Recruitment is time-consuming and often complex. Amongst many concerns the most common can be how to screen through the piles of resumes whilst ensuring that you don’t miss out on the perfect candidate for the job. The cost of hiring the wrong candidate is high, plus the impact of making a recruitment mistake will affect both you and your employees considerably. The real problem is not attracting people; it’s attracting the right people.

Your company needs to have clear goals about where it’s heading; when you are hiring you should be clearly communicating these goals to potential new-hires. Understanding your enterprise and its aims is important to applicants, especially the part where they fit in to helping you achieve those objectives.

You need to promote your available position; the job description needs to remain succinct, yet detailed enough to convey the nature of the role. Not only that, it also needs to make them want to apply in the first place. The candidate’s decision to apply will be based solely on what the ad says so the title is also crucially important, think of the advert as the resume for your company.

There are so many ways in which to advertise your position during the recruitment process, aside from the newspaper; online job sites attract a whole new type of traffic, plus there are social networking sites such as Linkedin, where you can actively search out the type of candidate you want and suggest the position to them directly.

Before looking elsewhere, have you looked within your company? All of your internal employees should be given the opportunity to apply for your vacancy; it is excellent for company morale and sends a good message to your workforce. The internal employees are more well-known to you and you to them, meaning a quicker settling-in period and lower costs. However, diversity within a business is priceless; any influx of new skills and knowledge will benefit everybody involved.

Communication with applicants, whether successful or not is imperative. Giving closure to unsuccessful applicants speaks volumes about your company culture; ignorance may actually do your business some damage, most likely through word of mouth.

Outsourcing the recruitment process will mean handling all of the above criteria with expertise; you would gain access to extensive knowledge of the exact right steps that are necessary to tackle the task at hand. As well as completing all the laborious processes such as the initial screening and information collation, all administration and background checks, interviews and aptitude testing can also be outsourced, leaving you free to fully prepare for your new employee’s start date.

The largest costs of recruiting arise from the consequences of getting it wrong; getting it right by leaving it to an expert is a popular choice for small to medium businesses.

Give the new employee at least a 90 day period to get up to full speed; it’s just part of the process. As is establishing a probationary period; it gives a clear and measurable way to verify the skills the employee laid claim to during the interview process and is also an easy way to address any underperformance issues. You should then measure your employee satisfaction and engagement levels regularly and consistently, the importance of this goes beyond the period of recruitment. Motivational meetings and performance reviews, training opportunities and reward & recognition programs will all help to keep your workers engaged, satisfied and happy to be your employees.