6 Ways to Optimise Your Hiring & Onboarding Processes

1. Build a brand

The first, bigger-picture step to optimising your recruitment process is developing your employer brand. In the long-run, this will improve your brand perception, reputation, and help to attract high-calibre candidates.

You’ll need to think about cultivating a company culture, defining your values and working to them, and developing a brand tone of voice that is consistent across all channels including job postings (more on this below).

2. Centre candidate experience

Optimising your hiring and onboarding processes is as much about streamlining your internal workflows as enhancing your candidate’s experience. This means ensuring they have positive interactions with your hiring team from day one, encounter no barriers to entry, and engage with easy-to-use recruitment and onboarding tools.

Importantly, candidate experience has a bearing on more than just your hiring success rate - it links to overall length of service too. 20% of new hires quit within the first 45 days of entering a new role. This is most likely the result of bad hiring practices combined with a negative or lacklustre recruitment and onboarding experience.

3. Automate, automate, automate

Automating key workflows through the hiring and onboarding processes is essential. Integrating dedicated tools will not only reduce your time to hire, but enhance the overall candidate experience and make your life easier. Let’s take a look at what automation might look like at each stage:

Automating recruitment

Do away with endless email chains and hectic bureaucracy. Using an integrated platform is key to streamlining your overall recruitment process. The specific features available to you will depend on the platform that you choose.

In general, recruitment automation tools will support you by:

• Automatically posting your vacancy to a number of hiring platform
• Pre-screening job applicants, filtering out anyone who doesn’t meet your requirements
• Letting you track your applicants
• Giving you direct access to candidate information
• Scheduling interviews directly with the candidate

Crucially, these tools recognise that recruitment doesn’t happen in a vacuum - it involves HR and the department that’s hiring. Using a consolidated platform means that everyone involved in the hire can access relevant candidate information.

Automated reference checks

Some employers choose to skip over reference checks because they’re time-consuming and involve yet more administration. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

Reference checks offer unbeatable insight into a candidate, far beyond what you can glean from their application and interview alone. They’re also an important way of verifying all the information you’ve been provided.

Using a platform like RefNow to automate your reference checks, simplifies the process for both you and your candidates, and speeds up your time to hire.

Right To Work checks

Right To Work checks are a legal requirement to ensure that anyone you hire actually has the legal right to work in the UK. You can also use accredited services like RefNow to perform digital RTW checks for eligible employees.

Automating onboarding

Effective onboarding is linked directly to employee retention. Initiating your new employee into your company properly is crucial for making sure they feel welcome and get their bearings quickly. Automating your onboarding process reduces pressure on your HR department and implements a clear and consolidated workflow that mitigates against human-error.

Onboarding automation can take a number of forms, including:

• Onboarding checklist of documents to read through and sign or videos to watch
• Access to key apps or software
• Personalised calendar for orientation and introduction meetings

4. Write better job descriptions

Writing clear, thorough job descriptions that tell candidates exactly what you’re looking for is critical. And often, much easier said than done.

Your job description could be the very first interaction a candidate has with your business. That’s why it’s important to give potential applicants a taste of who you are as a business and why they might be a good fit.

A clear job description that outlines exact requirements, necessary qualifications, and overall expectations is also an effective filter against unsuitable candidates.

5. Optimise for mobile & social media

Nowadays, the majority of job applicants find and apply for job openings online and on social media. Often, they do so using their mobile. Posting your open positions across a diverse range of platforms is the best way to maximise your exposure and reach a bigger pool of candidates.

6. Ask for feedback

Once your new employee has settled in, it’s worth asking for their feedback on their experience of your hiring and onboarding process. If they highlight specific pain-points, you can proactively address these for upcoming recruits. You can either do this in an in-person interview with your HR department or include a survey as part of your onboarding checklist.