Five questions to score your own recruitment process

Our employment consultants ask employers these questions all the time. The answers usually reveal more about the business than any job ad does. Score yourself honestly, one point for each, and see where you land.

1. Can you describe how you recruit someone, start to finish, without pausing?

If you can’t, nobody in your business can. Inconsistent process is where good candidates get lost, usually in the gaps between people. Who screens? Who decides? How long between application and first contact? A process that only exists in someone’s head produces different results every time you run it.

Scoring: Give yourself a point if you could walk a new manager through it tomorrow.

2. If you could build your ideal employee, what would they look like?

Most employers answer this with attitude and behaviour. Reliable. Curious. Good with customers. Gets on with people. Then their job ad asks for three years’ experience and a qualification.

Look at the gap between what you say you want and what you screen for. If your ideal employee is defined by attitude, but your shortlist is built on CV history, you’re filtering on the wrong thing.

Scoring: Give yourself a point if your job ad reflects your actual answer.

3. What frustrates you most about recruitment?

Whatever you just said, check whether it’s a candidate problem or a process problem. Too many unsuitable applications is often a job ad that’s too vague. Candidates dropping out is often a sign that the process takes too long. People leaving in the first three months is usually an onboarding issue rather than a hiring one.

Scoring: Give yourself a point if you can name one change you’ve made in the last year in response to that frustration.

4. Why do people stay working here?

Ask five of your longest-serving staff and see whether their answers match what you’d have guessed. The reasons people stay are rarely the reasons you put in your job ad. Flexibility, a decent manager, and being trusted to get on with it come up far more often than pay or progression.

Once you know the real answers, use them. They’re the most honest recruitment material you have.

Scoring: Give yourself a point if you’ve asked your staff in the last twelve months.

5. What impresses you in an interview?

Be specific. Not “enthusiasm”, but what enthusiasm looks like when you see it. Employers who can answer this precisely tend to interview better, because they’re looking for something rather than waiting to be impressed.

It’s also worth asking whether the things that impress you are things a nervous candidate could show. Some very capable people interview badly, particularly if they’ve been out of work for a while or find the format difficult. A work trial or a practical task will tell you more than a chat across a desk.

Scoring: Give yourself a point if you offer any alternative to a standard interview.

Scoring: Where you landed

4 – 5: Your recruitment is in good shape and you’re probably already thinking about how to widen it.

2 – 3: This is where most businesses sit. There’s nothing wrong with your hiring, but there’s a version of it that costs you less time and reaches more people.

0 – 1: This usually means recruitment is happening in a rush, between everything else. That’s normal for a busy business, and it’s fixable.

Wherever you scored, CoAct Connect can help you sharpen your recruitment process and open it up to a wider pool of candidates, at no cost to your business through Workforce Australia and Inclusive Employment Australia. Get in touch and we’ll talk through where your process might be losing great people.