A hiring checklist will help you attract and hire top talent. It is the starting point to a great hire. Simply put a checklist used for hiring is a detailed list of steps to define, plan, recruit and hire your employees. It defines your system or process to a great hire for your organization. And after all when companies hire great employees, they become great companies. As an owner, hiring manager or recruiter, you want only the best so both you and your company can enjoy great success.
The process is often complicated beyond what it needs to be. For simplicity we have broken the checklist for hiring top employees into just 7 steps. These steps are as follows:
Each of these steps addresses a specific function that has a number of choices and decision. Factors that impact those decisions include, size of business, type of position, resources available, and more. Each company must decide on their own what suits them.
As mentioned above, you need to start with a needs analysis. If you haven't done so already, benchmark the position, define success criteria and create a functional job analysis . (We have provided a sample job analysis , in case you have never done one before.) This defines the clear requirements of the position so you can develop a job description .
If by chance you have a job description and you have not done the foundation work, maybe consider revisiting at least the success factors part of this exercise. This may be the single most important part of the your checklist so I urge you not to skip this step!
Now that you have your job description, the next step is to decide what you are going to do with it. Recruiting employees requires some strategy and then planning to be successful. You have decisions to make like whether to do it yourself or outsource some or all of the process. Your strategy will impact your plan.
One last tip... be sure your hiring checklist makes sense to you and your company. For instance, if you have a well established job description for a warehouse worker, you probably don't need to do much job analysis or definition of success factors.
On the other hand, if you have a coordinator position and you have seen a wide variance on how successful people have been in the position, you may want to spend some time analyzing the root causes and get them down on paper.
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