“Hire right because the penalties of hiring wrong are huge.”

• Ray Dalio

Hiring the right people goes a long way to maximize cost, save time, and bring in a high return on investment for your company. Pre-employment can be a difficult process to overcome.

Undercover Recruiter reports that hiring a bad hire can cost about $240,000 in expenses, and CareerBuilder says nearly three in four employers are affected by a poor hire. 

To avoid the dire consequences of hiring the wrong employees, you must pay attention to your pre-employment process. This is so you can hire the right people who will contribute immensely to your company’s growth. 

This article will walk you through the seven practical ways to create an excellent pre-employment process that brings the right candidates for your organization.

Let’s get into it.

7 Pre-employment tips for selecting the best candidates 

There are seven critical tips to follow when looking to hire the best candidates for your company. They are practical and can help make your recruiting process a lot more effective. Let’s check them out below:

• Invest in recruitment marketing for pre-employment

If you are looking to hire the best talents for a role, you have to invest in effective marketing that reaches and attracts the right people.

 Effective recruitment comes with approaching the recruitment process with a marketing mindset, just like you would when attracting new customers. 

The best way to hire the most qualified candidates is by studying the three stages —awareness, consideration, and decision stages —  of their journey with your company.

In the awareness stage, your candidates become aware of your job vacancy. There’s also the consideration stage where prospective candidates evaluate your company and the position available to see if it’s a good fit. And there’s the decision stage, where your prospective candidates decide to apply for the job. 

It’s essential to know that each of these stages requires different approaches to be successful. For example, suppose you want to generate enough awareness to reach the suitable candidates and get them to consider the positions in your company. This means you need to invest in promoting your employer brand across several platforms. 

What reputation do you have with your employees? What is your employee culture, and what are the perks of working with your organization? You want to ensure you put these positives out there for your candidates to see. Because apart from the pay, the best talents want to work in an environment that lets them grow and be better. 

By highlighting your employee benefits, work culture, and work environment, you will be able to answer your top talents’ most prominent questions and they will be able to make a decision to work with you. 

• Ask for referrals during pre-employment

Asking for referrals from your existing employees or partners increases your chances of hiring the best candidates. This is because your current employees or working partners are more likely to have people with similar skill sets in their circle. 

Apart from this, asking for referrals comes with tons of benefits. First, they help speed up the hiring process because the referred candidates are most likely qualified and can save your team the rigor of pre-screening stages.

Secondly, the onboarding process is a lot easier. This is because the candidates are already familiar with at least one of your employees who can help with explaining the company’s culture and values.

Thirdly, referrals are excellent ways to actively engage the rest of the team in the recruitment process, which increases your chances of reaching a pool of talents to hire. 

To seek referrals from your employees, send emails stating the vacant positions available and highlighting the skills, requirements, and qualifications required to fill the positions.

Also, show them how you would like them to send the candidates your way. For example, would you prefer they send the details of the candidates through your email, or would you prefer they connect you directly to the candidate while you and your team take it from there? 

Stating your expectations clearly can help your employees recommend suitable candidates following the proper procedures to simplify recruitment. 

• Conduct pre-employment skills testing 

Pre-employment skills testing is one of the most critical parts of your recruitment process that should be carried out effectively to hire the best candidates for a role. 

It is how you know a candidate has what it takes to perform excellently in a role. Pre-employment skills testing is of different types. There are soft skills tests, hard skills tests, role-specific tests, personality tests, culture fit tests, cognitive ability tests, and many more. 

Conducting these tests goes a long way in streamlining the number of qualified candidates you have for a role and selecting the best talents among the eligible candidates.

It also helps you save big on recruitment costs and reduces time-to-hire. As a result, you will spend less time on the wrong candidates and avoid the expenses of replacing bad hires. 

• Create great experiences for candidates

Top talents are concerned about how a company treats them. This experience starts from the time your candidates get to know about your job all through to the recruitment process. So, you must make the recruitment process as seamless as possible for your candidates.

Start with making the initial application process straightforward. Keep your candidates informed throughout the process, from the details about the interview’s time, dates, and requirements to your expectations during the assessment process. 

Another way to keep the experience positive for your candidates is to provide constructive feedback when necessary. 

For example, if a candidate wasn’t hired due to a failed assessment or not meeting specific requirements, it’s good to inform the candidates that your company won’t be hiring them and why. 

The timely and constructive feedback can help the candidate move on to seeking opportunities in other places early; it can also enlighten them on their shortcomings to find ways to improve to be qualified for future opportunities. 

Also, you will be able to leave a positive impression of your company in the minds of your candidates, which can help with future collaborations. 

• Collaborate effectively with the team

Hiring suitable candidates is teamwork. It is, therefore, essential to carry everyone in the team along in the process. 

While you will be in charge of the execution as the hiring manager, you will also need to carry the executives, the financial adviser, and the rest of the human resources team along throughout the process.

Also, inform other employees outside your team ahead of time if you need their help with the recruitment process. 

For example, if you need the design team to come up with graphics for the job ad or the social media manager to post the job ads across the social channels, they should know what is expected beforehand. 

Keep the communication open and consistent to keep everyone involved in the hiring process updated every step of the way. This will go a long way in facilitating the recruitment process to achieve the right outcome. 

• Understand that it’s never a one-size-fit

It’s important to know that although it’s good to have a system to guide you through the recruiting process as a company, it’s also critical to understand the system won’t be applicable in all cases. 

There will be exceptions, situations where you have to develop new processes to meet unusual cases. 

For example, in situations where there’s an overflow of work, you need new hands to help the existing employees urgently, or for cases where more than two employees leave the organization without notice. 

There would be a need to come up with new processes to tackle these urgent needs. 

The effectiveness of a recruitment pre-employment stage is its ability to consistently meet the organizations’ current needs. It must therefore be open to change and improvement as new situations arise and as the company evolves. 

• Be proactive 

Proper planning is the secret of any successful pre-employment process. This means none of the activities in the pre-employment stage should be an afterthought; every process should be designed to make the employment process a success. 

This involves setting expectations and goals and predicting the outcome of the pre-employment stage to make the best decisions. 

Understand the present stage of staff. Stay updated on who would be retiring or resigning from the organization soon so you can work towards finding a replacement before the employees leave the organization. 

Remember, the success of your pre-employment stage depends highly on how well you plan and how effectively you execute your plans. One way to ensure a practical planning and execution process is to stay proactive. 

Conclusion on Pre-Employment

An effective pre-employment process saves your company from bad hiring decisions. This article discussed seven practical tips to introduce into your pre-employment process to enable your company to hire the best talents.

These tips include marketing your company’s employee benefits effectively, asking for referrals, conducting pre-employment skill tests, delivering great candidate experiences, keeping everyone in the team updated, keeping the system open to change, and being proactive in the processes. 

Use these tips to improve your pre-employment process and enable the recruiting team to hire the best-qualified candidates for the job.

Author Bio:
Lydia Iseh is a writer with years of experience in writing SEO content that provides value to the reader. As someone who believes in the power of SEO to transform businesses, she enjoys being part of the process that helps websites rank high on search engines.