How to kick-off hiring for a new role

Hiring a new employee is far more than just looking around and hoping to find the best fit. When you notice a gap in your team that needs to be filled, it’s important to work strategically to fill that role. These gaps occur for a wide range of reasons, from resignations to growth, and it’s important to get ahead as much as you can to create an effective hiring plan for your business. 

The most important thing you can learn from this article is that hiring processes should be formalised as much as possible within your company. 

If you create a new hiring structure every time a new position is created, you will never be able to keep up or find the right people. In this article, we will show you the best methods for creating a solid hiring structure, letting you take the time to find the right people for your business. 

Before you start looking for the right people to join your company, it’s important to have clear expectations and an outline of the whole interviewing process. If it’s your first hire, that can sometimes be a challenge - this is where our guide can help you. Below are the five clear steps you need to follow to ensure a smooth and successful hiring process. 

1. Set Up Your Recruitment Team

If you want to find the best-suited talent for your company, it’s best to use the best-suited talent within your company. Along with your collective of hiring managers, interviewers, and HR professionals, remember to keep those in the know involved in the hiring process, especially for technical roles. 

For example, if you’re hiring for an engineering role, make sure you have your most experienced engineer on your hiring team. Here is the standard structure for a recruitment team:

• Hiring Manager(s) — people who, most likely, will manage the person directly once they are hired. In smaller startups, it can also be a CTO or a Head of Product
• Interviewers — team members participating in the interviews
• Recruiters — people responsible for the talent acquisition process itself
• HR Team/Admin — people in charge of sending the contract and planning the onboarding. In a smaller startup, this role may be taken by the recruiter

2. Define the Role

The next step is to clearly define your expectations regarding the person you want to hire. Take the time to sit down with all the relevant people to create a succinct description of what this job will entail. This is vitally important, as it helps you know what you’re looking for and also helps attract the right clients. 

When thinking of the definition of the role, focus on things such as:

• The vision of the company — how will the role contribute to it?
• The vision of the role — what’s the possible career path, and what teams and projects will they be working with?
• Skillset — programming languages, experience level, frameworks, and desired non-technical skills
• Budget — hiring budget, estimated salary, bonus, relocation costs, etc.
• Timing — when do you have to hire the person and how urgent is the role?
• Location — is relocation an option, can the role be remote?

Flexibility Points

In recruitment, it is often necessary to make concessions. You can make an idealised job description, presenting your ideal idea of a candidate, but it’s important to be flexible too. 

This is where flexibility points come in. Decide what your priorities are and where you can make some compromises. Usually, you won’t get a senior-level professional for a low price and as soon as possible. You will have to make some trade-offs regarding budget, timing, and/or skills.

A great resource for this is the scope triangle:

A startup with a limited budget needs to be tactical with its hires. Decide what is the most vitally important aspect of this hire and build your recruitment process around that. 

3. Define the Interview Process

Interviews come in a range of shapes and sizes. From your pre-interview planning, you know your must-haves and priorities. With this, you can build your interview structure. 

If you need a lot of low-level hires fast, you can host an open interview day, creating a set block of time for you to screen candidates and hire the best of the day. 

If you need a high-level executive, naturally your interview process will have a much slower and methodical process. 

Once you have decided on the time scale of the interviews, you can then begin allocating roles:

• Who will be the person responsible for the first phone screen?
• Who will do a technical interview (is it going to be onsite or remote?)
• Do you need a technical assessment or skills test?
• Who will do the cultural interview?
• Who will attend the recruiting debrief?
• Who makes the final decision?
• Who will do the offer call?
• Who takes care of the contracts, visa, and onboarding?

From here, you have a solid understanding of the roles and outline of your interview process. Now, you can begin creating the job description. 

4. The Job Description

The next step is to create a job description that you will use on job listing platforms, such as LinkedIn, Xing, AngelList, etc. Here are some things worth listing, along with some tips to keep in mind:

• Description of your company, its mission, and values
• General responsibilities and key tasks
• Required qualifications and education, previous job experience, skills

With job descriptions, it’s often beneficial to keep it short, attractive, and sincere. Buzz words will deter many people, and overly detailed descriptions often may lead to confusion. Provide the important points, the values and unique aspects of your company, and ways of contacting your hiring team. 

Then, most importantly, document your description and process. Now, with your next cycle of hires, you have a solid description and workflow that you can rely on to shorten the hiring process.

5. Brainstorm on Sourcing

The last step of the kick-off meeting is to decide where and how are you going to source potential candidates. Sending out a blanket message to a wide variety of hiring platforms will give you plenty of applicants, but not a guaranteed great hire. 

The first place you should look is internally; is there someone within the company who could take over this role? Overlooking employees for outside talent can waste plenty of time and deters internal development within the company. 

If there is no potential within your business, then move on to referrals. If you’ve used a solid and practical hiring structure, you already have a great team of experienced professionals. Ask them for their recommendations, it’s likely they will have peers that would be a suitable fit for the role. 

To add to your potential for finding the right hire, an excellent step is to start sourcing. Reach out to the best in the business, see if they would be interested in working with you. 

Statistically, we have found that 70-90% of our top hires were not actively looking for a new job at the time.  

By reaching out to these potential candidates, you can immensely improve your chances of finding the right hire for you. 

Finally, it is always a good idea to publicly post the open position on your preferred platforms, again casting a wider net for your hiring team.  

More Key Hiring Tips

At ACELR8, it’s our job to hire the right people for our clients. To help us find the right candidates smoothly and efficiently, we often use a kick-off meeting template, which we are sharing with you. 

YOU CAN DOWNLOAD OUR KICK-OFF MEETING TEMPLATE HERE

It’s also worth setting up a weekly meeting to sync with the recruitment team in case something doesn’t go as expected. This can give your team an opportunity to share concerns and adapt your hiring strategy accordingly. 

In these meetings, it’s often best to keep everyone updated on:

• Status and number of all candidates within the interview process
• Bottlenecks and solutions
• Action points for the week

As said above, the most important thing to do throughout the hiring process is document everything. The more solidified your hiring structure, the more time you have for finding the right client. 

It’s also important to maintain a clear view of your hiring priorities. If things are disorganised, it can sometimes be difficult to keep an eye on the core responsibilities and roles needed. Stick to your structure, and communicate with your team. 

Finally, when you have successfully found your ideal candidate, organise a retrospective. 

By looking back on your processes and bottlenecks, you can work together to improve your approach and create a more efficient, stress-free hiring process. 

At ACELR8, we work with clients to create smooth, efficient hiring processes. If you’re looking for some guidance on how to improve the quality and equality of your hiring process, reach out to us. 

Like what we do? Then work for us. ACELR8 is always on the search for new talent to help us create a more progressive approach to recruitment.