The US Department of Labor estimates the cost of a bad hiring decision at 30% or more of that employee’s first-year earnings, so naturally, every business wants to avoid inept hiring practices. Particularly with a small business, the cost of a single bad hiring decision for a non-entry level position can threaten the entire company’s future.
Hiring involves several critical steps that must be done in a particular order. At the very beginning, you identify the need for a new employee, define the job requirements and qualifications, and determine where to advertise. Then, the process of sifting through resumes and determining who should come back for interviews often requires that you make some tough decisions.
After you have a shortlist and interview your candidates you begin the process of evaluating, choosing whom to hire, and notifying the people who did not get the job. It makes sense to have a defined workflow for the hiring process so that no key steps are forgotten and all your bases are covered throughout. Only then can you be confident that you have made the best decision with the information you have.
How Workflows Help Prevent Hiring Mistakes
A strong hiring process workflow can help prevent fundamental mistakes like posting a job offering without informing candidates of a qualification or certification required for the position. It can help you determine where each candidate is in the consideration process and prevent, for example, mistakenly making a hiring decision before that one last candidate is interviewed. Your hiring workflow can help with relocation, if necessary, and can ensure that all legal obligations are fulfilled and that HR can begin the process of onboarding your new employee.
Work Across Departments with Ease
Hiring workflows cross departmental boundaries. Maybe you’re hiring an engineer, but HR, finance, and facilities management must all know what’s happening so that the new hire will be able to fill out all the required onboarding and tax forms, the people who cut the checks will know what project to charge the new person’s time to, and there will be an office or cubicle available when your new person walks in the door on their first day. The right workflow software makes it easy to work across departments and ensure that everyone involved in the hiring process has the information and transparency they need to complete tasks efficiently.
Build Metrics into Your Hiring Workflow
Building key performance indicators (KPIs) into your hiring process will benefit future hiring processes, helping you fine-tune your hiring workflow for maximum effectiveness and efficiency. You could, for instance, collect data on how many people applied for the systems analyst job, their qualification levels, how much the new employee was offered in terms of salary and benefits, and whether the new employee completed their probationary period successfully. There may be many lessons to be learned during the hiring process. The right workflow software can ensure that none of them go unnoticed.
Parts of the Hiring Process You Can Automate
Because of the numerous critical steps involved in hiring someone, automating those parts of the process that can be automated is wise to prevent forgotten steps and other mistakes. If you choose the right workflow software to create your hiring workflow, you can do things like:
- Automatically assign tasks to the appropriate hiring team member
- Send follow-up emails to candidates automatically
- Automatically send follow-up questions or prequalification questionnaires to shortlist candidates
- Create interview guidelines to guide your interviewers
You can also ensure that HR and other essential departments are automatically notified once an employment offer has been accepted, and automatically trigger initial onboarding processes. You can even put some onboarding tasks online so the new hire can complete them before their first day at work. This helps ensure your new employee is up to speed and productive as quickly as possible.
Strategic Hiring Is Smart Business
Hiring mistakes are expensive and can affect morale. You want to avoid poor hiring choices whenever possible. PerfectApps is workflow software that makes it easy to create your own customized hiring workflow so that all key personnel in all relevant departments can keep up with the hiring process easily at any time. You can also use PerfectApps to create online onboarding forms for your new hires that they can complete prior to their first day at work, and automate parts of the hiring and onboarding processes to ensure they’re up to speed and productive as soon as possible. Take a look at our demo video and see for yourself how easy it is to make custom forms and workflows, for hiring, or most any other business process imaginable.
