Best practice in recruitment process – what is it?

Recruitment and selection have certain rules that can be followed to manage a successful recruitment project. The rules are particularly useful when a business does not have much practice in the recruitment process, or when the internal HR department decides to carry out the recruitment process in-house and does not hire a recruitment company. It is not enough for recruitment companies to know only good practices, as their specialisation requires them to develop new practices and improve the recruitment process on an ongoing basis. The most basic best practices in the recruitment and selection process are 3:

1.Building a recruitment team

If the services of a recruitment company are not used, the employer side must set up a team to participate in the recruitment process. The team may consist of specialists from the human resources department, the hiring manager, the company’s manager and other specialists who can assist in the selection process. This team formation before the start of the search process is particularly important as the team members know their roles in the recruitment project in advance. If the team is not in place, new team members have to be added during the recruitment process, which leads to:

• The time it takes for the new team members to become familiar with the recruitment project.
• Loss of quality, as new team members who have not been involved in previous selection processes may make mistakes.
• Risk for candidates’ motivation, as they may lose confidence in the employer by seeing new people with little connection to the selection process.

2.Establishing the stages of the recruitment process

If the recruitment process is carried out internally, then it is necessary to establish a precise structure of the recruitment phases, i.e. how many interviews there will be, how long the interviews are expected to last, whether there will be tasks, who will assess the tasks, at what stage the candidates will be screened for references etc. Such a plan allows the duration of the recruitment project to be predicted with near certainty, and all members of the project know exactly at which stage they will need to be involved and how long it will take.

3.Determining the methodology for assessing candidates

Once candidates have been identified and evaluated, the worst thing that can happen is an open discussion between the hiring team about the suitability of the candidates. Such open discussions are usually extremely time-consuming, unproductive and based on the biased arguments of each of the participants in the selection process. To avoid all this, it is necessary to anticipate the criteria on which candidates will be assessed. It is precisely by setting the criteria that the selection process may end up with only two objectively suitable candidates instead of five, making the debate on which candidate to choose much simpler.

These three points define the essence of good practice in staff selection and act as a starting point for the development of new good practices. Of course, when hiring a recruitment company, the practices will be brought with the company’s experience. If the recruitment is to be carried out internally by the recruiter, then the three recruitment best practices are the least that the internal members of the company’s recruitment team can rely on.