Successful recruitment – a helpful guide for businesses

Pure Human Resources is a leading recruitment and HR consultancy working with SMEs in the Hampshire area.

Recruitment is a high profile area of a business’s activities, that can have a huge impact on your public profile, so it is crucial that businesses get it right.

In this article, we answer key, topical questions that all businesses need to know the answers to.

What are the biggest challenges in recruitment for SMEs?

Candidates’ high level of expectations is a huge challenge and the biggest challenge, by far, is responsiveness on the part of the business who is hiring. In the current climate, the absolute priority is to be responsive to candidates and hire the right person for you before they get snapped up elsewhere.

The importance of a good recruitment process?

Apart from a good recruitment process being efficient and effective for your business on many levels, it is also important from a reputational perspective.

There is so much information available for us all to access online, across all kinds of digital forums. People can write ‘employee experience’ reviews on your business, and so can candidates who might not have even worked for you, but have built an impression of you through the selection process. If anyone looks you up online, you want them to only find good things!

People are much more likely to share a negative experience than a positive experience, which can spread like wildfire and give your company a bad reputation, so, you always want to make sure you are communicating well with your candidates throughout the selection process, being efficient and courteous.

The key to a successful recruitment process

There are various elements to running a successful recruitment campaign. ‘Campaign’ is a good word to use because a lot of businesses forget that recruitment is actually a marketing exercise for your business and vacancy.

It may feel like it’s a huge task to manage a lot of candidates but that’s what it’s all about. It’s reaching out to the market, finding the right people with the right skill sets, and attracting the people who are interested in applying to your company; enticing them to be motivated enough to put the time and the effort in to send in their application.

Timeliness and responsiveness are fundamental.

It has never been more important than it is right now to respond to candidates quickly.

You advertise your role online and, when a candidate applies, you need to give them your attention straightaway. Review their application and invite them to a telephone or face to face interview within 48 hours.

Good people are being snapped up in days so, if you’re not quick to respond to them, or you’re waiting to gather a pool of candidates to compare them and see if the elusive ‘someone even better’ will come along, you could find that by the time you do reach out they are probably no longer available.

Measuring the success of recruitment campaign

We find that a lot of businesses we work with don’t think about the metrics when it comes to recruitment or HR, but we feel that it is just as important to measure the impact of your recruitment process as it is with all other aspects of your business. Success is not just about finding someone to fill the role.

You need to think about the cost per hire for each vacancy, including the time you spend working on the process, and any lost opportunity, for example the sales you could be losing if you have a gap in your sales team.

You should also consider ‘time to fill’. We would ideally expect to fill any vacancy within 20 working days, or 30 at the latest. The longer it takes to fill a vacancy, the bigger the knock-on effect it will have on lost revenue opportunities and pressure on other team members.

Why you might not be finding the candidates you want.

There can be a lot of reasons why you may not be getting the candidates you would hope for. At the moment, we are finding that there are fewer candidates generally available in the market place than there have been historically.

In the current cost of living crisis, people can be more nervous of leaving a company than they have been with for a while, and walking away from the benefits they have accumulated there, for the potential risk of moving to a new company.

If you are not offering what candidates want, such as hybrid working, or if your list of criteria becomes too excessive, your recruitment pool will become even smaller.

Quick and easy ways to increase the number of candidates applying for your role include:

Stating a salary on your job advert, or at least a salary band if you can’t be specific. We know that people are much less likely to apply for jobs that don’t include a salary.

Be clear on your job advert about location, hours of work and benefits.

Experiment with different job titles. We have found this to be very effective, as what can seem like a meaningful job title to you might not resonate with candidates. Think a bit more laterally from an advertising perspective.

The importance of company culture

It sounds obvious, but people want to feel reassured that working for you will be an enjoyable experience with a warm atmosphere and a comfortable environment.

Hybrid working is a culture most people are looking for these days. What is really important for successful hybrid working is to have a framework with trust on both sides, where everyone knows where they stand and what is expected of them.

Individuals want to feel appreciated, to be recognised and rewarded, and they also want to have training opportunities.

Legislative considerations

Employers have a legal responsibility to all candidates going through their selection process. Discrimination legislation applies not just to employees already in your employment, but also applies to all candidates who apply for a role in your company and if either your advert or your selection process are discriminatory, you run the risk of having an employment tribunal claim potentially brought against you, causing serious reputational damage to your business.

You need to be constantly mindful that your job advert and your selection process are in no way discriminatory. Think carefully about how you describe the criteria in your advert, and ensure that you minimise any bias throughout your selection process.

Offers of employment are as serious as any other commercial contract you draw up and any offer you make is binding, if it is agreed and accepted, even before you have put it in writing.

If you call your successful candidate to make a verbal offer, we recommend that you personalise a script to make sure you include all the key information – what the salary is, the hours, the terms, and whether the job offer is subject to certain entry criteria like references, evidence of qualification certificates or a driving licence.

Whatever the details are, you need to make sure that you include everything as part of the verbal offer, then clarify every detail in writing as soon as possible.

It is now a legal requirement that you provide a contract of employment by day one of employment. Everyone is entitled to have that written statement as soon as they join your company. It is beneficial to you, as an employer, to send out a contract/written statement in advance of your new employee joining setting out the parameters of the contract and the relationship between you both, so that the individual has a chance to read it, absorb it, and fully understand it so that they have time to decide if the terms still work for them and if they culturally still want to work for you.

If you would like help you with your recruitment process, the friendly and expert team at Pure Human Resources would love to hear from you.

You can call us on 01794 329470, email us or fill out the Contact Form on our website.