Sometimes when recruiting for your business requirements, you may not always have the budget available to engage professionals. So DIY recruitment might be necessary.   if you are entering the recruitment space and you’re a bit of a novice, here’s a guide on everything you need to cover:

• Get clear on what you need

Sounds simple enough, right? It’s important when you are conducting DIY recruitment that you consider not just the capabilities of an individual role, but the future direction of the company. If your business is likely to require certain skillsets or experience in a particular area, you need to determine the right time to recruit for those skills. Moreover, when recruiting for a role, it’s also important to drill down into the individual tasks that will need to be completed and both the hard and soft skills that are required in the position. This information should really form the basis for the job specification.

• Find the right people

While it’s important to try and increase the number of applicants for a role to have enough candidates to choose from, always bear in mind that this increases your workload in terms of reading applications and shortlisting candidates. A good rule of thumb is to first advise staff that you are recruiting, ensure that the role is advertised on your own website and to leverage your own contacts initially. Other sites include LinkedIn and paid Job Boards such as Seek and industry-specific job boards.

• Shortlist, shortlist, shortlist

You’ll need to agree upon a method of shortlisting candidates. One way is to confirm the 4-5 essential skills required for the role and mark on a spreadsheet which candidates meet more of the skills than others. This method should provide a list which ranks candidates from meeting the most to meeting the least skills. It’s an easy way to start the process.

• Screening

We recommend phone screening 6-8 candidates for a single role. This is a quick sense check that the Resume details provided are correct and the candidate is still available and interested in the role and happy with the remuneration package on offer.

• First Round Interview

It’s important that pre-planning goes into the interview process, so ensure that the questions are devised that reflect the skills involved in the role. To avoid answers becoming too generic, ask for specific examples of when candidates have demonstrated a skill (both hard and soft). It’s important for candidates to relax so you can see ‘the real them’. Some organisations opt for conducting a tour of the business so that the candidate is able to see the business in operation for themselves and take time to relax as much as possible. At the end of this interview, it’s important that the candidate knows what the next steps will be.

• Second Round Interview

The second-round interview is the best time to drill down into any areas that require further clarification and to determine the suitability of the role for the different applicants that are shortlisted.

• Background Checks

Before you make a formal offer to a candidate, you need to speak with 2-3 of their referees who they have directly reported to, which essentially should consolidate the information that you already know about them. Depending on the nature of the role, some employers might opt to request a Police Check or conduct skill testing such as numeric, literacy or psychometric testing. Other skill testing might be specific to the nature of the role such as demonstrating a competency.

• Making the offer

The remuneration package should never come as a surprise to the candidate – this is something that should have been discussed quite openly during the interview process. When making the offer, make sure the candidate understands their commencement date and what the induction process looks like in their first week on the job.

One way of accessing recruitment support when you require it, is to utilise a service called Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO). This is a flexible offering whereby you pay for services that you require throughout the process, such as ad placement, shortlisting or interviewing for example.

Want to speak to the Recruitment experts? Speak to the Recruitment team at Flexi Personnel.