Full End-To-End Recruitment Guide For Hiring Managers & Small Business Owners

Joshua Sim Interviewer Help, Interviews, Recruitment

As a recruiter, I have been through the full recruitment journey many times. In my time helping employers find the right person for their job vacancies, I have noticed that hiring managers and small business owners are often unclear on the full recruitment process. This is even despite having guided some of them through it a few times. Thus, this article aims to be a written reference to guide hiring managers through the full recruitment process from start to finish.

Before we start, let’s at least clarify the definition of end-to-end recruitment first: End-to-end recruitment, also known as full cycle recruitment, refers to the whole process of filling a job vacancy by sourcing, screening, and selecting job candidates, then offering the job to and onboarding the new hire.

Here is a metro map of the end-to-end recruitment cycle. This article will follow the path of this map, and explain each point along the way.

I have to warn you that this is a really long article. I have attempted the difficult task of squeezing an entire college-level course into a single article. (Trust me, I used to tutor recruitment at my old university.)

The result is this long article that covers the full recruitment cycle from one end (when you have a job vacancy), all the way to the other end (when you have a new hire successfully join your company). Also known as end-to-end recruitment, this article is broken down into recruitment steps from start to finish.

Each recruitment step is described here in some detail, but if I have written a specific article on each step, it will be linked appropriately. Additionally, as this guide assumes you are a hiring manager or small business owner, I will add in my perspective and some pro tips on what you should and shouldn’t do at each step.

Scroll down to read on, or use the table of contents above to navigate to the section you need the most help in.

Job Vacancy Identified

So you have a potential job vacancy on your hands. You are in this situation because an existing staff member has left, or there aren’t enough people to do the work, or, best of all, your business is growing and expanding and you need more hands on deck.

The whole recruitment can be tedious and expensive. Before you jump straight into it, you should make sure that you do indeed need to recruit. Ask yourself the following questions:

Can the work be divided up and done by existing team members?
Can I pull another staff member into this job and close off their previous job?
Can the job be automated?
Is this job really necessary or can we do away with it entirely?

If the answer is no, then you can move to start the recruitment process.

Job Analysis

Job analysis is the practice of researching a job and its incumbent to understand what is expected of the job holder in terms of the responsibilities and tasks covered under the job, and also in terms of the traits and competencies the job holder should ideally have. The job analysis is used to inform the job description and help identify the ideal job candidate during the recruitment process.

Basically, a job analysis helps you paint a picture of the ideal candidate beforehand. It can help guide you during the latter stages of the recruitment process and save decision-making headaches down the road. When you meet a candidate who “fits the mold” set out by the job analysis, you will know you have found the right person for the job.

Yet in my experience, Job analysis is a key step in the recruitment process that is often overlooked by hiring managers. This is probably because they either don’t know about it or don’t know how to do it properly.

As a hiring manager, you probably don’t have the time to do a deep analysis of the job. However, for the purpose of recruitment, the least you can do is to identify the top 5 competencies or traits that your ideal candidate should have. This will help you determine what interview questions you will ask and what other tests you can use at the job screening stage (more about that below). After this point, you should be on the lookout for any job candidates who match these 5 criteria. The logic here being that the job candidate who best fits the 5 competencies or traits will be the best fit for the job.

Recruiter Pro Tip: If you don’t have time to do a proper job analysis, you can search for premade job analyses of generic jobs on the government-funded website O*Net. Simply go to O*Net, search for the job title in question or a similar job title, and look at its job analysis profile. You can pick the predetermined top 5 competencies or traits listed on the profile and go from there.

Sourcing for Job Candidates

Candidate sourcing is the act of looking for potential job candidates on an open market or through private networks in order to fill a job vacancy. Candidate sourcing can be divided into “active” sourcing, where job seekers are approached by the hiring employer, and “passive” sourcing, where the hiring employer advertises their job vacancy in order to attract job seekers to express their interest in taking up the job.

This step is all about finding the potential job candidates who will want to do the job that you have available. Before you can even start matching candidates to the job, you will need to find them first.

Candidate sourcing shares many parallels to regular marketing to find customers and clients, and the mentality behind both is the same. Strategies such as “find out where your customers are and look for them there”, can be translated into “find out where job seekers are and look for them there” for recruitment.

This is also the step where you can get as creative as you want, as long as at the end of the day, your job vacancy reaches as many potential job applicants as possible and they are convinced to apply for it.

Recruiter Pro Tip: Although you are trying to market your company and job vacancy in the best light, avoid falsely advertising the job and give people a realistic preview of the job. Nobody likes false advertising, and doing so will hurt you. If you paint a picture of the job in a certain way, and when the job candidate takes up the job and realizes the job is different from how it was portrayed, they will likely resign and leave you back at square one. It is much better to paint a realistic picture of the job at the onset, even if the picture isn’t pretty, because at least the job candidates will know what they are getting themselves into. If they are still interested even after hearing the pros and cons of the job vacancy, their interest is likely to be genuine.

The various methods of candidate sourcing, both active and passive, are listed below, along with a short description of each.

Job Advertising

Job advertising, similar to regular advertising, is an announcement that publicly communicates that a company is looking to employ a suitable person to do a job or fill a job vacancy. The aim is to get as many potential job candidates to express their interest in the job vacancy as possible.

Job advertising is extremely commonplace and has become the primary method of candidate sourcing for most companies. This makes sense as it is the most efficient way of reaching the most number of potential job candidates for the amount of resources put in. With most job advertising going online, it is also merging seamlessly with the online job application process, thus multiplying its efficiency.

Therefore, job advertising is a key step and key skill that you will need to have for the recruitment process. Doubly so if you are a small business owner tight on time and money to spend on looking for job candidates.

In this method of candidate sourcing, you need to think like a marketer and brainstorm ways to attract job seekers to apply for your job. You also will be wanting the job seekers to apply for your job over the other job vacancies available as well.

Creating the Job Advertisement

In order to craft your job advert, consider using the AIDA framework from marketing. AIDA stands for Attention, Interest, Desire, and Action. These represent the mental steps that prospective job seekers go through in deciding whether or not to apply for your job. The job advertisement should start by attracting attention to the job, hold that attention by making the job and the employing company sound as interesting as possible, and thus build up the desire to want to work in the job. The final step is to make it easy for the job seeker to take the action and apply for the job.

Don’t forget to also include details of the job vacancy, such as whether it is permanent or not, the total hours of work per week, the days of the week to be worked, and most importantly a way to contact you or to apply for the job vacancy.

If possible, your job advertisement should also include optional items, such as the salary of the job, and a link to the job description, to give even more information about the job to the job seekers.

Recruiter Pro Tip: Attracting as many job seekers as possible is one thing, but attracting the right applicants is another. You will want job applicants to have the right experience and competencies for the job. These are the same competencies that you would have identified in the job analysis stage. In the job advertisement, set out the experience and competencies needed as criteria for application. The applicants should then “self-select”, and only apply for the job if they meet the criteria.

Posting the Job Advertisement

Once the job advertisement is crafted, it should be made public on a job board or classifieds. Online, there are websites dedicated to hosting your job advertisements, known as online job boards. Traditional newspapers would also have a classified section just for job advertisements. One way or another, you need to decide the most likely spot your ideal job seekers are located and advertising your job there.

Recruiter Pro Tip: Watch your budget while advertising for a job vacancy. In my experience, the ubiquity of job advertising also makes it the most ubiquitously expensive step in recruitment. Popular job boards will typically charge $200 and above for a single job advertisement. Having nobody apply for the job, and thus causing you to advertise the job, can greatly compound the cost of job advertising. Also, advertising to multiple job boards at the same time will nonetheless also compound the cost. It would probably be best to get the job advertisement written properly first, and only be advertised on the most popular job board once (plus any other free classifieds if possible), to get the most value out of your job advertisement.

Is Job Advertising Enough?

It is useful to note that job advertising is a passive candidate sourcing method, and you will only capture the active job seekers. That is to say, a passive job advertisement on a job board will only get the attention of people actively looking for jobs and careers to get into. Job advertisements will miss out on the passive job seekers, who are the people who might be interested in your job but weren’t looking out for jobs in the first place. Attracting the attention of these people is the realm of active candidate sourcing methods that aim to seek out and “shoulder tap” passive job seekers.

In most cases though, the passive job advertisement approach is good enough to attract a sufficient level of job candidates. It will be up to you to decide if more resources need to be spent on other active candidate sourcing methods.

Sourcing From Existing Networks

In candidate sourcing from existing networks, such as current employee referrals, individuals working for or with the employing company communicate with people in their social networks in order to encourage them to also work for the company. The aim is to discover potential job candidates

As a semi-active form of candidate sourcing, the aim is to discover potential job candidates within the existing social networks. Due to the personal referral nature of this method of sourcing, the employing company and its job vacancies can be made to look more attractive.

This candidate sourcing method is similar to how customers of a company recommend and evangelize the company by word of mouth. Instead, people doing the recommending are those who are already affiliated with the company, and the thing they are recommending is the job vacancy.

Giving referral incentives for successful hires to existing staff is one of the popular ways to kick start this candidate sourcing method. After all, most people will not work for free.

As such, due to its mostly low cost and low effort nature, this sourcing from existing networks is the most common candidate source for most companies. The logic here is that since you are already hunting for someone to fill the job vacancy, you might as well ask your existing staff if they know anyone who is interested.

Executive Search

Executive search, informally known as headhunting, is the practice of actively reaching out and uncovering potential job candidates for a job vacancy. This is usually done by an external recruitment agency as commissioned by an employing company, as opposed to doing it in-house.

This method of candidate sourcing is the most intensive of all and could even comprise of all the previously mentioned sourcing methods. The idea is that all avenues of looking for candidates, (i.e. targeted advertising, building or searching existing candidate databases, online boolean searching, and cold calling potential candidates) need to be deployed with the singular purpose of obtaining names of potential job candidates.

As such, executive search is an active candidate sourcing and also potentially the most costly in both time and money. Typically, it requires specialist knowledge and training to pull off, so most hiring companies will just outsource this to recruitment agencies with the ability to carry this out.

As a hiring manager or small business owner, you probably do not have the budget to pursue this method of candidate sourcing. Even for larger companies, executive search is used sparingly, and usually only for higher-level roles. Similarly, you should only start considering executive search when you are desperately short on options, or if you are looking for the next associated director in your company.

Employer Branding

Employer Branding is the reputation of a hiring company in the minds of job seekers, as a place of work. This branding helps to push a company’s employer value proposition, which comprises the perceived benefits that a potential employee can hope to receive by working at said company.

While not directly a method of sourcing candidates itself, employer branding is a supporting asset that can impact the effectiveness of the other primary candidate sourcing activities. The more attractive the employer brand, the more likely a potential job candidate will apply for the job.

Similar to consumer branding, the goal of employer branding is to position the hiring company in the minds of job seekers as a great place to work at. This is done by defining and communicating its employer value proposition (EVP). Just as how companies signal specific benefits of their products, companies can also signal the benefits of working for them through their EVP.

Generally speaking, an EVP represents a mix of common employer benefits, such as:

Salary
Other Benefits
Career Opportunities
- Training and Development
- Job Security
Company Culture
- Work-Life Balance
- Positive Work Atmosphere
Work Environment
- Workplace Safety
- Workplace Amenities

Any mix of the above should be able to create an attractive enough EVP and employer brand to showcase to potential job candidates.

As mentioned before, the employer brand is to be used as a supporting mechanism to make your primary candidate sourcing methods even more attractive. For example, in a job advertisement, employer branding can be included within the advertisement. Then the advertisement will not just be about doing a job, but give a holistic view of the work environment and the (overt or subtle) benefits of working for you. Thus, giving the job seeker even more reasons to work for you.

Recruiter Pro Tip: Your company probably already has a reputation in the community or industry that you operate in, whether you are aware of it or not. It will be up to you to cultivate this reputation and employer brand. Otherwise, it will be shaped by forces outside your control. If you are not careful, you could end up with a negative employer brand and reputation which could hurt you instead.

Notes on Keeping Track of Job Applications

Assuming your candidate sourcing goes well, and you have hordes of interested job seekers ready to hand you their CV, how will you keep track of all the names and paperwork? Increasingly, this is done with electronic job applicant tracking systems (or ATS for short).

An applicant tracking system (ATS) is software that helps with the logistics of job applications throughout the recruitment process. Typically, an ATS can aid in the candidate sourcing and screening process by collating job applications and filtering job candidate information.

With an ATS, job seekers can apply for your vacancy directly to your ATS or have their job application and data transferred to your ATS. When it comes time for you to screen and shortlist, the ATS will be able to list out job applicant data in a format where it is easy to differentiate or rank applicants. More sophisticated ATS will have add-ons that can carry out additional screening methods on the job applicants, such as administering psychometric tests, video interviews, and even applying artificial intelligence screening.

Recruiter Pro Tip: As a small business owner, you might not have the budget for a full-blown ATS. However, nowadays online job boards are offering basic ATS options along with the job advertisements on their website. These are enough to at least keep track of job applications. At the very least, the humble excel spreadsheet can act as your ATS. You don’t need specialized software, but you at least need a system to organize the information collected.

Screening and Shortlisting Job Applicants

Candidate screening is a process of elimination of job applicants conducted in one or more rounds. In each round, the more ideal job candidates are chosen to move on to further rounds of screening, until a preferred candidate for the job is chosen. The criteria for choosing candidates is based on how well they fit the predetermined competencies required for the job.

The opposite way to think about it is: job applicants who undoubtedly do not fit the requirements of the job are not picked to advance further down the recruitment process.

At this stage, the competencies that you have uncovered or discovered during the Job Analysis stage come back into play. The competencies that you had previously identified as being crucial to the job, now become the criteria by which to evaluate and screen the job applicants.

For example, if one of the job’s key competencies is “speaking communication skills”, then for every screening method, you will be asking the question “am I confident in this applicant’s speaking skills based on what I am seeing?”. If yes, you will shortlist them for the next round of applicant screening, or even potentially select them for the job.

The various methods of screening and shortlisting job applicants are listed below, along with a short description of each. All screening methods listed below will have some connection with your list of core competencies.

Recruiter Pro Tip: Each screening method can actually be used more than once to screen applicants, especially when you are not sure of how to differentiate them. This will add more rounds of screening but might be worth it to find the right person for the job. My advice, if you do use the same screening method twice, would be to change some variables for them each time, for example asking different interview questions or bringing in a different interviewer. That way, you may be able to learn new things about the job applicants with the same screening method.

Resume, CV, and Cover Letter Analysis

Resume analysis involves scanning through the resumes of job applicants and then selecting the most outstanding applicants to pursue in the next phase of the selection process. The selection criteria are based on factors such as experience and competencies predetermined to be critical to the job.

Assuming that during the candidate sourcing phase, you had a way of collecting the resumes (and also CVs and cover letters) of the job applicants, this step is all about analyzing them.

On the resume or CV, the only things you can really look out for are the job applicant’s educational background and also their work experience. You are looking to see if these match your predetermined criteria.

Specifically, you are looking to see if the applicant has educational certificates of the appropriate level and in the target area of study/expertise. You are also looking to see if the applicant is currently working in a job that is similar to your vacant job, or in a job that is associated with the vacant job in other ways (such as a junior version of the vacant job).

Educational certificates can easily be verified by searching the educational provider’s website. Most educational providers have a dedicated register you can search to look for the job applicant’s educational record with them.

On the cover letter, you can perform a more qualitative analysis of the job applicant. The letter gives the applicant a chance to “sell” themselves and explain their unique circumstances in applying for your job vacancy. This should help give you at least another perspective of the applicant.

If there were any discrepancies or gaps in the resume, the applicant should explain it in the letter, or you should at least be on the lookout for possible reasons.

It is important to note that all the information in this step is volunteered by the applicant. They will pick and choose to display only the absolute best about themselves. You will need to be aware of these drawbacks and maybe read in-between the lines in some cases. Because of all these drawbacks, resume analysis is usually only used as an initial screening tool to weed out any obviously unqualified candidates and shortlist the more outstanding candidates for further rounds of screening.

Application Blanks (Job Application Form)

Application blanks are the application forms job seekers fill in to apply for a job vacancy. The application blank can capture the professional history of the applicant, such as educational background and years of experience. This information is then used by the employer to screen the applicants.

Assuming that during the candidate sourcing phase, you had a way of collecting job applicants’ information, the application blank is probably how you did it.

The application blank or application form should mostly include questions about:

Contact details
Legal right to work in the country (i.e. visas)
Work history
Educational background
Professional qualifications
Their willingness to work
Health & safety related issues
Permission to hold and use that data for employment reasons
Other questions determined to be relevant to the vacancy job (e.g. licenses)

The information gathered should be enough to understand the job applicant as a whole.

The advantage of gathering all this information on an application blank is that the data gathered is standardized, thus making it easier to compare the applicants against each other. For example, the application blank has the question, ‘how many years of experience do you have in this industry?’. You can look across all the responses to this question and easily eliminate those who do not have the required number of years of experience.

Looking through the top responses to the main questions should be able to give you enough information to differentiate the applicants from each other. This is usually not enough to select your preferred candidate for the job, but enough to shortlist applicants who should progress to the next round of screening.

Recruiter Pro Tip: Most employers use the application blank to only capture basic information about their applicants. However, to stretch the effectiveness of the application blank, try including one to three optional short answer questions for the applicant to fill in. These questions can be about the applicant’s competencies or their personality and motivations. In effect, this makes the application blank a mini written job interview. The answers to these questions can further help to differentiate the applicants and help reveal the outstanding applicants.

Application Blank Legality

Be aware that you are legally compliant when collecting information on the application blank. Unlike the resume, the information on the application blank is not volunteered by the applicant but is in response to your questions.

Therefore, you have to make sure that the information asked for is only going to be used for employment purposes only, and will not be used to unfairly discriminate against the applicant due to a particular protected characteristic. Check your local laws, but in general, this usually means you cannot collect information that will lead you to discriminate against an applicant based on their age, gender, sexual orientation, race, and ethnicity.

Phone Screening (Telephone Interview)

A phone screen is a short job interview conducted over the telephone. The employer will ask questions related to the candidate’s job application and history. This then allows the employer to screen and shortlist candidates for more detailed screening methods, such as a longer in-person interview.

A common dilemma faced by some hiring managers after the job applications close is having too many applicants. A good problem to have, but a problem nonetheless.

In such a scenario, simpler screening tools like resume analysis and application blanks can process the applications in bulk, but not give enough qualitative information to make a hiring decision. On the other hand, a comprehensive screening tool like a job interview can provide the qualitative information to make a hiring decision, but will take too long to implement for the numerous number of applicants.

This is where a lighter version of a job interview, the phone screen, can come in. Similar to a job interview (detailed in the sub-section below), the job applicant is asked job related or job experience related questions. However, unlike a full-length job interview, the questions are typically fewer in number, require a shorter answer, and are quickly conducted over the phone. This makes it easier to organize, making it faster for you, the employer, to screen your applicants.

However, do note that there is a slight loss of information with phone screening as body language does not factor into the communication.

Typically, the phone screen is used to narrow down applicants for further, more comprehensive screening methods. Most notably, the job interview.

Job Interviews

Job interviews have become ubiquitous in the recruitment process. Because it is so extensively used and studied, the job interview can have a whole article just dedicated to it. Case in point, here is our article on just job interview question types.

However, to the somehow uninitiated: A job interview is an interaction between an employer with a job vacancy and a job applicant, where the former asks the latter job and work experience related questions in order to determine if the job seeker is the ideal person for the job.

Job interviews are one of the most effective forms of screening job applicants. In the landmark study by Schmidt and Hunter, structured interviews tied with intelligence tests for the second-most valid screening method. In this case, validity meant which screening tool best predicted job performance. (In first place was Work Sample Tests, which we cover in a separate subsection below.)

Interviews are also cost-effective in the sense that they take up time and effort to carry out, but not outright monetary costs. It will be a pain to find a time where everyone is available to come and conduct the interview, but at least you don’t need to pay anyone to do them. With such high effectiveness and low cost, interviews are probably the most value-for-money screening tool available.

Job Interview Questions

An effective interview starts with the interview questions. Even before the applicants are invited to the interview, the questions should be set and standardized for each interview session. Determining which questions to ask comes down to which questions will elicit a response from the job candidate that will demonstrate if they have the competencies or personality traits that suit the job.

That is to say, choose interview questions linked to the core competencies you identified in the job analysis stage.

For example, if the core competency of your job vacancy is “public speaking skills”, then a possible interview question would be “tell me about a time you had to give a presentation to more than 10 people?”. The question is linked to the competency, and the job applicant’s answer will demonstrate if they have the required level of skill in this competency.

Where do you find these interview questions to ask? Glad you asked. We at HMH have the largest database of interview questions that you can use for free. You can access the interview question bank here.

During and After the Interview

Asking questions and interpreting the job applicant’s answers is a process and skill of its own. However, generally speaking, you should ask the same set of questions, and in the same order, for all the job applicants. That way, you are applying the same screening ‘test’ for all job applicants you interview, and it will be easier to compare the applicants against each other. This is also known as a structured interview.

Selecting the preferred candidate, or further shortlisting to just a few candidates, is a process of its own as well. But generally speaking, you will want to score how well the applicants did in the interview on a score sheet. For each applicant, give a score on each of the key competencies measured by the questions in the interview then tally up the scores. Unless there were specific red flags that appeared in the interview, the applicant with the highest total score is the preferred candidate. Using numbers to differentiate the applicants in this way makes this process less biased and more objective.

For a more detailed breakdown of what to do after the job interview ends, read our guide here.

Selection After the Job Interview

For many employers, a job interview is enough to determine the preferred candidate for the job. As a small business owner, you might not have the resources to take the recruitment process any further, which is fine. You can skip the other screening methods (listed below) and go straight to offering the preferred candidate a job.

However, sometimes there are scenarios where the job interviews are not enough to determine the preferred candidate. A common scenario is when two job applicants are neck and neck during the interview process. In such cases, further screening tools can be used to gain even more clarity on how the job applicants stack up.

Recruiter Pro Tip: If you are the main interviewer, you should at least have another interviewer for all interview sessions. A second interviewer will help to keep things unbiased and may provide perceptions about the job applicant that you would not have come up with. At the very least, the other interviewer will be a sounding board for you to see if your impression of the job applicant is accurate or not.

Technical Tests or Job Knowledge Tests

A technical job knowledge test is a written test with science, technology, engineering, or mathematics questions related to a specific job. This test is administered to job applicants to test if they have the appropriate level of job-related knowledge and competencies to perform the job in question.

Job knowledge tests are useful for specialized jobs, and even more so for highly technical jobs. Instead of ‘soft tests’ that look for ‘soft skills’, these types of jobs can enable the use of ‘hard tests’ to look for ‘hard skills’. The test scores of a job knowledge test can objectively analyze whether the job applicant has the knowledge and skills to be able to do the job.

In this way, the higher the score, the more likely you can be confident that the job applicant can perform the job well. In contrast, a low score or a failing mark is evidence that the job applicant is lacking key knowledge to do the job.

Technical tests should not be confused with technical interview questions. Although they achieve the same aim of testing for technical skills, the former is a written test, while the latter is a verbal test given as part of the job interview.

Technical tests can either be bought or made in-house, with pros and cons for each. Purchasing a test can save time and give you tests that have already been validated for use. Tests made in-house by your resident technical expert will be more customized to the job, and could cover specialized knowledge that may not be common elsewhere.

Either way, make sure the test had questions that will assess the knowledge and skills essential to the job or to the core competencies related to the job.

Job knowledge tests are not usually used on their own to determine the preferred candidate. These tests would not reveal much about the personality and character of the job applicant. Therefore, technical tests should be used in conjunction with other screening tools, like job interviews to properly analyze and differentiate a pool of job applicants.

Personality and Cognitive Psychometric Tests

In this context, there are two types of psychometric tests that can be definitely separately.

Cognitive Psychometric Tests

Cognitive psychometric tests, also known as aptitude tests, are tests designed to measure aspects of a job applicant’s basic cognitive abilities (such as verbal reasoning) or other aptitudes (such as attention to detail), to determine if they have the appropriate level of mental abilities for the job.

Some of the cognitive traits that these tests measure are:

Numerical Intelligence
Verbal Intelligence
Logical Reasoning
Diagrammatic Reasoning
Spatial Reasoning
Inductive Reasoning
Deductive Reasoning
Critical Thinking
Error Checking Ability

Similar to the technical job knowledge tests (detailed above), cognitive psychometric tests can objectively analyze whether the job applicant has the appropriate level of cognitive ability to do the job.

Generally speaking, the higher the score, the more likely you can be confident that the job applicant can perform the job well. That said, the validity of the test needs to be checked, and the cognitive trait tested must be linked to job performance.

For example, if one of the tasks of the job vacancy requires a lot of numbers and calculations, then someone who scores well on a numerical intelligence test will likely be able to do the job well.

Personality Psychometric Tests

Personality psychometric tests are written tests designed to measure aspects of a job applicant’s personality (such as extraversion). The goal of these tests is to see if the job applicant’s personality and character are the right ‘fit’ for the job.

Some of the personality traits that these tests measure are:

Extraversion vs Introversion
Agreeableness vs Disagreeableness
Openness to Experience vs Cautiousness
Conscientiousness vs Impulsiveness
Emotional Stability vs Neuroticism

Unlike other tests, there are no right or wrong answers or score types. What matters here is figuring out which personality fits the job vacancy the best.

For example, if the job in question requires the job holder to meet and talk to customers all day, then someone who scored as an extraversion would be more likely to fit the job better.

Also unlike other tests, an increasingly higher score in a particular trait does not predict job performance (with a few exceptions). You will only really be able to discern the job applicant’s job fit and maybe at most, their job satisfaction.

Keeping to the above example of extraversion: Just because a job applicant scores higher on the extraversion spectrum does not mean that they will be better at talking to customers. The main thing to discern is that they are extroverted, which will mean that they will probably like the job better and be more satisfied doing that type of work. This is in contrast with someone who scored as being introverted. Even if an introvert can do the job, they might not be so satisfied with the work and may find it draining.

Recruiter Pro Tip: There are all sorts of vendors and providers who sell personality tests, and who claim that their personality tests can reveal all sorts of hidden characteristics of a person. However, any school of psychology will tell you that the only validated personality model is the Big Five Personality Traits model. So be wary of the lofty promises of these vendors. As someone with a masters in psychology, I recommend you only buy and use personality tests based on the Big Five model.

Administering the Psychometric Tests

Unless you have a psychologist on staff, you are most likely going to have to buy a psychometric test rather than create one. The vendors that sell them will have psychologists on staff and will be able to explain to you how valid their tests are and how to use them.

Administering psychometric tests is similar to how you probably took tests in high school: In a quiet place with minimal distraction and no outside interference. That said, nowadays, a lot of the tests from vendors now include an online test option where the job applicant can do them on their own time.

Psychometric tests are not usually used on their own to determine the preferred candidate. Often, they are either used to shortlist which job applicants to interview, or used in conjunction with the job interview to help identify the best performing job applicant.

Work Sample Tests and Job Auditions

Evaluating samples of a job applicant’s past work and administering a work sample test are two related screening tools here that are often mixed up.

A work sample test is when a job applicant shows samples of work they previously had done to a potential employer. This could be in the form of reports, projects, or portfolios. The employer will then judge the job applicant’s suitability for the job based on these work samples.

Job Auditions or Job Tryouts are practical tests where a job applicant performs tasks that mirror activities from the vacant job that they have applied for. For example, answering a call from a simulated client. This test gives employers an idea of how the applicant will perform if they were placed in the job.

The idea behind both these methods is to give you, the employer, a better idea of how the job applicant will actually perform if they were hired for the job. The past work samples will indicate past performance on the job, while the job auditions will indicate in real-time how well the job applicant is doing in an environment that simulates the job.

Evaluating work samples simply requires the job applicant to present said samples for evaluation. You, as the potential employer, then just rate how well done these work samples are. This makes this screening method very cost-effective.

However, not all work can be condensed into a sample for analysis. For example, service-based tasks cannot be captured as physical or digital objects. This would make it impossible to apply this test to these types of work. To overcome this, job auditions can be used instead.

In contrast, job auditions can observe intangible work, like service work as the employer observes the test in real-time. However, due to the need for the job audition or ‘tryout’ to simulate a specific job, it is more likely that the test needs to be created in-house. As such, it will take time, effort, and expertise to design a suitably appropriate test. This is a significant drawback of this screening method, and also why it is not as widely used.

That said, one overlooked benefit to using a job audition is that it gives the job applicant a realistic job preview and gives them a sense of what the job is like before they actually work in it. That way they can understand the job better and choose if they want to continue down the recruitment path or drop out immediately. It is better to have them drop out now rather than get hired for the job and then resign because they didn’t like the job.

Because both past work sample tests and job auditions have high validity in measuring simulated work performance directly, they potentially can be used independently of other screening methods. However, this is not recommended as these work sample related screening test would not reveal much of the job applicant’s personality or character, which is vital to other job factors such as team fit.

That said, because job auditions are so expensive to run, I would recommend you only use these sparingly and only later in the recruitment journey when the original pool of job applicants has already been narrowed down by the other screening tools.

Job Audition Legality

One important thing to note about job auditions is that you cannot just ask a job applicant to “work on the shopfloor” of your business for one day and call it part of recruitment and selection. This is illegal in most places. This is because the moment they do work that somehow benefits you (the employer), they are doing work that needs to be paid for. So, you can either have the job applicants do simulated work that generates no benefit to you, or you can have the job applicants do actual work and pay them for it. Check your local laws for more specifics.

Assessment Center

Assessment centers are in-person practical tests, where job candidates participate individually, or in groups, on activities and challenges designed to showcase their personality and competencies to the examining employer. The goal is to screen through a large pool of job candidates all at once.

These activities and challenges can include seemingly mundane, such as group discussion, and can escalate in complexity up to becoming a work sample test (see above subsection).

In essence, assessment center activities are the same as work sample tests in scope and function, with the main difference being that assessment centers are carried out with a large number of job applicants, as opposed to just a few. Furthermore, assessment centers are used nearer to the start of the screening process in order to go through as many job applicants as possible in one go and to shortlist them for further screening.

Because organizing an assessment center requires getting so many job applicants in one place at the same time, this causes all manner of practical issues. Assessment centers are planned months in advance, with the job applicants warned long beforehand.

Typically, this screening method is used for fresh graduates entering the workforce as they are more time-rich to attend the assessment centers than working adults with busy schedules. It is also because new graduates come in batches, which fits with having to screen a whole bunch at once.

Along with the above points, because assessment centers take effort to plan out the activities for each session and other preparation work, these centers are costly in terms of time and effort. As a small business owner or hiring manager, you might not have the resources to spend on an assessment center. You might not even have enough job applicants to justify one. However, under the right conditions and a critical mass of applicants, an assessment center can scale up to become one of the most cost-effective tools in terms of resources spent per job applicant.

Compared to some of the other screening tools, an assessment is a more blunt tool, relatively speaking. Because its main use is to quickly narrow down a shortlist from a large number of applicants, you as the hiring manager do not get to know each applicant individually. I would recommend making sure you use one of the other more applicant-specific screening tools to achieve this.

In fact, oftentimes assessment centers are run together with job interviews. The logic here is that since the job applicants are already there for the assessment center, you can immediately interview the job applicants who did the best at the assessment center activities to save time.

Background Checks

In recruitment, background checks are processes where a hiring employer, with consent from a job applicant, investigates information about the applicant by reviewing said information with a third party. This is to confirm the information or to learn more about the applicant from a different source.

Background checks can be further broken down into a list of specific checks and can be done individually or separately. These are:

Reference Checks
Misconduct Checks
Police Checks
Credit Checks
Educational Certification Checks
Professional Certification Checks
Visa Checks

Each of these is pretty self-explanatory based on the name of the check. In each case, you as the hiring manager have to interact with a third party to carry out the check. In the case of a reference and misconduct checks, these would be the job applicant’s previous employer or manager. In the case of the rest of the checks, this would typically be the regulatory or license-issuing institution that governs their respective area.

Unlike the other screening tools, the background check is mainly used for sniffing out ‘red flags’ in the job applicant, rather than looking to see if they are suitable for the job. You are looking for either one of two things.

Firstly, you are looking for any past behavioral problems that the applicant might have had. You don’t need a psychologist to tell you that past behavior can predict future behavior. Any negative behavior a job applicant has exhibited in the past is quite likely to repeat after you hire them. By learning about this upfront, you can avoid this.

(Sometimes people change for the better, and this topic could be the subject of a different debate. But for now, it can be said that generally speaking, such change is not as common.)

Secondly, you are looking to see if they actually have the rights or qualifications to do the job. The job applicant might claim they have studied at a top college or gained their architect’s license, but until you check with the college or professional registration board, those are all claims. In my experience, although fraud like this is rare, it does happen. Better to be safe and double-check it at the screening stage than to be sorry later.

Generally speaking, background checks are used nearer to the end of the screening and shortlisting process just to double-check already shortlisted candidates. Since background checks are mainly used to tell you if there will be issues in hiring the job applicant, but not necessarily how well they can do the job, background checks need to be used with other screening tools earlier in the process to make an informed choice when selecting the preferred candidate.

Recruiter Pro Tip: Be sure you get informed consent from the job applicant to collect and use their information for the checking process. Privacy laws and rules are increasingly being put in place to protect people, and these rules will apply to the recruitment process too. Check your local laws on what you need to do.

Notes on Mixing and Matching Selection Methods

No screening and shortlisting tool is used in a vacuum. Even the shortest path possible through the recruitment, application blank followed by job interviews, is two parts long. The reason for this is that each screening method has its own uses, and combining them will make the screening process flow smoothly all while giving you the hiring manager a wholistic idea of who the job applicants are.

To start mixing and combining selection methods together, it is useful to think of the screening and shortlisting process as happening in stages. At each stage, job applicants are screened and successful applicants are shortlisted for the next stage. The stages progress in a linear fashion, and the last stage is where one applicant (a.k.a. the preferred candidate) is chosen for the job.

At each stage of the screening and shortlisting process, screening tools can be used individually or together. When used individually, successful job applicants need only to pass just that one screening tool. When used together, successful job applicants have to do well on all the screening tools for that stage in order to advance to the next stage.

A typical combined use of screening tools and methods could look like this:

Stage 1
- Application blank and
- Resume/cover letter analysis
Stage 2
- Phone screening (typically with HR)
Stage 3
- Job interviews,
- Technical job knowledge test and,
- Work sample test
Stage 4
- Reference check (background check)
- Education certificate check (background check)
- Police check (background check)
Stage 5
- Final preferred candidate selection

Here is another example:

Stage 1
- Application blank
Stage 2
- Assessment Center with
- Job interviews and
- Personality psychometric test
Stage 3
- Second job interview
- Educational Certification Checks
Stage 4
- Final preferred candidate selection

Take note that these are just examples. Different industries, companies, and jobs will require a different combination or format of the screening and shortlisting process. But the idea of using screening methods in stages remains the same. It will be up to you to mix and match this according to your needs.

Selecting the Preferred Candidate

Assuming you have been using screening tools to continually shortlist your job applicants down to just a few, this is the point where you choose the one you want to offer the job to.

Despite making the screening and shortlisting process as objective and unbiased as possible, when it comes down to the final selection, some subjectivity in decision making could come into play. In my experience, this subjectivity is unavoidable, but may not be a bad thing, as hiring managers start using their ‘gut-feel’ at this point and consider all contextual factors when making the final decision. And, as this ‘gut-feel’ or intuition comes from experience as a manager and working with people, it can be surprisingly accurate.

At this point, you too might have a ‘gut-feeling’ as to who is the preferred candidate. If you do not, that is fine too. Take some time to think it over. I have seen hiring managers torn between two good candidates and had to take a few days to think it over.

To help think it through, you could ask yourself the following questions:

How will each job applicant affect the team dynamics of the existing work team if they were hired?
Would this job applicant take instruction well?
Could I work with this job applicant because of or in spite of their personality?

This is a big decision and should not be taken lightly. You will be stuck with this employee for the foreseeable future (unless your company is located in the USA, where terminations ‘at-will’ exists). So, make sure you make certain and comfortable with your decision before moving on to offer the job to the candidate.

For hiring managers in the USA, even if it is relatively easier to fire your staff, remember that you have already paid the costs incurred in time and money from the recruitment process. Quickly hiring and quickly firing will mean that you will quickly need to pay these costs again. So again, the final decision on who to hire is still to be taken seriously.

Recruiter Pro Tip: In order to be sure of your choice, it is possible to open up a job trial for job applicants in some places. This involves initially hiring the preferred candidate for a short fixed-term period just to see how well they can perform on the job. Further permanent employment will be determined by how well the preferred candidate (now new hire) performs. A job trial is a good way to let you ‘try before you buy’, and allow you to see the preferred candidate in the actual work setting before committing to hiring them permanently.

Recruiter Pro Tip: The ‘perfect’ person for the job does exist, but finding them is so rare that you might as well not get your hopes up. In my experience as a recruiter, each job applicant will have strengths and weaknesses akin to a list of pros and cons that you will have to deal with if they are hired. I speculate that the weighting of trade-offs is where the ‘gut-feel’ starts creeping in. However, the two objective ways to think about the final selection is to choose the job applicant with the most pros and the least cons, or, with cons that you can manage mixed in with good enough pros.

Offering the Job

A job offer is an invitation from a potential employer to a preferred job candidate to offer to the latter the opportunity to be employed under and work for the former.

Assuming you have finally chosen your preferred candidate, the next step will simply be to offer them the job.

In my experience as a recruiter, this step is probably the most anticipated step for both the job applicant and the hiring manager. Everybody wants a good match, and both parties stand to gain from this match-up.

Offering the job is fairly straightforward. It can be done with a verbal offer followed up with a written offer, or just a written offer. Technically an offer of employment can be verbal only, but it is highly not recommended as too many details of the employment agreement can be left out or simply forgotten without writing to back it up.

In either case, you will want to communicate the job offer to the preferred candidate and essentially ask them if they want the job. I recommend phone calls or video calls as the medium of choice as they are a quick yet personable method of communication.

One way or another, hopefully, your preferred applicant also views you as their employer of choice and accepts your job offer.

Onboarding and Orientation

Assuming you have offered the job to the preferred candidate and they accept your offer, congratulations, you have a new hire!

However, your work is not yet done. This is the point where the job candidate becomes a new hire; the point where the recruitment process becomes the onboarding and orientation process.

In my experience working with hiring managers, managers take for granted that the orientation is a foregone conclusion and that the new hire will simply learn about the job while on the job. However, in most cases, an orientation without a plan usually turns into a haphazard first day for the new hire and will leave a bad first impression in their minds.

Because the onboarding process will later feed into the ongoing performance management process you will want to do this right, right at the start. (A hiring manager’s work is never done!) The orientation and onboarding process will help the new hire understand what to expect from the job and what is expected of them. Any misunderstandings here, and any aforementioned bad impressions, may lead to issues further down the track. Performance management sessions might help to spot and reduce any issues, but in the meantime, if the new hire thinks they can get a better experience working for somebody else, they might just resign.

The key to a good orientation is just to have a plan of what will happen for the first few days of the new hire’s time working with you. Make sure to detail all the things that they need to know about the job itself, about the general work environment, and any supporting amenities, then communicate these to the new hire. It would be good if all this information is written down for the new hire so that they can refer to it later.

Other things do to for onboarding would be to have a sit-down review of the job description with the new hire just to iron out any questions and expectations about the job. There is also the obligatory tour of the workspace and meeting exiting coworkers.

Your new hire’s first day at work is going to happen one way or another. It is up to you to make sure that it goes well and to help them reaffirm in their minds that coming to work for you was a good choice.

Other Factors & Considerations

Here is a list of other topics to consider regarding recruitment. These topics either did not nicely fit into the flow of the recruitment process as listed above or are things to think about throughout the whole process.

Budgeting for Recruitment

Budgeting can get very vague and confusing for first-time hiring managers. You might not know all the costs upfront, and the costs can vary with the recruitment strategy.

A good rule of thumb is to budget at least 8% of the vacancy job’s expected salary for recruitment. This is often enough to cover the costs of advertising and any tools used to screen the job applicants. However, this guideline does not account for the paid manhours for the interviewers.

For example, if the job vacancy you have will be paid at the USA average salary of $53,490 per annum, the recruitment budget will simply be at 8% of that, at $4,279. This might sound like a lot, but it is actually in line with the USA average recruitment spend of $4,425.

A majority of this budget will go to job advertising spend. With job boards like LinkedIn charging $495 for a 30-day advert, and the need to advertise in multiple locations across multiple time periods (sometimes longer than 30 days), all these expenses can start to add up.

Still, don’t be scared off by the seemingly high number. You can reduce costs by using more cost-effective or labor attentive screening methods. For example, you could:

Try looking at internal or existing networks to source for potential job applicants, instead of forking over cash for a job advertisement as a first resort.
Use job interviews as the main screening tool as they take up man-hours instead of cash.
Create technical job knowledge tests and work sample tests in-house.

There will be some costs that you can’t avoid and probably want to pay for to ensure you get quality job applicants or a quality new hire. However, you can be smart about the excess costs that you know you won’t really need.

The Timeline for Recruitment

Apart from the recruitment budget, hiring managers also often underestimate the time needed to recruit. Just like how recruitment advertising can have hidden costs, the recruitment process can have hidden time sinks and unforeseen delays.

Too many times have I seen eager hiring managers thinking that they can secure their preferred candidate right after the interviews. And they do this all while forgetting that even if the job applicant was immediately served a job offer letter, they would still need to serve the notice period at the job they are leaving.

To help make sense of the timeline for recruitment, here is an example of a short recruitment process with rough timeframes at each stage:

Opening job vacancy	It would take about 1 or 2 to work out whether to open up the job vacancy, decide on a recruitment plan, and create the job advertisement.
Job advertising	Average of 10 to 30 days of job advertising
Initial screening and shortlisting	Assuming 29 applicants applied, which is the USA average for a job advertisement, plan for 2 to 3 days to screen these applicants and narrow them down to 3 to 6 applicants for a job interview.
Job interviews	The job interviews are usually scheduled 3 days to a week in advance to ensure that everyone involved can attend. After the job interview, depending on the quality of candidates, the decision of the preferred candidate can be immediate or take up to a week.
Job Offer	It would take about 1 to 2 days to create the written job offer documents, and after presenting these to the preferred candidate, they can take up to a week to decide to accept the offer or not.
Start Date	Assuming the preferred candidate accepts the job, they will usually need to serve a 4 week notice period before being able to start their new job.
Orientation and Onboarding	An orientation program for the new hire can typically last 3 days to a week, or even longer, before they get up-to-speed on the job and their responsibilities.
Total time	Based on the above, and not counting the orientation and onboarding, from the time the job vacancy opens to the start date of the preferred candidate’s start date, this time frame is 49 days at the minimum and can stretch up to 88 days and above.

(Note that these timeframes are rough estimates only, and your recruitment situation may vary greatly.)

Based on the example table above, it is easy to see how long the recruitment process takes and where all the time goes. The more steps and stages added to the recruitment process, the longer the timeframe will get.

This example also assumes that the recruitment process goes smoothly, and does not account for any hitches. However, things do go wrong during recruitment (see below), so it is recommended to add some buffer time to the process just to “expect the unexpected”.

Although there are certain minimum times for some recruitment activities, trying to reduce other time frames where you can will be beneficial to you. The sooner you can find someone, the sooner they can get up and running and be productive for your business. This is also the reason why recruiters stress so much about time to recruit as a key metric in their work.

When Things Go Wrong During Recruitment

In my experience as a recruiter, after handling hundreds of cases, I would say that about half the time, something will go wrong during the recruitment process. This can be something as minor as the new hire needing to start later than anticipated, all the way up to major issues like the new hire being unable to get a work visa for the job.

Some of the other common issues include:

Being unable to secure a time where all interviewers and interviewees can be at the same time and place.
The job applicant no longer answers your calls or emails at any point in the recruitment process.
Nobody applied for your job vacancy.
All the job applicants interviewed were not suitable for the job.

Unfortunately, the sad fact is that you won’t be able to plan for every problem that crops up, and they will eventually crop up. The most you can do is to add in buffer time for solving problems as they come up and put in place practices that can help minimize any errors.

For example, some possible solutions to the above problems include:

Pre-plan interviews by making sure that all interviewers are aware of the interview schedule ahead of time, and possibly putting the interview dates on the adverts to make the interviewee aware.
Setting clear expectations beforehand that if you are not responded to by a certain time frame, you will assume they are no longer interested in the job vacancy, and move on to another job applicant.
Either be clearer on the expectations and benefits of the job in the job advertisement and re-advertise or investigate the reason as to why there were no applicants.
- Sometimes there could be nobody in your entire region or country who could do the job, which presents its own challenge.
Have runner-ups at each stage of shortlisting so that you can fall back on interviewing these job applicants instead. You could be surprised by giving these people a second chance.

From these examples, you can see that there is no perfect solution to these problems. The best you can do is to anticipate them and plan your recruitment process as if they will happen (because they will).

Declining Unsuccessful Applicants

Another aspect of recruitment often overlooked by hiring managers is declining unsuccessful applicants. In fact, it’s not just declining the unsuccessful that is important but also the timeliness of doing so. Nobody wants to submit a job application and wait months to receive a rejection letter, let alone actually hearing back at all.

In my experience, a lot of hiring managers focus so much on their preferred candidate that they forget all other candidates. This is not wise because if anything were to go wrong during recruitment (see above), and the preferred candidate is now unavailable, you would need to fall back on the unsuccessful runner-up applicants. And, if these unsuccessful runner-ups were not respected, in terms of timely communication regarding their application, they would be very unlikely to take up any offer

I highly recommend you create a plan for the unsuccessful job applicants, or at the very least make sure you let them know as soon as you can that they are unsuccessful. A quick negative answer is better than waiting for a long time in uncertainty.

I can understand that nobody wants to deliver bad news, even in my years as a recruiter, I never liked doing it myself. But it needs to be done, and as the hiring manager, this is part of the job (oh, the joys of being the manager). In my experience, the applicants do appreciate being told early, and being told at all.

Job Application Fraud

Though uncommon, job application fraud does happen. This could come in the form of lying on the resume or job interview, presenting fake certifications, or even getting a friend to stand in as a work reference.

The lengths applicants go to commit fraud can be astounding, and sometimes, you won’t even see it coming. However, because you as the employer are in control of the recruitment process, you can also put in place checks and balances to weed out fraud.

The primary defense against fraud is to use various background checks as a screening tool (see above). Background checks are the main way you can double-check the information provided by the job applicant is accurate and true.

If the applicant claims that they have graduated from prestigious university X, then an academic certificate background check with university X directly will prove this.

Basically, whenever you collect and decide upon a job applicant’s key information, each piece of key information needs to have some sort of double-checking process attached to it. That way, you will be protected against job application fraud if and when it happens.

Hiring a Recruitment Agency

This whole article contains just a rough guide on what a hiring manager needs to do to start and finish the recruitment process. If you are reading this, chances are, you are a new hiring manager, or small business owner doing recruitment for the first time and trying to figure this all out on your own. It can be daunting to navigate the path to a successful hire from scratch, especially if you are not confident in what you are doing.

If you do not want to or think you should not do the recruitment process yourself, consider hiring a professional recruiter or recruitment agency.

If you were to hire a recruitment agency to do your recruitment instead, they will run through some or most of the recruitment steps outlined in this article for you. Plus, they will know the ins and outs of each step in far more detail than is written here. They will also have the experience to guide you on which steps are necessary and which will just waste your time and money and not produce results.

That said, hiring a recruiter can get really expensive. A typical recruitment agency will charge anywhere between 10% to 15% of the new hire’s starting annual salary as the “finder’s fee”. I have seen more premium recruiters charge up to above 20% for some roles, and all these fees are not including the job advertising fee(s) that you will likely incur.

Even working as an in-house recruiter myself, sometimes I would still need to hire external recruitment agencies to handle some of my work because I was in need of extra help when recruiting for hard-to-fill jobs, and they were just that good.

The question to hire or not to hire a recruitment agency comes down to whether you have time, resources, and expertise to do recruitment just as well as any recruiter can. With enough training, guidance, and practice, you can run through the recruitment process properly by yourself. This is especially important if you are short on the funds to hire a professional recruitment company; If you stick to using the most cost-effective selection methods, you can potentially get the same result for less.

In Conclusion

There you have it: The full recruitment journey from start to finish from the point of view of the hiring manager plus some extra considerations. Thank you for reading to the end, or even just reading the parts that are relevant to you.

Hopefully, this article was clear in guiding you through the established recruitment and selection methods. There is not much else new about this whole process. These are the tried and true (and in some respects scientifically proven) recruitment practices.

However, how the recruitment process is executed and how well it is executed is always evolving and improving. Once, where the majority of the process was paper-based and job interviews were done in person, now, much of the process is paperless and job interviews can be conducted over the Internet.

Either way, don’t ever forget the goal of the recruitment process: to hire the best-performing person who fits the job and work environment well.

Now get out there, and get hiring!