Who you hire will make a huge difference to the culture of your team.

How you hire is the most visible communication of your team culture to the world outside your organisation. How you hire will determine who you hire because it impacts who is interested in your role, your team and your organisation. Aspects include how the job description is written, how the person specification is written, whether the salary is published, how much information is included to sell the company to the candidate and how laborious the application process is.

How you treat your candidates is an excellent proxy for how you will treat your people. This includes how transparent and efficient the interview process is as well as the mix of formal and informal parts of the process. It also includes how promptly candidates are contacted at each stage, how easily they can obtain answers to their questions, and whether they are given accurate information about what any next steps will be and when things will happen.

Good candidate experience is vital to successful hiring practices for most companies. Intentionally improving and measuring your candidate experience is a great way of ensuring you are gaining the potential benefits available for your reputation as well as securing the best talent.

And it’s not just the candidate experience of your successful candidates you want to know about. How your unsuccessful candidates feel after rejection is a strong indicator of the respect and dignity you extend to every person in the process. If a rejected candidate still holds you and the organisation in high regard after the hiring process and would try again or talk to others positively about you, that is truly recruitment success.

---

Photo by Eric Prouzet on Unsplash