Hiring best practices: A complete guide to building a better hiring process

The wrong hires come at a high price. According to Gallup estimates, the mistake can cost an employer upwards of 50% of the person’s annual salary. 

Often, this mistake is the result of a broken hiring process: an unstructured workflow that doesn’t effectively help a recruiting team attract and retain the right candidates.

Strong recruiting processes follow a set of guidelines that consistently ensure a fair and equitable experience for applicants and drive internal recruitment efficiency. Here, we’ll explore eight common hiring best practices and the importance of each.

The 8 best practices for hiring

Your hiring process should be by-design and deliberate. If it isn’t, recruiters risk making instinctual hiring decisions, pulling candidates that fit only some but not all of the role’s requirements, or unwittingly applying inequitable filters. Without a structured workflow, recruiters may also let promising leads fall through the cracks.

Avoid these hiring pitfalls by adhering to the following eight best practices.‍

1. Define hiring needs and goals

Often, hiring decisions fail before a job description is even written. Recruiters jump to screen applicants without first assessing the organization’s needs and how a new hire would fulfill them. Here’s how you can correctly define hiring needs before opening a role. 

• Start with outcomes: Define what pain point the organization needs to fix. Perhaps your engineering team is stretched too thin to reasonably meet feature launches. Ask yourself whether the team is struggling to keep up with work because it doesn’t have enough hands or because of process bottlenecks that won’t be solved by hiring new engineers. If the root cause of the problem is not having a robust enough team, you’re right to think that adding a talented new member may help solve it. If the cause is a broken process, put hiring on hold and fix that workflow instead.
• Define the requirements: Once you’ve determined that you need to hire someone, define what this person’s role should achieve. What specific tasks would this individual own? How would completing these tasks directly contribute to workflow improvements and organizational goals? 
• Build a candidate profile: Translate the role requirements into a candidate profile, outlining the hard and soft skills the new hire should ideally have. This step is essential as the candidate profile will become the basis for the job description and interview questions.

2. Validate role requirements

Ask stakeholders, like the head of the department you’re hiring for, to provide feedback on the candidate profile. Because these leaders are closest to the work and know what type of help they need, they can easily spot gaps in the profile. They can also pinpoint requirements that aren’t valuable and can be removed.

Then, validate the candidate profile against the job market to ensure that the type of applicant you’re seeking realistically exists. Juicebox’s Talent Insights feature can pull data for candidate criteria, like skillset or seniority, in a specific geographical area.

3. Write a clear job description

Job descriptions serve as an internal record of role requirements, but they are also sales documents designed to generate candidate interest. So, it’s just as important to paint an attractive and representative picture of the role, company, and compensation as it is to detail the nature of the work. Here’s what to include.

• Role summary: Describe, at a high level, what processes the candidate would own.
• Key responsibilities and outcomes: Outline the core responsibilities of the role and the business objectives to which they contribute. Provide a 30-60-90-day success map, with specific goals the candidate would have to achieve in those periods.
• Must-haves vs. nice-to-haves: List must-have and nice-to-have qualifications separately. This way, applicants can self-filter if they don’t meet the basic criteria. And those who possess the core competencies won’t feel discouraged from applying because they don’t tick off every box on the nice-to-have list. They know those items are pluses, not requirements.
• Compensation: Research shows that four in 10 candidates won’t apply for a job if the description doesn’t state the compensation range. In addition to listing these figures, include what benefits your organization offers, as these perks are increasingly valuable to today’s job seekers.
• Markers of fairness and inclusivity: Show job seekers how seriously your organization takes equitable hiring practices by stating your anti-discrimination commitment. And always use inclusive language (i.e., “salesperson,” instead of “salesman”).

4. Align on a consistent hiring process

Drive consistency by following an established workflow and assigning owners to each step of the process. Here’s an example to guide you. 

1. The hiring manager determines the need for a new hire
2. The recruiting team and the hiring manager create and review the criteria 
3. The recruiting team drafts a job description for the hiring manager to approve 
4. The designated member of the recruiting team publishes the job description
5. The recruiting team divides up applicant review, assigning each candidate to a responsible recruiter 
6. The recruiting team’s coordinator initiates and manages candidate outreach and scheduling as recruiters select candidates to interview
7. Each responsible recruiter interviews their candidates 
8. The recruiting team reviews and narrows the shortlist 
9. The recruiters responsible for finalist candidates run additional interviews and assessments
10. The recruiting team makes a final hiring decision
11. The recruiter managing the chosen candidate’s process extends an offer

5. Hold structured interviews and fair assessments

Interviews and assessments are integral to most hiring workflows, including the example one shown in the previous section. Interviews provide qualitative and quantitative insights into candidates, allowing recruiters to familiarize themselves with the applicant’s skills and experiences, while also checking for cultural fit. Assessments surface data on candidates' technical skills, ensuring they’re qualified to perform the role’s key tasks. 

Useful interviews and assessments are structured and fair, providing standardized evaluation criteria that recruiters can use to compare candidates. Interviews should follow the same series of predetermined questions for all applicants. This way, all interviewers cover queries about basic competencies for performing the role. Similarly, assessments should test candidates on the same skills, i.e., by having everyone perform the same trial exercise or test.

6. Prioritize excellent communication

Just as you put your faith in candidates, candidates put their trust in your organization. This mutual respect relies on clear and consistent communication, in which you quickly derive the information you need from applicants, and they remain clear on advances and next steps. 

Avoid the following common communication errors, and ensure that candidates have a positive interaction with the company, no matter the outcome of their application. This interaction reflects on your employer brand, and even if a candidate doesn’t end up joining the organization, they will leave the conversation with a positive view of it to share with colleagues.

• Slow or incomplete responses that leave candidates confused about their standing in the process
• Ghosting candidates after they’ve interviewed
• Providing generic feedback that doesn’t reference the particulars of the conversations you’ve had with the candidate
• Template messages that risk containing unhelpful information (i.e., generic hiring steps irrelevant to a candidate’s case) or errors (i.e., the wrong name in the greeting)
• Never-ending review timelines with little explanation on the wait from the hiring team 
• Insensitive, boilerplate rejections (especially with candidates who made it far into the process and established rapport)

7. Focus on the employee experience

Don’t risk losing the ideal candidate to a disorganized or unfair vetting and offer process. Keep applicants interested and eager to work for the company with the following tips. 

• Extend fair compensation: Candidates regularly turn down job offers because of inadequate compensation and benefits. You can increase the chances that an ideal applicant won’t reject your offer by extending a competitive compensation package. Research salary and benefits benchmarks for the role and geographical area, aiming to meet or surpass them. You can often find competitor compensation data on job boards.
• Sort internal approvals ahead of time: You should be ready to make an offer once you’ve found the right candidate, not weeks later, after you’ve run the decision through a chain of approvals. Instead, get finance and senior leadership on board before nearing the end of the recruitment process. This way, you don’t leave the ideal applicant waiting for information. They may assume they didn’t get the role or feel frustrated by the silence and look for opportunities elsewhere.
• Establish an excellent onboarding program: Onboarding is a new employee’s first impression of working at the company, and it should be a positive one. Aim for a smooth, supportive transition in which team leaders provide the training that the employee needs to confidently perform their work. Look for ways to streamline admin tasks, too, like by using HR software with employee onboarding portals that allow new hires to sign contracts or add payment information without time-consuming e-mail back-and-forths with HR staff. 

8.  Check in

Check in with both new employees and their managers after 30, 60, and 90 days. 

Send a pulse survey to the new team member to gather feedback on their experience at the company. The employee’s first impression provides valuable insights into potential areas of improvement in your onboarding process or the company culture. 

Invite managers to offer feedback on the employee’s performance and fit. These moments of reflection enable leaders to assess progress and spot gaps in the employee’s learning. They can then provide additional guidance to help the employee succeed.

Find the right fit first with Juicebox

Just as the wrong hire is the product of a disorganized recruitment process, the right one is the result of a functional workflow. When employers correctly map their organization’s needs to roles and follow a structured recruitment cadence, they improve their odds of landing on the ideal candidate quickly. 

Make the manual, time-consuming tasks of talent acquisition more agile with Juicebox, which enables recruiters to search over 800 million candidate profiles with natural language queries. Tell Juicebox exactly who you need, and let the tool surface talent that matches so that your candidate pool matches your criteria from the start.

FAQs

How do you reduce bias in hiring? 

Reduce hiring bias with a structured interview and assessment process that equitably evaluates job seekers on hard and soft skills. Don’t leave your recruitment team to make gut decisions that could result from underlying biases.

How can AI improve recruiting without replacing recruiters? 

Let AI handle sourcing research, first-touch contact, analysis, and repetitive tasks, like scheduling and interview summaries. When AI does this work, recruiters have more time to focus on tasks that require human judgment, such as relationship building with candidates,

What metrics should I track to assess the efficacy of my recruitment process? 

Start by tracking the time-to-fill, quality-of-hire, and offer acceptance rate. Time-to-fill shows whether your recruitment process moves at a competitive pace. Quality-of-hire (which is based on new hire performance reviews) demonstrates how suited new employees are for their roles, telling you how well you did at matching them to the work. And offer acceptance rate signals whether your process and compensation are competitive with market standards.