Cioffi: Keep candidates engaged during hiring process

The job market today continues to churn with openings, offers, counter offers and internal promotions.

Finding a candidate is relatively easy, but finding the right candidate with the skill sets you're seeking is much more difficult.

Attracting qualified candidates to your company is especially challenging now, as we continue to see high job churn in recent years.

One of the most critical components of attracting candidates is having a defined process. This is something missing in the tire industry today for many companies, yet something I believe to be critical.

Have you ever had a great interview with a candidate, only to realize well into the process that you disagree with another vice president or with human resources on the scope of the role and what the proper candidate looks like?

Or, maybe this sounds familiar — your hiring process takes four-plus weeks. By the time you finally make an offer, you learn that you've lost your top two candidates because they lost interest, took a promotion or joined another company.

If these scenarios don't sound familiar, consider yourself lucky. This is a daily happening with our clients, candidates and hiring managers in the field.

A structured hiring process implemented by your company is the key to mitigating the above pitfalls and their associated outcomes.

It comes down to providing a superior candidate experience and an exceptional time to offer, including an expeditious candidate interview timeline.

Implementing a structured hiring process can help employers achieve this, and it will result in a better experience for everyone involved. Here are three simple steps you can take:

Begin with an internal kickoff meeting. This should occur before any other steps in the process.

Choose participants based on their relationship to the position, but at minimum include your internal hiring manager and stakeholders from other pertinent areas, such as HR or the C-suite.

This meeting should be used to get everyone on the same page regarding the business objectives of the position, as well as come to agreement on the skills and experience necessary for a candidate to possess if they are to be successful in this position. Write these down as they will be used in the next steps.

Launching the search correctly by starting with a structured meeting of this sort will set the pace and expectations for later steps in the hiring process. Be sure to consider the long-term contributions and impact this role could have on the organization and not just address the short-term advantages.

Think in terms of the day-to-day duties of the job as well as the longer-term impacts a superstar candidate could have on the overall business. The final box to check in this meeting is agreement on roles and responsibilities during the hiring process. Be sure this is clearly agreed upon and deadlines set.

Develop a candidate scorecard and prepare for interviews. The attributes you identified in your launch meeting are now put onto an interview scorecard. Try to cover everything discussed during the launch meeting without being redundant.

Once the scorecard is developed, plan the interview process itself. The interview should uncover the candidate's relevant experience and skills, then measure each candidate against the same set of criteria.

The process should involve key stakeholders and deliver an exceptional experience for candidates, so you can keep the highest-quality people engaged and focused on the position.

Create interview kits that include the scorecards and identical questions to be used in assessing candidates. Questions should verify skills, gain insight into how a candidate handled certain situations in the past and how they might react to a variety of situations they could face in the future if hired for the position.

The last step of the structured hiring process includes sourcing, interviewing and evaluating candidates so a hire can be made. This phase is particularly important in ensuring the time to offer is kept at a reasonable length and candidates are sufficiently engaged.

Once you've gotten through the interview process, you will need to analyze the candidates through all the data that was gathered. This is most effective when done as a round-up meeting where those involved can come together with the goal of coming to an agreement on which candidate will receive the offer.

This is also the time to outline the steps necessary for the offer to be made and to address any process concerns that would prevent the hiring from proceeding efficiently.

Following a structured hiring process not only will take away many of the challenges from the process, but also go a long way to ensuring that the right candidate is hired for the position.

Through planning and organization, the hiring experience can not only be a positive one for the company, but for candidates as well.

I hope these tips help you uncover the importance of planning ahead and developing a process for each role in your team. I will be glad to provide free help to our readers: Email me with any specific questions.