A Recruiting and Interviewing Guide for Human Resource Managers

As a human resource manager, you’ve got a lot of responsibilities to deal with on a daily basis. Hiring, however, is one of the most important responsibilities of all. After all, hiring the right (or wrong) people can make or break a company’s success.

With that in mind, you need to be strategic in the way you approach the recruiting and interviewing process so you can filter the candidate pool and find the best fit for each role. Here are some factors to consider as you continue to build up the team within your organization.

The Importance of Diverse Recruiting Tactics

It’s hard to overstate the importance of diversity in the hiring process. A lack of diversity stifles innovation, affects a company’s attractiveness to job seekers, and can even negatively impact a company’s bottom line. In fact, racially diverse teams have been shown to outperform homogenous teams by 35%.

Diversity within an organization also has a significant impact on corporate culture. Most young people don’t want to work at companies with a poor track record of diversity. Companies with a homogenous workforce often slip into groupthink, which affects the culture, productivity, and innovation of the organization. A more diverse hiring process allows for different perspectives and backgrounds within an organization and improves the culture as a whole.

People have implicit biases, which often result in poor diversity within an organization. As a hiring manager, you need to be aware of your own biases and make a conscious effort to reduce their impact within the hiring process. For instance, if you find yourself passing over resumes with names that don’t sound white, you need to take a huge step back and consider the candidate’s skill, rather than their names.

It’s important to scrutinize every aspect of your recruiting practices for bias or aspects of your process that might be unconsciously pushing diverse candidates away. Building a diverse team is a long but worthwhile process.

Using AI Tools to Recruit Employees that Align With Your Company

There are lots of great tools available for reducing the manual workload of human resource professionals. This is important as more and more demands are being placed on HR departments. However, it is important to use these tools as tools instead of letting them lead your hiring process.

Artificial intelligence tools, for instance, are on the rise in HR. They can reduce the need to review every application by filtering candidates based on specific criteria. However, it’s important to ensure that no implicit biases are incorporated into these settings, leading to a less diverse pool of candidates.

In addition to evaluating your settings regularly and ensuring that you are attracting employees who align with the organizational values, it’s important to look at some additional resumes that were passed by from time to time, just to make sure that the AI isn’t filtering out the wrong people.

Keeping New Hires Informed and Content After Hiring

Finding, attracting, and evaluating new employees can be a long and difficult process. But building an ideal team doesn’t stop with the hiring process. Once you’ve brought someone new on board, it’s HR’s job to help arrange ongoing training and other opportunities that help keep people content and fulfilled in their roles.

The best employees don’t want to just come in, collect a paycheck, and leave. They want to build their skills, be challenged, and continue to learn throughout their careers.

When people start to feel bored, burned out, stifled, or otherwise dissatisfied, they will leave. It’s as simple as that. To reduce turnover and maximize productivity, HR needs to be actively involved in employee development plans.

Communicate with Candidates and Employees

Communication is key at every point. Hiring good communicators will help ensure that dialogue flows in both directions. If you are honest with people both before and after you hire them, your results and effectiveness as an HR manager will likely be much better overall.

Hiring and retaining employees is costly. It’s always better if you can hire the right person from the beginning and allow them to grow and thrive so they’ll want to stay long-term. Good planning and a clear strategy will help!