Your employees are the core of your business and attracting top talent to work for you will increase your value exponentially. It’s a competitive employment market, and finding and securing the very best personnel for your team is not an easy task. At CareerWise, we’re happy to share our expertise in effective hiring strategies to help you make the most of the recruitment process.
There are many steps along the way to employing a brilliant new team member, and we’ll take you through these in this article. We’ll discuss how to attract the most impressive candidates to apply for your role, and how to interview for the best possible outcome. We have many years of experience and we make the most of this to help businesses improve their recruitment strategies.
When you’re looking to fill a vital role on your team, it’s important to start from a place of clarity. Taking the time to dig deep into the role you are recruiting for and defining exactly what you hope to find in your new employee will save a great deal of wasted time and effort and enable you to streamline the recruitment process.
Focus first on your brand as an employer. What sort of people do well in your company, and how do you appeal to them? If you have incentive schemes and flexible working opportunities, is this reflected by your staff retention levels and team members who are loyal and productive? Think about what you are offering potential employees and make this clear in your advertising, as the sort of applicants you want will view your role more attractively as a result.
You can get really specific in your job advert, so go all out to describe exactly what you need and want from an applicant for this role. If you need someone with a particular qualification, this is a top priority. However, if it’s also important that this person has a good sense of humour and experience in managing a high-powered team, you can make these key criteria too.
Crafting a job description is not as straightforward as many people think, and you may be surprised to hear that there is quite a skill to doing this. A creative approach means you can lay out exactly what you are looking for and attract the right kind of person for the role. While a generic advert may attract hundreds of replies for you to sift through, being super specific and very clear about your requirements will be more likely to appeal to applicants who are looking for something special.
Who are you hoping will apply for your new role? If you have a clear demographic in mind, you may find that targeted advertising on social media gives you a better result than a website post, for instance. We can advise you on the best way to reach the applicants you are aiming for, and this is a great way to improve the calibre of your applications.
You’ll be paying for your job adverts, so it makes sense to make the most of your budget and target the audience you really want to reach. With job adverts that reflect your brand and the ethos of your business, you’ll be able to reach great candidates more directly than ever before with a targeted online recruitment strategy.
When your applications start pouring in, it can be overwhelming if you haven’t been specific enough about what you’re looking for. If you’ve honed your job description to narrow down your applicants, you’ll have a much smaller pool of more appropriate applications to consider and it’ll be easier to make a shortlist of your favourites.
You’ll have a list of essential qualities for applicants, so you can begin by removing any applications that do not meet these from the list. This is a simple way to reduce the pool and involves only a surface read of applications to weed out those without the key criteria. This means that you’ll be left with a selection of candidates who have all the necessary basics, and you can start looking through the applications more thoroughly to find those who have the extra qualities, qualifications or experience you would prefer.
If you’ve made it very clear what you need and want from an application, the best applicants will have made efforts to ensure that their applications highlight why they meet these criteria. This makes the process easier for you, enabling you to shortlist more quickly and find the applications that really stand out from the crowd.
Interviews are a great opportunity to further narrow down the pool of candidates for a position and employers can get really selective at this stage by crafting questions that count. Forget the basic questions about employment history and dig deep into the specifics of exactly how your potential employer likes to work, their personal motivations and what makes them unique. Finding out how your interviewee would really add value to your organisation is an excellent way to make the most of interview questions and identify the best new employees for your business.
An interview is a good chance to form an impression of a potential employee and how they could fit in with your team, so don’t be afraid to ask more unusual questions to get a better picture. Creative questions encourage unique answers that will give you more insight into a person than generic interview questions, and it’s a more interesting approach for the interviewer and interviewee as well!
Think carefully about the recruitment process you are asking candidates to go through. Are you wasting time conducting initial interviews by phone, for instance, for a position where face-to-face interaction really matters? Could your time be better used in a two-stage interview process where you get to meet candidates again and get a better impression of what they are really like?
When you have made a decision about who to offer the job to, how are you informing them of this decision? Will they have time to ask questions and think about whether or not they wish to accept the position before making a decision? This is an important factor to consider when you’re aiming to hire for executive and managerial roles especially, since you want to find people with critical thinking skills who are comfortable taking responsibility for themselves and others.
When you’re looking for a talented new team member, it is worth making the most of the recruitment process, pulling out all the stops to find someone really special. The way you do this will be dependent on the type of business you are recruiting for and the level of responsibility in the position, and we can help you with this.
Working with our team to ensure that your recruitment process is designed to attract the very best talent to your organisation is a great way to optimise your hiring strategies and ensure that the best people want to work with you. Taking a different approach to recruitment than you’ve taken before can bring you new and dynamic results that can take your business to the next level, so don’t be afraid to step out of the box and try a new approach with your job adverts and interview process.
CareerWise is Ireland’s leading specialist recruitment firm, based in Cork, Shannon and Galway, and we can help you to find the top talent for your business in Ireland. We specialise in the Engineering, Supply Chain, Science/Pharma, IT and Accounting industries in Ireland, and we look forward to working with you. Contact us online now or call us at +353 (0) 21 206 1900 to arrange a consultation.
Joe Robbins is co-founder of CareerWise Recruitment. A graduate of the University of Limerick (Degree in Business Studies, 1985), Joe worked in the UK for five years where he specialised in materials management, production management and plant management for a number of companies.
He returned to Ireland in 1992 to become Operations Manager for a Cork-based start-up, FMC Automotive Division which was subsequently taken over by Snap-on Equipment. Joe managed the business re-location of this company to Shannon in 1997 before setting up CareerWise Recruitment in 1999.
He is a committee member of the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) Mid-West region, and a former Director and Vice President of the Shannon Chamber of Commerce. Joe is former Chairperson of the Sixmilebridge Camogie Club and current Chairperson of the Clare County Camogie Board.
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CareerWise Recruitment. EastGate Village, EastGate, Little Island, Cork.
Phone: +353 (0) 21 206 1900
Email: info@careerwise.ie
