Improve Your Skills to Hire the Best Candidates

Improve Your Skills to Hire the Best Candidates 

A great recruiter makes the process of employment a breeze for both hiring company and for the applicant. If you’re soul-searching on how you can improve your soft skills to bring in the best brains to the company’s talent pool, then follow our guide:

Understand your Industry

There’s nothing more frustrating for the candidate than a recruiter that doesn’t understand the role that they are employing for especially if it’s a super-specialised STEM area. Brush up on your knowledge with free and introduction courses from Udemy or Coursera. A base understanding will stand you in good stead even if you don’t follow the more complicated details of the role. 

Communicate, communicate, communicate

Each step should feel like a natural progression with clearly defined expectations and deadlines. Set up and follow a clear recruitment strategy and make sure you communicate each stage clearly to the candidate. With careers and livelihoods in the balance, the candidate will appreciate knowing how long each stage will take and can prepare accordingly. This especially applies if they aren’t the right fit for the role/company – be decent and make time to let them know with some constructive feedback on why. 

Even if things get tricky behind the scenes try not to rearrange calls and interviews otherwise the candidate will question the company’s professionalism. Having a clear and structured interview process may mean more work but it will leave a great impression so invest time in tightening up procedures. 

Improve your IT Skills

The world is going digital, and fast, so don’t be left behind with the dinosaurs. Embrace technology and find the right tools to help streamline your workload. If you are unsure of which technology to utilise (it can be overwhelming), then seek out trusted opinions of colleagues or online recruitment groups. Technology can help every process from searching candidates, reducing the CV pile using keywords, video interviews and online calls. Test out different tech until you find what works for your processes – better to test and trial as you go than to try and find a ‘perfect’ piece of software. 

Work for the candidates

Recruitment is a competitive market especially in STEM where the best brains are being sort by a multitude of companies and sectors. Practise at working with your strong candidates to make them feel at ease in the interviewing process. Showcase their talent rather than challenge their knowledge and they will understand that you, and the company, value their skills. This could be the difference in winning them over if they have competing companies making offers.