Recruiting – Where To Start & What To Do

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The idea of hiring staff can seem easy but when you sit down and think about how to do it or where to look, all the sudden it can become very daunting. Add onto this, every business & recruiter does things slightly differently. So simply typing into google “how to hire” won’t give you a straightforward answer.

Fail To Prepare, Prepare To Fail

In order to put a plan in place or know what to do, you need to think of a few questions first. Remember fail to prepare, prepare to fail:

• Have you recruited before, and do you have a process set up to do so?
• If you have recruited before, does your process work? How do you know it works?
• What are you looking to hire?
• Is everyone in the business onboard with the hiring and agrees of the need?
• Have you created a job description and might sound obvious but is it clear, informative and has all information like salary and hours on?
• Have you thought of a correct salary bracket and researched the market to know whether this is accurate?
• Do you know how many stages of interview will be held and are all relevant parties agreed on this?
• Do you have new starter contracts and processes in place?

Truth be told, the list above could go on for pages but hopefully that has sprung ideas into your mind. For more info and aspects to be mindful of, check out our DB Charles Client section.

Many businesses want to hire but aren’t ready to do so. Make sure you are. Be prepared before launching in.

Have You Got The Time?

Hiring someone takes time and will take up way more than you realise; trust us we know. You will often hear recruiters use the phrase “time kills a process.” For example, if as a business you advertised for a role today but didn’t check the applications received back for over a week, it is highly likely that you will have lost out on any of the superstars that had applied. You wouldn’t believe how quick some candidates go in certain industries in the U.K. market. If you are unable to commit proper time to hiring, you will be restarting repeatedly. Good candidates / applications won’t hang around long and remember it is likely your competition is hiring as well.

With the above in mind, remember it is going to take time from your day and bear in mind that hiring a new permanent member of staff, can involve the process spanning over 3 – 6 weeks from CV received to contracts being signed and the candidate starting.

What Do You Need To Decide?

The key decision early on is would it be easier for you to use a recruiter to handle it all or to cost save are you able to hire directly. But how are you going to do it?

The rest of this article will cover basic advice on how to approach hiring directly.

Gone are the days of advertising in the local paper or in a shop window. How and where you advertise roles is often critical to the success of applications received.

Here are some steps to think about:

• Advertise across social media platforms. Your business might not have the presence on socials (something to consider for the future) but there is a whole generation of candidates, who live their lives through these platforms, don’t underestimate who might see it or know someone else.
• Advertise on your direct company page
• Offer internal referral incentives to current staff and advertise internally across your business (if you have multiple locations, people might be considering relocation for the right role, you never know)
• Advertise on Linked In – hugely important.
• Could you advertise on any specific local groups (often Facebook has local village / town groups) or is there any memberships / subscriptions that target your market, which could advertise through (great for retail-based roles)
• An absolute key area, would be to advertise on well-known job boards (such as Indeed, Reed, CV Library etc) or again, you might want to look into specific job boards that target your market
• Some further ideas outside the box would be (if applicable for the type of role hiring):
  • Attending local careers fairs
  • Affiliating / speaking to local universities / colleges to see if any soon to be leavers would be interested in your role
  • Have you considered apprenticeship schemes

You’ve Advertised, Now What?

Once actioned some of the points above, it is then crucial to handle all applications received immediately. Allow yourself to be excited by those CV’s that look incredible but remember even the people that have applied that don’t look right, still deserve an email letting them know they have not been selected etc. Important to note, any time you are hiring, your business reputation is at stake and the way in which people are treated during a hiring process is critical (you never know who knows who or when paths might cross again). Please reach out to us at DB Charles Recruitment, for further free advice & guidance on this.

For many people, reviewing CV’s can be something new to them and quite challenging and you can often find yourself being too picky or choosing too many. Again, let us know on advice as we could hold a session on what to look for, the do’s and don’ts and how to give feedback.

Going back to our earlier discussion, time is crucial. Once you have chosen candidates  to interview, show an element of flexibility in your diaries for the candidates, it can’t just be what time suits you. Most people have jobs, so either have to change their diaries around or take time out / travel to attend.

From this point, there is still a long way to go:

• Handling the interviews, if you haven’t interviewed someone before, be sure to seek advice beforehand, you might think certain questions are ok to ask but they might be inappropriate.
• Conducting numerous interview stages
• Providing appropriate & helpful interview feedback
• Making job offers
• Completing contracts and handling notice periods
• Staying in contact with new starters during notice periods. There are many excellent things you can do to make someone feel part of your business / excited to join. Drop us a line if needing ideas on this front
• First day set up
• New starter induction and training
• Reviews and support
• How to keep people happy and motivated

Hiring seems easy but very quickly becomes a minefield, it’s like buying and decorating a house, you can have lots of ideas in your head but when it comes to putting it all together (choosing flooring, taps ha ha), it takes a lot of time, money, stress & attention.

To Conclude

DB Charles recruitment can help in many ways when it comes to your hiring:

• we can partner with you as a recruiter and handle everything
• we can help evaluate your current recruitment process and aid you in making it better or simply re-affirm to you, what you are doing works, and the right person will eventually come forward
• we can help set up a recruitment process for you that you can take forward and make direct hires from, cost saving in the long term
• we can simply be here for a chat and advice at no cost whenever you need us
• plus, many more ways

A number of our other articles & guides in our Insights section cover other key aspects that link to this article or might be helpful as further reading:

• Hiring your first employee
• What makes a good application process
• Giving interview feedback
• Writing effective job descriptions
• Making a good impression on candidates

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