Hiring the Right Candidate: Recruitment Process 101

July 7, 2023

‍Give a great idea to average performers and they won't make anything out of it,

Give an average idea to a team of talented individuals and they will surely get you something worthy.

The talent that you acquire defines your future growth trajectory. No matter which industry you belong to, what you sell and the job roles you’re looking to fill – hiring the right candidates is the core objective, it has always been. However, the recruitment process and methodologies have transformed. Just like consumer expectations have drastically evolved – candidate expectations are growing at an astounding pace too.

The primary reason for the foundational changes in the recruitment space is the immense shortage of talent supply as compared to the continuously augmenting demand. In 2022, 75% of organizations globally report a talent shortage – which is the highest ratio in the last two decades. Finding qualified candidates and hiring them is now trickier than ever, recruiters and organizations need to adapt to these changing times and innovate their talent acquisition strategies.

Fast-growth organizations have high-scale talent requirements at any given point of time. The conventional methods of sourcing, qualifying, and hiring talent don’t quite work effectively. With the talent market becoming more open and dynamic than ever before – recruiters constantly need to experiment with their strategies and evaluate the results to optimize their recruitment funnel. Amidst the severe competition, where hiring has become nothing short of a race among talent hunters – streamlining your recruitment process is the key to boosting your talent acquisition outcomes.

So how do you ensure hiring top-quality talent – while dealing with the scale, time, and external challenges of your recruitment? What strategies do you need to follow for improving your candidate experience and reducing funnel drop-offs? The solution to these is driven by a well-established and smooth recruitment process. In this blog, we will discuss why is it crucial to work on your recruitment process and how you can ace it. Stick around for a comprehensive guide.

What is the Recruitment Process?

The cycle followed by organizations to source and hire candidates for their open positions is defined as the recruitment process. It covers the end-to-end strategy that goes behind finding, screening, shortlisting, interviewing, and onboarding talent. With different stakeholders involved from hiring managers to recruiting teams and department heads, companies accomplish the planning and execution of the talent funnel.

Although the recruitment goals of all organizations resemble – hiring high-quality talent within a short span of time and optimized cost attached, the approach taken by each of them is different. And it should be – every business is different, and so are its requirements. Especially in such a volatile talent market, what works well for you might not lead to the same results for others.

Recruitment being a crucial part of your business’s sustainability and growth, needs to be streamlined for producing optimum results. So we break down the recruitment process into X different stages. Further, each phase is assessed, analyzed, and restructured with the aim to improve hiring results.

It’s a candidate-centric market today. So while planning your recruitment process, the focal area should not just be your organizational goals related to time and cost. You should also cover candidate experience and focus on improving it for a positive shift in conversion rates.

Why is Your Recruitment Process Vital?

A seamless recruitment process has numerous benefits for your hiring team and organization. Some of the top reasons why you must establish a clear recruitment process and consistently put efforts to optimize it are:

#1 Quality of hiring

A well-defined recruitment process has multi-dimensional benefits that contribute to the quality of hire. As the recruitment cycle is accelerated while maintaining a positive candidate experience, you retain more candidates in your recruitment funnel and hire people faster than the average competition. Equal focus on sourcing and engaging candidates ensures a high-quality talent pool for your organization. Not only this, a prolific recruitment process also boosts your employer brand and helps you attract the best talent possible.

#2 Set Expectations Upfront

When you know your recruitment process inside out, you can help candidates, managers, and executives set clear expectations from the recruiting team upfront. In terms of time required to fill current roles or recruiting budget needed to satisfy the quality of the talent pool – everything can be analyzed keeping in mind your recruitment process. Additionally, it keeps your entire hiring team on the same page and enables quality collaboration. Decision-making – which is a crucial part of recruitment becomes much more efficient.

#3 Reduce Cost of Hiring

Cost per hire is one of the most critical recruitment metrics for most organizations. No matter how big a business is, optimizing the expenses, especially for recruitment is a constant struggle for stakeholders. With a predefined and tested recruitment process, the cost of hiring is significantly reduced. A strategic recruitment approach begins with talent pool building, and once enough candidates are sourced for creating a talent pool, what remains is assessing them and interviewing the shortlisted candidates before releasing the offer letter. Hence the entire recruitment is streamlined with respect to productivity and cost of resources.

#4 Save more time

Time taken to hire is undoubtedly the primary factor defining your recruitment efficiency. Fast-growth startups and organizations want to expand, and they do that at an extremely high pace. Clear and end-to-end framing of recruitment plans helps you accelerate each phase of the hiring. Hence, from sourcing candidates to shortlisting them based on pre-decided criteria and templatizing the onboarding – an organized recruitment journey helps recruiters and candidates save a lot of time. On average, top candidates are available for just 10 days in the market before they end up somewhere. More than saving time, you need to boost your recruitment pace for grabbing the ‘creamy-layer’ of talent.

#5 Improve Candidate Experience

The recruitment process has a direct impact on candidate experience right from the top of the talent acquisition funnel to the bottom. When a candidate is sourced or applies for a role at your company:

Is the job description clear enough to attract closely relevant applications?
How easy is your application form/procedure?
Is the candidate informed about the expected timelines in advance?
Do you inform them after each round of recruitment?
Is the feedback flow consistent or does it even exist?
Does the candidate have the option to communicate with you quickly and get their queries resolved?

All of these questions and more arise when it comes to focusing on your recruitment focus. Working on these not only elevates your candidate experience but also gives your recruitment a word-of-mouth promotion.

#6 Boost Employee Retention

If you’re wondering how a fine-tuned recruitment process would help you in retaining employees, here’s the crack. When you communicate clearly about your company culture, role requirements, and candidate expectations during recruitment – the employees that you end up hiring would probably be more likely to stay in your organization for longer. Secondly, as the recruitment process gets streamlined and almost templatized, your HR team gets more bandwidth to actually engage employees in activities, host events, etc.

A positive candidate experience produced by a smooth and talent-friendly recruitment process leaves them immensely satisfied. As a result, it maximizes your talent retention rate.

#7 Helps Recruiters Maximize Productivity

Two of the biggest challenges for recruiters today are – finding quality talent to hire and reducing the candidate drop-off in the recruitment funnel. While hiring teams strive hard to ace every stage of recruitment for different roles at scale, they often have more than enough on the plate to handle. Introducing automation for repeated admin tasks and streamlining the recruitment process by preparing standardized workflows would grow your team’s productivity multifold.

Further, if the admin side of recruiting like managing applications and candidate databases is mostly automated – recruiters get more time to interact directly with candidates leading to much more efficient engagement and hiring.

The Anatomy of a Strong Recruitment Process

Let’s now reverse engineer what goes into a strong and effective recruitment process. From multi-layered planning to leveraging technology at its finest, this breakdown covers everything. Without any further ado, let’s dive in straight.

Putting People First

Before all recruitment strategies comes the basic principle of keeping candidates first. This mindset and approach are extremely important, especially with recruitment in modern times. It’s often underrated how deeply recruitment impacts candidates’ lives. And hiring journey is not simple for a majority of people, even if they are well-versed technically. It’s natural for candidates to seek guidance anytime as they feel nervous and confused about the different recruitment processes for every company.

Successful recruiters have this trait but it’s least talked about – they make candidates feel so comfortable and important that recruitment becomes a positive journey filled with learning.

Data-driven Recruiting

To make your recruitment process more effective, you can’t just keep experimenting randomly and expect good results. Analyzing data to inform your hiring strategies and decisions is the need of the hour. Renowned global employers have been following this for a long, but that’s not the reason you should practice data-driven hiring. Companies lose USD 14,900 for each bad hire and leveraging data to drive your recruitment decisions will ensure you’re hiring better candidates and not losing out on your precious resources - especially time.

Company-Specific Recruitment Plans

Recruitment strategies that work amazingly well for companies might not work for you at all. The road to redemption? Analyze your company culture, growth objectives, and past recruitment performances to figure out your recruitment process. From your organization’s mission, vision, and diversity-building plans to interview strategy – personalize each step of your requirement for producing desired results.

Leveraging Technology

94% of recruiters and hiring managers say that using recruitment software has positively impacted their hiring. As you look forward to scaling your hiring and hiring a number of candidates in a short span of time, using recruitment automation and other technological solutions is the way to reach your goals. In fact, using solutions like Applicant Tracking System (ATS) is necessary for recruiters for collaborating with their teams effectively and maintaining the candidate database easily.

Platforms like Nurturebox enable recruiters to automate their outbound sourcing, engagement, and candidate pipeline management. With a comprehensive solution for scaling up your candidate sourcing via LinkedIn, Nurturebox also allows you to create nurture sequences for engagement and track your recruitment funnel – all from a single window.

Optimize Your Candidate Experience

We have talked about how candidate experience is driven by your recruitment process throughout the blog. But why does candidate experience matter? First look at this figure - 63% of job seekers will probably reject a job in case of bad candidate experience. The difference between the supply and demand of talent is huge and is constantly growing – this leaves the workforce with more opportunities than ever. Additionally, candidates now expect much more than nice payroll and perks from companies. Company culture, employer brand, and recruitment experience have become intrinsic drivers of decisions for them.

7 Stages of the Recruitment Process

So far we had a high-level view of the strategy required to build a reliable recruitment process. But how do you apply those plans and strategies to establish your recruitment cycle? Let’s find out with a brief analysis of 7 core phases in the recruitment process.

Analyzing Your Hiring Requirements

Once a position is opened at your organization, you cannot directly go online for posting the job ad or reach out to candidates for sourcing.

To hire for a role, you need to understand the requirements and the role specifications inside out.
Find out all the positions that are unfilled right now followed by in-depth requirements and the expected scope of work.

Next up, identify the knowledge, skills, and experience required for the respective roles

Figure out the soft skills, qualities, qualifications, interests, and strengths you want in your target candidate and what your team needs too.

Also keep a track of the employees leaving your company or serving their notice periods.

Have an idea for budget cap – many skilled candidates directly ask you this and you can’t really deny answering it.

Framing the Job Description

After you know the role specifications and internal expectations in terms of skills, experience, and qualifications – it’s time for you to create a detailed and inviting job description. It’s a vital phase as the number of applications and the ratio of qualified ones would be determined by your job description.

Candidates use the JD to figure out if they match the skill and experience requirements, and if the job is worth applying to (or switching for). The objective of this stage is to get applications from ideal candidates. Here are some tips to ace your job descriptions:

Address your candidates directly, like you’re having a 1:1 conversation
Frame a real & accurate job title
Mention a brief company description
Position yourself strongly in the ‘About Us’ section
Specify clear roles and responsibilities
Skip the boring generic requirements - replace them with unique ones
Highlight the top perks of the role & your company
End with a conversational CTA

Sourcing Talent

Talent sourcing refers to drawing candidates to the top of your recruitment funnel. Numerous channels exist for sourcing candidates including a website careers page, social media platforms, job listing sites, advertisements, referrals, and more. Additionally, recruiters also reach out to candidates or network with them at events, job fairs, and online. Here’s where the differentiation in outbound and inbound sourcing approaches happens:

Inbound sourcing: Candidates applying for your open roles through various channels like job sites, social media, careers landing page of your website, referrals and digital ads refers to inbound sourcing. The efficiency of inbound talent sourcing is largely driven by employer brand and reputation.

Outbound sourcing: When you reach out to potential candidates with the aim to hire them – it’s outbound sourcing. With passive candidates increasing rapidly, this approach has become the go-to strategy for recruiters.

Screening and Shortlisting

At this stage, you probably have a number of applications and sourced talent profiles and now you need to shortlist them for beginning your recruitment interview or assessment rounds. This is where you push candidates from the top of your recruitment funnel.

Now this stage is vital as you perform an in-depth analysis of candidate profiles and make a decision about whether or not they are qualified enough for interviewing with you. On the other hand, a majority of recruitment teams find this stage the most challenging. Although making decisions about recruitment is not a piece of cake, breaking down the strategy into small steps can surely help. Here’s how you can screen candidates and shortlist effectively:

First things first, check each candidate’s qualifications and work experience - not in terms of years but previous job profiles

Next, shortlist candidates based on certifications, relevant experience, skills, technical expertise, and achievements

For screening calls, analyze the candidate’s confidence with the skills they possess as well as communication skills. Try to find out their career goals and objectives

Score the candidates based on their profile and screening call together – push the candidates passing the threshold score forward.

Interview

The shortlisted profiles are sent for interviews. This stage can be divided into two or more interview rounds depending on an organization’s requirements, respective roles, and general practices. Some organizations also conduct a single round of interview in their recruitment process.

For example – If you’re hiring developers, you can prepare separate interview rounds for technical assessment and non-technical (or culture-fit) evaluation. Ideally at this stage, the recruitment teams collaborate with department heads for assessing candidates.

Here are some tips you must not miss out on for optimizing your interview process:

Focus on building an interaction rather than a one-way or Q&A type of communication.
Prepare role-specific questions for efficient evaluation
Analyze if the candidate would fit well in your company – the pace of work, flexibility, and curiosity matter more than current skills

Offer Letter and Onboarding

Now that you have finished the interview and evaluated the candidates deeply – it’s time to share the offer letter with the shortlisted candidates. Do it enthusiastically – convey that you have confidence in their abilities.

Effective communication and candidate experience are the keys to successful conversion here. You can never be assured of a candidate accepting your job just because the offer is tempting or the candidate has surpassed all the evaluation rounds.

Be transparent with the candidates about the expectations and required agreements
Seek feedback from them about the interview process

In case a candidate accepts your job offer, prepare the onboarding – connect them with their leads and the team for an introduction call
Begin your induction program (if any)

Amidst today’s noisy digital world, brands find it challenging to create meaningful connections with their customer base and target audience. Getting the target consumer’s attention and persuading them to buy from you gets even trickier. Hence, content marketing has become more crucial than ever for brands to attract, educate, and retain customers.

Content creation is a top priority for 80% of marketers, and there is no reason it shouldn’t be. Consistent, high-quality, and engaging content impacts your audience’s decisions through education and persuasion.

Depending on your business goals and requirements, the role of Content Marketers you hire will vary. The primary responsibilities revolve around forming consistent brand messaging and deciding upon a unique and identifiable voice, style, and pitch across various distribution channels.

From raising brand awareness to attracting a relevant audience to your website, boosting social media presence and engagement, generating leads, and building brand loyalty – content marketing drives all the growth efforts for your brand. When done effectively, it can help you:

Build positive brand awareness
Make your audience stick around for longer
Get better traction on social media
Gain more trust of your audience than ever
Generate qualified leads
Improve conversion rates
Boost business visibility with SEO
Position your brand as an authority
Cultivate loyal brand fans

While content marketing is a broad role with numerous areas of expertise involved, it’s vital to thoroughly understand your company’s current marketing goals and the related requirements. In this blog, we will dive deep into the step-by-step approach to hiring a Content Marketer.

What is The Role of a Content Marketer?

A Content Marketer must be deeply passionate about telling your brand’s story to the world. The objective is to educate and nurture the target audience to establish brand authority using thought-leadership and drive more people to buy from you.

As a candidate is expected to be a mediator between the brand and the target audience, they are primarily responsible for planning, creating, and sharing valuable content to grow their company’s awareness and engagement to bring more business.

To be more specific, the role of a Content Marketer requires a perfect blend of creativity and attention to detail in an individual. It’s a balancing role, as they need to ensure creating content that resonates and strengthens business relationships, using strategies that position your business as authentic and problem-solving.

Take a look at the core responsibilities of a Content Marketer that most businesses expect them to take over:

Research and Competitor Analysis: The first and foremost step to creating a content marketing strategy is effective initial research. It not only helps a Content Marketer understand the nuances of the industry through competitor analysis but also study and understand the target audience thoroughly. ‍
Building Content Marketing Plans: Once the competitor research and target audience analysis is done, a Content Marketer needs to work on the different plans for all the business objectives, targeted channels, segments of the audience, and the bigger marketing strategy. A content marketing plan typically consists of:
Specific goals along with a pre-decided timeline
Various channels to be targeted for content distribution
Types of content to be created
Budget for the entire staff, outsourced services, and paid promotion (Collabs and Ads)
Creating Editorial Calendar: Creating, managing, and maintaining a content calendar is one of the most crucial responsibilities of a Content Marketer. It is a centralized visual document that enables effective collaboration among the marketing team and helps Content Marketers ensure on-time production and delivery.‍
Content Creation: Once the strategy and calendar have been approved by relevant stakeholders, Content Marketers need to do the on-ground work. This task usually depends on the scale of your company and content marketing strategy. Suppose an organization already has a set of writers, then the Content Marketer doesn’t need to create content by themselves.‍
Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Producing quality content that educates your target audience and resonates with them, isn’t enough. You need to optimize your content creation to make it search engine-friendly. While most companies need a dedicated SEO specialist for keyword research and planning, Content Marketers need to closely collaborate with them and should be well-versed in the basics of SEO.

While the practices discussed above are primary responsibilities of a Content Marketer, they also need to be proactive with

Content editing and ensuring adherence to a certain style guide
Continous publishing and distributing content
Measuring and analyzing performance

How to Hire a Content Marketer: Step-By-Step?

Content marketing has become the key to driving growth for businesses. Unlike a few years ago, it’s not possible now to get away with a one-person team for content marketing. You need deeply trained individuals for specialist roles.

Let’s now dive into the step-by-step approach of hiring a Content Marketer. But before you even source your first candidate, you should have a clear expectation of the skillset and experience to look out for top content marketing candidates.

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Step 1: Create a Candidate Persona

Let’s sort out the priorities first, and decide the type of content marketing candidates you want to recruit. From exceptional research skills to storytelling, communication skills, relationship building, audience engagement, and more capabilities must be comprehensively considered. Identify and break down the skill requirements for Content Marketers:

What are the educational qualification criteria for the role?
How many years and what type of work experience do you want in candidates?
What are the specific skill sets you’re looking for?
Which industry experience would you primarily prefer?
Are there any tools your candidates should be hands-on with?
What are some personality traits that will fit your company?
Where do they look for a new job?
What are their career and life goals?

Forming a candidate persona by answering all these questions would ensure you are not shooting in the dark while sourcing candidates. Further, it helps you determine the traits of the ideal candidate, and plan your sourcing and recruitment strategy further.

Step 2: Document the Role Requirements and Decide on Your Recruiting Process

Next step is determining your role requirements suiting primarily to organizational needs and business goals. A content marketing professional is expected to own the entire content strategy, creation, and distribution. But what about your business’s unique requirements?

You might need someone comfortable with frequently creating long-form content pieces like blogs, ebooks, or whitepapers, or creating engaging video content based on your industry trends.

Talk to various relevant stakeholders for seeking the complete detailed company requirements for the role.

Before you enter the recruitment funnel, outline your talent acquisition process. Identify various strategies, channels, and other informational insights you would need – and maintain a collaborative document.

As you update the tactics and tweak your recruitment process for meeting hiring requirements optimally – keep your document up to date.

Step 3: Prepare a Content Marketing Job Description

Once you have finalized the role requirements with respect to your current content marketing goals and team, you can start sourcing candidates. Preparing the job description is the first task you’ll need to do.

Here are the necessary components you must have in your job description:

Job Title: The position you’re looking to fill. For example - Content Marketing Specialist or Content Marketing Manager.

Roles & Responsibilities: An outline of the candidate’s day-to-day activities. From ideation to implementation and the impact on the organization, everything should be covered.

Skill Requirements: Skills and abilities a candidate must have to perform the job successfully.

Perks and Benefits: The compensation details, perks of the job, and any other benefits.

About the Company: Why should a candidate consider working with your company?

Content Marketer Job Description Template

Role

The job of a Content Marketer is to perform competitor research, create user persona, and write plagiarism-free content for blog articles, social media, and the company website. They need to stay updated on the latest SEO techniques.

Responsibilities

Develop, write and deliver persuasive copy for the website, email marketing campaigns, sales collateral, videos, and blogs
Build and manage an editorial calendar; coordinate with other content crafters to ensure standards
Measure impact and perform analysis to improve KPIs
Include and optimize all content for SEO
Contribute to the localization of processes and content to ensure consistency across regions
Review and implement process changes to drive operational excellence

Requirements

Proven content marketing, copywriting, or SEO experience
Working knowledge of content management systems like WordPress
A well-maintained portfolio of published articles, blogs, copy, etc
Proven experience of working under pressure to deliver high quality output in a short span of time
Proficiency in all Microsoft Office applications, Google Suite
Fluency in English or any other required language

Soft Skills

Excellent verbal and written communication skills
Excellent writing and editing skills
The ability to work in a fast-paced environment
The ability to handle multiple projects concurrently
Strong attention to detail and the ability to multi-task projects and deliverables

Step 4: Source Candidates

Once you have the tailored job description in hand, it’s now time to do the groundwork and source candidates. Create an attractive job post to promote your job across job boards and social channels.

Begin with what to expect from the role at your company?
Why should candidates apply for the position?
Highlight the growth opportunities
State the company vision and mission
Briefly describe the recruitment process

Prepare an impactful job post and also execute paid job ad campaigns if required. The next step would be promoting your jobs on various job boards and hiring platforms. You can leverage the following platforms for hiring Content Marketers:

LinkedIn
Indeed
Instahyre
ZipRecruiter
Monster
GlassDoor
CareerBuilder

Not to forget - almost 3/4th of the workforce includes passive candidates, so you cannot miss out on passive talent sourcing as well. Reach out to qualified candidates on communities, LinkedIn, Twitter, and even Facebook to offer them suitable opportunities.

Step 5: Evaluate Candidates and Interview Shortlisted Ones

Once you have filtered candidates based on their experience and skills listed on their profile, it’s time to evaluate them deeply. Ask them to create a content strategy for your website, along with a value-adding content piece like a small blog. The topic of the article must fall within the scope of the strategy.

Interview the candidates whose profiles got shortlisted. Keep in mind the parameters covering skills, relevant experience, and personality traits of candidates.

Step 5: Make the Hire

Reach out to selected Content Marketers and communicate about the compensation.

Further, extend your offer letter to all the candidates who have been selected. In the case of passive sourcing, extend to only those who were aligned with you on the compensation and are willing to move forward.

Ensure having a deadline for the joining date and mention the necessary documents required by your recruiting team.

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Get the required documents and set up the offer agreements with candidates
Organize an orientation session for the onboarded candidates
Introduce them to the entire team and the marketing teams they will be working with
Guide the new candidates about your company management tools and communication channels
Provide candidates with forms for benefits and perks like Health Insurance.

Supercharge Your Hiring for Content Marketer with Nurturebox

Inbound candidate sourcing doesn’t work effectively anymore. Do you also find challenges in closing quality candidates through job posts even after spending on ads?

Don’t worry, passive candidate sourcing can be an optimal solution for hiring top content marketing candidates.

Nurturebox is a one-stop talent sourcing and engagement platform which is powered by automation. Here’s how you can source product managers from LinkedIn using Nurturebox:

Install the Nurturebox Chrome plugin and sign up.
On your LinkedIn profile, start sourcing Content Marketers with boolean searches stating the required experience from targeted locations and including other criteria
Add the qualified candidates to your sourcing campaign pipeline with just a click
Automate the candidate engagement through email, Whatsapp and LinkedIn direct messages for reaching out and nurturing candidates at scale.