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7 Crucial Steps in the Hiring Process

Defining your hiring process steps is one of the simplest ways to improve the success of your recruitment. It gives you a clear structure to follow to ensure you’re identifying the skills and experience you need, looking for it in the right places, and hiring the best people for your business. This guide walks you through the main steps in the hiring process and shows you how to use them to attract better talent and improve your employer brand.

HR Featured

Posted 08/01/2025

Candidates in hiring process

What is the recruitment process?

The recruitment process is a set of steps you follow to identify, attract, assess, and onboard new employees. When you replicate it, time and again, it delivers a consistent experience for candidates and finds the best people for your organisation.

It guides everything about recruiting a role from the nature of the vacancy you have, the strategy you’ll use to fill it, right through to measuring how successful your hire has been. At each stage, you can also outline:

·       Internal roles and responsibilities: confirm how you will screen and shortlist candidates and any associated deadlines, identify how your systems get updated

·       Expectations for recruiting managers: involvement in defining the role, securing commitment for interview times, providing feedback in an agreed template and within set deadlines to keep your hiring process moving forward

·       Communications with candidates: keeping them connected through the hiring process, gathering their feedback from interviews, notifying unsuccessful candidates

In essence, your hiring process steps outline everything you need to run a successful recruitment campaign from start to finish. And the more you can systemise it, the easier it becomes to focus on selecting the right person.

The importance of having a seamless recruitment process

An effective hiring process does more than fill vacancies. It promotes:

Positive candidate experience: you want people to accept your offer, so take them through a great hiring process. Consider using blind recruitment to reduce unconscious bias and encourage more diversity. Issue questions in advance as standard, so those who are neurodiverse or who get flustered have a better chance to perform at their best. In other words, tailor your hiring process to give people a genuine sense of the culture so when the offer comes, they can’t wait to accept. 

Boost in productivity: having clear hiring process steps speeds up your recruitment. You can set clear expectations for everyone involved and ensure you get the right person into the role first time. As a result, the existing team feels motivated and continues to deliver while they’re short-staffed, and your new recruit hits the ground running because they’re a great fit.

Enhanced company reputation: you want everyone who applies to work for you to like what they see at the company, even if they don’t get the job. A well-structured recruitment process ensures fair selection process, excellent communication at all stages, and a guaranteed yes or no. In a world where some recruiters are being accused of ghosting (even when they are just overwhelmed with work), be one of the organisations that knows their reputation is strong.

Best of all, you don’t have to do all this manually. There are plenty of opportunities within your hiring process steps to use HR automation to assist you. You can use it to initiate shortlisting, schedule interviews, create template communications, and more.

The 7 steps for hiring the best talent

Step 1. Identify vacancies and requirements

What position do you need to recruit, and why? They seem like simple questions, yet they are so often ignored. It’s tempting when someone leaves to look for a carbon-copy of them, but is that still the best option for the business?

Partner with hiring managers to define the essential skills, experience and qualities they need. Think about potential changes to the role and future skills you might need. Then consider what impact that has on your role requirements.

Once you understand the role you need, develop a comprehensive job description and person specification which align with company goals and values.

Step 2. Choose a recruitment method

You can’t use the same approach for every role – it just won’t work. Consider the nature, technical skills and seniority of the position, and then look at the best strategy for hiring.

An executive for the board is far less likely to look for a role through social media than a marketing manager, for example. You might need a specialist agency or to commission an Executive Search.

You also need to know what budget you have for advertising, whether you need to look openly or confidentially, and what recruitment process steps you will follow. Perhaps you will use an assessment day, or practical case studies as well as competency-based questions in the interview.

Piecing all these aspects together will help you identify your recruitment approach.

Step 3. Search and attract candidates

The next step in your hiring process is to find people. You have identified where you will look for candidates, but have you given as much thought to attracting them to you?

Hiring is a two-way process. The candidate needs to want you as much as you want them, so consider both how to find the right applicants and how to attract them to your business:

How to find them:

       Post job adverts: on job boards, social media, on your own website, in industry forums and publications

       Run a referral program: get recommendations for new employees from your current team. Encourage them to find people who will fit well into your culture

       Review prior applicants: Use your Applicant Tracking System (ATS) to identify passive candidates who would be great for your latest role. Invite them to apply

How to attract them:

       Be clear on salary: Be more inclusive through transparent salary expectations. It creates a higher level of trust with candidates, and can reduce your gender pay gap

       Outline the benefits: Focus less on holidays, pension contributions and life assurance, and more on flexible and remote working and personal and professional development

       Share your culture: Use a great careers page, culture videos and employee testimonials to show people what it’s like to work for you – it’s the most important factor for many candidates (45%)

Step 4. Select and screen candidates

Now you have your candidates, you need to shortlist them. Using an Applicant Tracking System (ATS), you can automate the screening step of your hiring process. With a few clicks, you can apply keywords to highlight those people with the required technical skills for the role, and then follow up with a brief phone or video interview

For businesses looking to encourage greater diversity and inclusion across your teams, you may wish to introduce blind recruitment to your hiring process. This anonymises CVs and covering letters, so decisions are made on skills and experience, not unconscious biases.

Step 5. Interview and assess candidates

This can be the hardest of your hiring process steps, but that’s why planning it in advance is so crucial. Hiring managers need to understand how to assess skills, experience and cultural fit.

Many organisations use feedback templates to rate candidates against key competencies and values. Walk hiring managers through them in advance, to ensure they are applied fairly and consistently. And use a variety of questioning styles to get a deeper understanding of your applicants:

       Structured interviews with standardised questions to ensure fairness and consistency.

       Mix of competency-based and situational questions to help individuals demonstrate experience

       Use practical assignments or work samples for roles requiring technical skills

       Incorporate psychometric tests or personality assessments to evaluate behavioural traits and cognitive abilities.

       Involve multiple stakeholders at different stages e.g. inviting final stage candidates to lunch with team members or asking senior leadership to test different skills in the interview process.

Some businesses are now issuing questions in advance as part of their hiring process. This is mainly to support neurodiverse applicants, though it can be useful for many candidates to know what to expect.

Step 6. Create a compelling job offer

Remember, recruitment is two-way, so you need to secure your chosen candidate with an appealing offer.

Make sure this step in your hiring process has a way to reflect on what you’ve learned about the candidate. Craft a competitive offer and be sure to include details around:

       salary

       traditional benefits e.g. holidays, pension

       flexible working options

       personal development commitments and/or professional qualifications support

Not everyone will be salary-driven, so make sure the offer reflects what’s important both to you as a business and them as an individual. You should also be prepared to negotiate, in line with company policies, on less traditional points such as location, flexibility and support for personal interests.

Step 7: Implement a solid onboarding process

Many businesses think recruitment stops once the candidate has accepted your offer, but that isn’t the case. The best hiring processes include additional steps which give support and training to your new hire, so they become an effective member of the team as quickly as possible.

Create a structured onboarding plan for all roles which includes training, introductions to the team, and access to necessary resources. Assign a mentor or buddy to help them settle into their role and understand more about the company culture. And start planning their development early.

If you wait until the end of probation, you may already have lost them. Talk to people about their career goals and aspirations and help create employee development plans so they can see you’re invested in their success.

Key Steps in The Hiring Process

How do you know whether your recruitment process has been successful?

The best businesses understand what a great recruitment process looks like:

       Recruits the right person for the job

       Reduces turnover in a department or business

       Is efficient and streamlined

       Makes continual improvements

       Boosts employer brand

Use key performance indicators (KPIs) to give yourself a baseline and then measure how effective your hiring process is over time. You can either create these reports manually, or run reports through your ATS, but as a start point you should track:

       Time to hire: The number of days taken to fill a vacancy. A shorter time to hire often indicates an efficient process.

       Cost per hire: Total recruitment expenses divided by the number of hires.

       Offer acceptance rate: The percentage of candidates who accept your job offers.

       Quality of hire: The performance and retention of new employees after a defined period, such as six months or one year

       Candidate satisfaction: Issue candidate experience surveys automatically to gather feedback about each of your hiring process steps

Regularly analysing these metrics helps you identify inefficiencies, refine your approach, and measure whether you've successfully met your hiring goals.

Final tips for ensuring a successful hiring process

It’s easy to stumble from one hiring activity to the next, especially when you have lots of roles to recruit. For them to be successful, however, understanding your hiring process steps makes all the difference.

Just knowing what you are aiming for each time, helps you ensure you look for the right skills in the right places to find the best person for the role. The key is having great supporting structures which make the process seamless.

Using The Access Group's Talent Acquisition Software, you can develop a smooth hiring process to enhance your employer brand and attract the right people. Book a demo today and find out how you can get back time and energy to focus on creating the perfect offer.