How to Improve your Company's Recruitment Process (Free Templates Included)

Do you know how advantageous it can be to improve the recruitment process for your business? Recruiting is one of the most important business strategies as it can help you hire the right candidate for your team. The people you hire become an eternal part of your workforce and are responsible to take it to great heights. Not only this, you utilize your company resources on these people in return for their hard work and dedication.

If you are still relying on old ways of scheduling interviews and hiring candidates without screening them properly, it is time to change your process for the best. Let me start with a few reasons why one must think of improving the recruitment process:

Increased productivity

Replacing manual resume screening and interview scheduling can make it much easier for your human resource management team to hire the right candidate for the job. It can increase their efficiency and help them filter out candidates at a fast pace.

Streamlined recruitment process

Once you have developed an automated system for hiring candidates all the team members would work in the same way. They can collaborate in one place and keep each other updated with different stages of recruitment like the creation of job descriptions, advertising the job, sending application forms, refining applicant data, scheduling interviews, and so on.

12 Functions of Human Resource Management (HRM)

Bias-free Hiring

The recruitment team might be biased at times even without noticing it. For instance, a female team leader might want to hire more females in the team or someone would prefer a candidate because they are from the same ethical background. Automating and improving the hiring process removes such unintentional (and even intentional) biases by making the process completely objective.

These are just a few important benefits of improving the recruitment process. You will experience many more once you will start automating the process which takes us to the agenda of this blog - how to improve the recruiting process. Now, I will be sharing some easy ways to enhance the hiring process including some recruitment tips and free Stackby templates!

How to improve the recruitment process

1. Create a schedule

The best way to streamline a business process is to create a schedule for every task. You must create a schedule for different tasks involved in recruitment, for instance, set deadlines for creating job descriptions and ads, set a publishing date, or schedule interviews with candidates. Let the whole team have access to this schedule so that everyone knows who is working on which task and what’s scheduled next!

You can use Stackby's weekly schedule template to improve the hiring process of your business by scheduling interviews/ calls/ recruitment tasks. This template provides you with a weekly schedule. It also includes events form that can be used to schedule an event in the recruiting process. You can further customize this template based on your requirements.

2. Use an Application Tracking System

How are you managing applicant data till now? Still relying on excel files and google spreadsheets? It is time to change by incorporating an application tracking system for recruitment and hiring. An automated applicant tracker can reduce the hiring time, speed up the recruitment cycle and provide a better screening process for the HR managers.

Stackby has a pre-built applicant tracker template that includes the details of applicants, interviews, and open job profiles in the company. The applicant's table stores the complete details of applicants such as their name, the position that they are applying for, their resume, interview date, interview score, status, phone, etc.

It comes with a predefined applicant tracker form that you can send to a candidate interested in applying for the current open positions. All the details entered by the candidate will be stored automatically in the Applicants table.

You can also filter out candidates based on their status, and score or check the interview calendar to see how many interviews are scheduled in a month.

3. Automate the onboarding process

Make your new employees feel valued and equal by implementing a standard onboarding process. I have seen that in many companies, some employees get proper orientation while others are just waiting for their email ids from the IT department and don’t know what to do. This can really bring down your company’s reputation.

So, at Stackby we decided to create an employee onboarding template to streamline the whole system for HRs and improve the recruitment process. Now you can track the onboarding process from start to finish on a single interface.

Our employee onboarding template allows you to create a onboarding process checklist where you can check whether each employee has completed the onboarding process or not. For instance, signing the employee contract, submitting bank account details, office tours, meeting the CEO, setting up benefits, and so on.

You can also store all the company resources in one place such as the security policy, employee handbook, HR handbook, etc., and share them with your employees/ team members accordingly.

Last, but not least, you can check how many onboarding tasks are pending for which employee and follow up with them. Isn’t that an easy way to manage the newly hired employees?

4. Maintain recruitment pipeline

Some human resource managers like keeping a track of every stage of the recruitment process. We call it the recruitment pipeline. This way, they can organize, maintain and improve the hiring process without creating any chaos.

So, at Stackby we decided to create a template that can help HR managers to streamline the recruitment pipeline. Stackby's prebuilt, free employee recruitment pipeline template can track the progress of each candidate throughout the entire recruitment process and provides updates to the whole team in real-time.

In this template, you will find a ‘Candidates’ table that keeps track of the recruitment pipeline for every candidate. For instance, their photograph, resume, contact number, and notes from the HR department, recruitment stage, application date, last process date, next process date, etc.

You can keep track of the job position they have applied for, screening round rating, technical round rating, HR round rating, and so on.

You can also keep track of the number of profiles submitted for every job role and who is managing the interviews for that profile.

Streamlining the recruitment pipeline can help improve the recruitment process easier for an organization. Try our free recruiting pipeline template today.

5. Automate candidate communication

Now comes a very important part of the hiring process – keeping the applicants in the loop. Believe me, if you keep the applicants hanging until your team decides the results, it puts a very bad impression on them. You might even lose deserving applicants as they have joined somewhere else or have a job opportunity at some other place.

Candidate communication is no more a hectic task nowadays with automation. To keep candidates in the loop by communicating with them during the recruitment process, use a call log template. Our predefined call log template helps you track and manage every conversation you have with them on the phone.

You can customize the call log template for recruitment purposes only and store the details of every phone call done with the applicants. You can also track who conversated with the applications, what were the results, or any notes related to every call.

Here’s another way Stackby can help you automate candidate communication and improve the recruitment process. Use Stackby’s button column type to send messages/ emails and schedule meetings instantly.

The button column type automates your redundant tasks and creates a streamlined workflow. Using it is simple for anybody. Just add the button column type in your recruitment tracker or call log template.

Here’s a short video on how to use the button column type in Stackby:

A few more tips on improving the hiring process for your business…

I hope the above tips will help you automate the recruitment process and make things work in your favor. However, automating the hiring process would work much better if you take care of a few more things.

Create attractive job descriptions

An effective job ad can provide the complete details of what is expected from the applicants. For instance, use power words like ‘must have’. Add bullet points to emphasize every requirement.

You must also keep the roles clear and try avoiding clickbait titles. For example, work-from-home opportunities for recent graduates are a big no-no while writing the job description. Write clear titles like job openings for marketing managers, job openings for literature teachers, and so on.

Promote your company in the job description to attract candidates. For instance, you can write about a newly opened branch or how your company is growing at a fast rate. Also, mention the perks or any benefits that you are willing to offer.

Make great hires with candidate sourcing

Candidate sourcing is a technique to find potential employees on various platforms. For example, places like Reddit, Twitter, LinkedIn, or GitHub can help you find people who match your job requirements perfectly. Even if they are still ‘employed’, you can offer them a better opportunity.

You can also begin a referral program and ask your own employees to recommend suitable candidates. You can reward them or provide extra benefits to those employees for finding you gems for your company. Gamify the whole process and see how exciting the recruitment process would become.

Create an effective career page

This should actually be your first step in improving the recruitment process for your company. A careers page defines your work culture and attracts potential employees. It should be convincing, and engaging and should highlight the unique features of your work culture or what makes your company better than the rest.

Putting an effort into your careers page can help you in many ways. It will explain everything about your company, current open positions, and your work culture clearly to potential employees or interested candidates.

Collect recruitment feedback from candidates

My last piece of advice is probably one of the most important tips for recruiting employees. Always make sure to collect feedback from the candidates about the recruitment process whether they are hired or not. This will help you in two ways.

First, you will get insightful data about the experience of the candidates and how you can improve the recruitment process.

Second, it will showcase that you value the candidates and their input. Some candidates who were not hired might point out some negative aspects of your hiring process and it would be a great chance to improve the recruitment process.

Create a Stackby form including all the questions and send it to your candidates for their feedback. Some common questions could be –

• Whether the employee had all the information about the hiring process?
• How would the candidate rate their experience with the interview process?
• Would they recommend other people to apply for a job in your company?

Refine your recruitment process with Stackby

Improving your hiring process by automating some of its elements and enhancing others can help you make it more efficient and pleasant. Imagine, no more pressure on the human resources and operations teams, no more frustrated emails and calls from candidates asking for a final answer from your side, and no more discrepancies and biases in the hiring process!

All you will get is clarity on the process. It will be easy to maintain and track the recruitment process in every department. I hope the free pre-built templates at Stackby would be very useful in the whole process. You will also find many other interesting features at Stackby that will aid in streamlining your recruitment workflow. For instance, our top-notch powerups, data reporting, data organization, and data creation features.

Check out the new features added to Stackby in 2021.

If you haven’t signed up yet, wait no more. Join Stackby here at absolutely no cost!

Frequently Asked Questions

1. How can we improve the recruitment process?

Make sure to provide the right, clear, and concise job descriptions. Always create an attractive careers page and make sure to take the candidate feedback regarding the hiring process.

2. What are the different phases of the recruitment process?

There are 7 phases of the recruitment process in general - Planning, Analysis, Searching, Screening, Engagement, Selection, and Onboarding. Stackby can help you automate each phase.

3. What is an applicant tracking system?

ATS or Application Tracking System automates the recruiting process. An automated applicant tracker can reduce the hiring time, speed up the recruitment cycle and provide a better screening process for the HR managers. Check Stackby’s Applicant Tracker Template to know more.