systems, chatbots can also help you gain more time and efficiency in your daily work in recruiting. Simply speaking, a chatbot is nothing more than software. Instead of chatting with people, applicants in this case communicate with machines. I used to only know such bots from my bank's customer service portal. You type in a question and get a quick and reliable answer about the product or the services. But such bots have long since arrived in the HR area.

Applied to recruiting, you can e.g. use bots to have repeated applicants' questions be answered without the involvement of recruiting. It saves a huge amount of time and at the same time improves the candidate experience, as the chatbot can provide reliable answers without time delays and around the clock. Especially so-called AI (artificial intelligence) can do a lot there. Of course, for this to be worthwhile, a correspondingly high number of questions must land in your mailbox.

But it also works the other way around. A chatbot can of course not only answer questions, but also ask questions. A new form of recruiting in our company is the possibility of applying via WhatsApp with the provider PitchYou. For example, job advertisements are published on Google for Jobs or their own career page. If applicants click on the respective link, an automated interview via a chatbot will start directly in WhatsApp, once confirmation of the data protection declaration has been given. The applicants are thus acting in their familiar chat environment and do not need to download an additional tool or have a résumé ready.

The data requested in this way is intended to replace the resume in the first step and thus make applying easier. The data is then transferred to the applicant management system via an interface and a candidate profile is generated directly in the system. From there, the process runs normally. A personal interview with a real employee does not replace the chatbot. However, we see chatbots in this case as a good opportunity to significantly lower the hurdle for applications in the retail business. On the other hand, we save a lot of time, as we often spend time asking candidates for important information that is missing in the application.

Final word on recruiting processes

I hope my article has been able to give you a rough checklist for a successful recruitment process and you've seen how important a well-structured recruiting process is and how it can make your workday easier. However, the processes are as individual as the companies. Therefore, such an article cannot be final and cover all eventualities.

Apart from the previously mentioned recruiting software there are also many other gadgets that can make your workday easier. In the enumeration of the tools, I focused on those where I currently see the greatest time savings. Meanwhile, many HR tool providers, like PitchYou, are partnering with applicant management system manufacturers so that ideally you can map everything in one system later. Even HR-foreign tools like Trello or Microsoft Teams are just part of my daily work and project coordination. At OMR Reviews, you get a comprehensive overview of the various possibilities of tools and verified user reviews. Perhaps there is also a suitable software for you that helps you take your recruiting processes to the next level.