Few HR processes have greater impact on a small business than its recruitment practices. Get these right and your business is likely to prosper. Get them wrong and you could live to regret one or more hires.
You need..
An efficient, legally compliant, and structured approach if you are to attract and retain the best employees. Such an approach will be clear, fair, and appealing to potential employees. This is especially important in competitive job markets from cleaners to the board.
A consistent recruitment approach…
Ensures that all candidates are treated fairly and evaluated based on the same criteria. This is important for maintaining a positive reputation and to demonstrate adherence to employment laws. These emphasise equality and non-discrimination.
Indeed, it is crucial to follow certain legal standards during the recruitment process, especially equal opportunity laws and GDPR regulations related to candidate data. A privacy statement, open to candidates, is valuable for ensuring the latter. An equal opportunity policy also helps.
Sound selection processes
The job interview remains all pervasive but unreliable. A sound process will identify a person specification, seek cogent evidence for individual candidates meeting it and rank all candidates on these objective criteria (only). We all believe we are good interviewers, despite evidence to the contrary. It is all too easy to reach a decision in 30 seconds and spend 30 minutes confirming our original conclusion. A careful, structured interview helps to mitigate against this tendency and to avoid allegations of unlawful discrimination.
There are other alternatives, or complementary options, to interviewing. For example, on the job tests, trial days, presentations, assessment centres, psychometrics tests. They can involve time and cost but these factors should be weighed against the cost of mistakes – short service employees (meaning the process has to re-start) or long service ones that you wish you had never met.
Are you a brilliant job interviewer?
What it means
By following a structured recruitment process you ensure that time and money are used efficiently and reducing the likelihood of costly hiring mistakes. As suggested above, some mistakes can haunt you for years!
Attracting and selecting the right candidates leads to lower employee turnover. Excessive turnover is one of the greatest hidden costs in a business, especially small businesses where the impact can be more pronounced. Hours spent on recruitment are all hours of opportunity cost. You want to be running your business, not chasing for good employees.
How to recruit the best workers and top talent
In conclusion
We assume you want to attract top talent, have reliable employees, enhance your employer brand and make your business an attractive place to work. If so, then a transparent and sound recruitment practices are crucial.
Malcolm Martin FCIPD
Author Human Resource Practice
Blogs are for general guidance and are not an authoritative statement of the law.