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How to Design a Better Hiring Process

• Alex Haimann

It’s time to move past “What are your greatest strengths and weaknesses?”

Many standard interview processes rely on outdated behavioral questions like “What are your greatest strengths and weaknesses?” to evaluate prospective hires. But more often than not, these types of questions fail to reveal useful information about a candidate’s competencies. A better approach is to immerse job candidates in unconventional scenarios to gather the most useful insights about their critical-thinking abilities, tech savviness, and interpersonal skills. For example, if you want to test their ability to prepare, let them know the questions you’ll ask beforehand. If you want to test their technical skills, give them a problem to solve in real-time. And if you want to see if they’ll be a good cultural fit, have them play an interactive game with your employees.

Shortly after we started hiring for our business, we recognized that most traditional interview processes  are flawed , at best. At the time, we had a goal of growing our CRM software company from six to 18 employees. Our objectives were simple: Find talented people to contribute to our culture, generate great work, and stay with us for the long term. To avoid retention issues, we decided to focus on optimizing our interview process early on as opposed to relying on outdated behavioral questions to guide us.

• Alex Haimann is a partner and the head of business development at  Less Annoying CRM , a simple CRM built from the ground up for small businesses. Over 10,000 small businesses worldwide use LACRM to manage contacts, track leads, and stay on top of follow-ups. LACRM continues to grow by engaging customers and finding new opportunities for mutually beneficial partnerships.

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• How to build a best-in-class hiring pro ...

How to build a best-in-class hiring process

A hiring process is a structured approach to help you find, assess, and hire new members of your team. While it’s not often something we consciously build, an effective hiring process makes it easy to collaborate with stakeholders like human resources and your interview panel. Plus, it helps you check off every box and hire the best possible candidates. Learn the ins and outs of hiring, then get started with 11 concrete steps.

Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither was your team. Hiring great people takes time, but it’s worth it because your team members are the driving force behind everything you accomplish. To accomplish big goals, you need a solid team. And to build your team, you need a well-planned hiring process. 

What is a hiring process?

A hiring process is a structured approach to find, assess, and hire new members of your team. It’s a standardized set of steps you follow every time you want to hire a new employee—whether you’re backfilling an existing role or adding a new role to your team. And while hiring can often feel urgent (especially when you’re understaffed or need to backfill a role), it’s worth it to set up a hiring process before you kick things off. With some extra time up front, you can save yourself even more time and hassle in the future.

Hiring is usually a cross-functional process. It involves working with stakeholders like recruiters and your human resources team, plus any coworkers that will help interview potential candidates. Hiring is also customizable depending on who you’re hiring and what resources you have available. For example, hiring a software engineer requires different steps than hiring a clinical therapist. Or, hiring responsibilities may be different at smaller companies with no HR team.

But if you’re not sure where to start or if wrangling stakeholders isn’t your cup of tea, don’t worry. A standardized hiring process makes collaboration easy. Once you figure out what works for you and document each step, you’ll have a roadmap to follow—so you know exactly what to do and who to talk to every time you want to hire someone new. 

Hiring process vs. onboarding process

Before you can onboard new team members, you need to hire them. That means your hiring process includes identifying job requirements, sourcing qualified candidates, interviewing, and extending a final offer. Along with those bigger steps, your hiring process also includes details like who communicates with candidates and how you should evaluate each applicant. Simply put, hiring includes everything up until a candidate accepts your offer. 

Onboarding starts after a candidate signs your offer letter. That’s when you start to welcome your new hire and bring them up to speed. Surprisingly, some critical onboarding steps often happen before an employee’s first day—like making sure your team member has a laptop and office access badge, or sending them a first-day email so they know what to expect. After an employee officially starts, onboarding continues as employees learn about your organizational culture , get to know their teammates, and learn about the tools and processes they need for their role. 

Why is a hiring process important? 

A structured hiring process doesn’t just make your life easier—it also helps your stakeholders and potential candidates. Here’s how: 

Create a positive candidate experience

Candidate experience is a key component of your company culture . According to a study , 78% of candidates say their interviewing and hiring experience indicates how a company values its people. That means it’s essential to put your best foot forward during the hiring process, because that’s when potential employees form their first impressions.  

A hiring process gives each candidate a consistent experience and helps you provide the right information at the right time. When you have a predefined hiring process, you can tell candidates what next steps look like and how long each step might take, so they’re not left wondering where they stand or what to do during downtime. You can also build essential communications into your hiring process to ensure you’re not missing any steps—like sending candidates the information they need to prepare for interviews or sending follow-up emails to let people know when you’ve hired a different candidate.

Avoid unconscious bias

Unconscious biases are learned assumptions, beliefs, or attitudes that we aren’t necessarily aware of. They’re also a normal part of being human—our brains process truckloads of information on a daily basis, so we sometimes take shortcuts. For example, we assume frost on our windshield means it’s cold outside, rush hour means lots of traffic, and the milk we just bought is safe to drink.

The examples above are pretty harmless, but our biases can also creep into the hiring process and influence who we choose for a specific role. For example, a Princeton University study showed that when symphonies started to hold blind auditions, female musicians were immediately 50% more likely to make it to the next round of the audition process. That means that when judges could see the gender of applicants, they were unconsciously biased towards male musicians.

But luckily, learning about unconscious bias can help you recognize when it’s happening and put active countermeasures into place. A structured hiring process helps you avoid unconscious bias by making you follow the same steps for every candidate. It lets you collect the same type of information for each applicant and make decisions based on data rather than the undefined idea of “culture fit.” For example, you can include a standard set of interview questions in your hiring process to ensure candidates are assessed equally in the same areas. 

Hire the right candidates

Hiring is a bit like speed dating. You and the applicant are both trying to decide if you want to pursue a long-term relationship—you’re trying to decide if the candidate is a good fit for your team, while they’re trying to figure out if they want to work at your company. It’s easy to rush this process and leave out key information that would help you both make the best decision. And when that happens, you might struggle with employee retention if new hires aren’t qualified for their role. 

But when you follow a predefined hiring process, you can make sure both you and your candidates have all the information they need before a decision is made. A hiring process helps you build in key steps like an initial screening call, a take-home practical assessment, and structured interviews with plenty of time for questions. This gives you a robust set of information to consider for your final decision. And equally important, it gives candidates a clear picture of the day-to-day responsibilities of the role and what it would actually be like to work at your company. 

Collaborate efficiently with stakeholders

Hiring usually involves working with multiple stakeholders—including recruiters, human resources, and any coworkers on your interview panel. Since different stakeholders need to be looped in at different parts of the process, it can be tough to coordinate all of the moving pieces. For example, the recruiting team might handle job postings and resume screening, the hiring manager might be responsible for scheduling onsite interviews, and members of your interview panel may be responsible for collecting and sharing their feedback for each candidate.

A structured hiring process gives you and your team a clear roadmap to follow. It tells you which stakeholders to loop in at every step, who’s responsible for each task, and how long each stage of your hiring process will take. To make things even easier, you can use a project management tool to plan and execute your hiring process. For example, Asana lets you create reusable templates that lay out each task within a process—including the task owner, due date, and any dependencies.

11 steps to build a best-in-class hiring process

Hiring can seem daunting—especially with all the complexities of job postings, interviews, background checks, and more. But like many things, you can simplify the hiring process by breaking it down into a series of bite-sized steps. To get you started, we’ve listed 11 hiring process steps that most companies share. Once you run through these steps a few times, you can tailor them to your specific needs and resources. 

1. Set your hiring goal

Before you kick off the hiring process, you need to set clear objectives that outline what you’re looking for. Setting goals gives you a North Star to aim for as you recruit and assess applicants. It helps you write a job description that addresses the gap you’re trying to fill, evaluate candidates against your objectives, and manage the timeline for your hiring process. When you set your goal, just be sure it’s SMART : specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and time-bound.

To formulate your hiring goal, ask yourself the following questions: 

Who is your ideal candidate? 

What specific skills do they have? 

What level of past experience do they have?

What hiring needs or gaps are you trying to fill with this role? For example, are you filling an open position, adding bandwidth to your team, or adding a new area of responsibility? 

When do you need to fill this role? How long should the hiring process take? 

2. Identify stakeholders

Next, it’s time to identify the stakeholders you’ll collaborate with during the hiring process. This can vary from company to company, but these are the most common stakeholders to look out for: 

Hiring manager: The person who will manage the new employee. The hiring manager often drives the hiring process and has the final say on which candidate is selected.

Human resources and recruitment team : Depending on the size of your company, recruiters may be responsible for job posting, outreach, initial screenings, scheduling interviews, and negotiating offers. At bigger companies, a recruiter may be your candidate’s main point of contact throughout the entire hiring process. At smaller companies, the hiring manager may be responsible for some or all of this work. If your company doesn’t have an in-house recruiting team, you may even outsource some steps to a recruiting agency. 

Interview panel : These are the people who will interview each candidate. They can be potential teammates, cross-functional partners , or people with specific areas of expertise. For example, if you’re hiring someone who needs to have design expertise, you may want to include a product designer on your interview panel. Just be sure to give each panel member guidance on the type of questions they should ask—for example, specify that the product designer should ask specifically about the candidate’s design experience. 

As you identify stakeholders, it can be helpful to create a RACI chart to outline who is r esponsible, a ccountable, c onsulted, and i nformed for each step of your hiring process. 

3. Write a job description

A good job description (JD) is key if you want to attract quality candidates. Ultimately, the goal of your JD is to help potential candidates understand what a person in this role actually does on a day-to-day basis, so they can decide whether they want to apply. That means it’s important for your description to accurately reflect the duties and responsibilities of the position. 

While job descriptions can vary, here are some key components to include: 

Job purpose

Job duties and responsibilities

Required qualifications (like education, experience, or skills)

Preferred qualifications

Working conditions (like whether the role is remote or in-person and what hours the candidate is expected to work)

A salary range and list of benefits

You can also outline key aspects of your company culture in your JD. For example, at Asana we include a paragraph at the end of each job description to emphasize how we value inclusivity and welcome candidates from all backgrounds. 

4. Advertise and recruit for the position

Now it’s time to put your job description to work. Finding great candidates can be tough, so companies often use a combination of advertising and active recruiting. If your company has a recruitment team, they typically handle both. 

To advertise the position , first decide whether you want to recruit internally, externally, or a combination of the two. For example, you may want to advertise the position internally first, then open it up to external applicants. Job boards and posting sites like LinkedIn are a great place to start advertising externally, along with job fairs and your company website. You can also lean on your current employees to help advertise the position by offering referral bonuses. 

To recruit for the position , you need to actively reach out to qualified candidates via LinkedIn, email, social media, or job fairs. The recruitment process helps generate applications from potential candidates who aren’t actively searching but might be a good fit.

5. Review applications

At this point, you should have a solid batch of resumes and cover letters to review. Take some time to review each application and decide which candidates meet the required qualifications listed in your job description. Try to stick to hard skills and concrete experience at this stage, since it’s tough to get a sense of soft skills from a resume. You can also build in guidelines to help combat unconscious bias as you review. For example, you could hide the applicant name to reduce gender or racial bias, or focus on relevant experience instead of years in the workforce to prevent age discrimination. 

At some companies with high application volumes, recruiters on your human resources team will prepare a batch of pre-screened resumes for you to look through. Your company may also use an applicant tracking system like Greenhouse, Workday, or ADP to store and organize job applications and contact information. 

6. Conduct a phone screen

A phone screen is your initial contact with a candidate—typically done over (you guessed it) the phone. The goal of a phone interview is two-fold. First, you want to determine whether the candidate has the required qualifications and aligns with your organizational culture and company values . Second, you want to give the applicant time to ask questions. Remember they’re also deciding if they want to work on your team. 

If you’re partnering with a recruiting team, they might conduct an initial phone screen first to verify the candidate’s eligibility and make sure they’re really interested in the role before passing things to you for a more in-depth conversation. 

If you’re not sure where to start, here are some example phone interview questions: 

Tell me about yourself. Who are you? What motivates you? What did you have for breakfast? 

Why does this job appeal to you? 

Walk me through your resume. Tell me about the accomplishments you’re most proud of for each of your roles. 

What would an ideal team setup look like for you?

What type of collaboration do you prefer? 

What do you need from your manager and your team in order to feel successful? 

What questions do you have for me? 

7. Assess skills

It’s tough to demonstrate hard skills during an interview. That’s why a skills assessment is important for roles that focus heavily on hard skills like writing, data analysis, or programming. For roles that emphasize soft skills instead (like customer service), you may not need this step. 

Your skills assessment can be a take-home assignment, a timed online assessment, or even an in-person test. For example, you could create a take-home writing assignment for a copywriter candidate or a timed online coding exercise for a developer candidate. For senior positions or roles that involve lots of cross-functional collaboration, the assessment is often a presentation. In this case, you can ask the candidate to present on a project they worked on—leaving time at the end for a panel of stakeholders to ask questions. 

Regardless of the format you choose, a skills assessment is the best way to see a candidate’s experience and skills in action. 

8. Conduct on-site interviews

On-site interviews involve a lot of moving pieces. But if you iron out a few key details first, you can organize every moving part and make your interview process as smooth as possible for everyone.

Here are some key questions to ask yourself as you plan on-site job interviews: 

How will you format interviews?

A candidate’s on-site interviews are often formatted as 1:1 meetings with each member of the interview panel. That said, you can also schedule group interviews with panel members who have similar expertise. You can even hold larger interviews with an entire team—but since this format can be intimidating, it’s best used when you’re trying to hire for management positions. 

You also need to decide whether your on-site interviews will be virtual or in-person. If you opt for virtual, be sure to choose a video conferencing platform that’s easily accessible to people outside your company. 

How long should interviews last?

This depends on whether your interviews are virtual or in-person. Research shows that video fatigue sets in at the 30-minute mark for virtual meetings, meaning it becomes much harder to focus past that point. On the other hand, we can usually maintain focus for 45 to 60 minutes when we’re talking face-to-face. 

When should you schedule interviews?

It’s usually more convenient to schedule a candidate's interviews in back-to-back blocks. This means the candidate only has to visit your office once if your interviews are in person. On the flip side, you might want to break interviews up over two days for virtual on-sites to avoid video fatigue. For example, you could schedule two 90-minute interview blocks during the same week. If you schedule interviews back-to-back, make sure to build in five-minute breaks between meetings so the candidate can get up, stretch, or use the restroom. 

How should interviewers prepare?

Being well-prepared shows that you value your candidate’s time and helps you collect better feedback. Here’s how to help your interview panel prepare and set them up for success:

First, make sure each interview understands what competencies they’re evaluating for. For example, a designer interviewing a design candidate should ask more technical questions, while a cross-functional stakeholder should ask about collaboration and how the candidate works with non-design team members. 

Ask each interviewer to come up with questions beforehand. This not only ensures that they’re prepared, but also helps reduce bias. 

If there’s anyone on your panel who hasn’t participated in an interview process before, see if your HR department offers training sessions for first-time interviewers.

How should you prepare the candidate for their interviews? 

It’s equally important to make sure your candidate feels prepared for their on-site interviews. Before the onsite, be sure to let them know the following: 

The date and time of each interview, including when they should arrive if they’re visiting your office in person. 

How to access your office—for example, will you meet them in the lobby or should they check in at the reception desk? For virtual interviews, provide instructions on how to access video conferencing links. 

Who they’ll be meeting with, including each interviewer’s name and title. It’s also helpful to provide an overview of each person’s area of expertise so the candidate can prepare questions in advance. 

Any relevant additional information—for example, if your office is especially laid-back you can let them know they don’t have to wear business casual attire. 

For virtual interviews, it can be helpful to schedule a quick 10-minute meeting with a recruiter or someone on IT before the on-site interviews start. During this time, the candidate can troubleshoot any tech issues that might come up. 

9. Make a decision

Now that you’ve interviewed the best candidates, it’s time to make a decision. This involves reviewing all of the feedback from your interview panel, either asynchronously or during an in-person meeting. Ultimately the hiring manager decides who to move forward with, but they should consider the input from each panel member. 

If you’re torn between two or three equally qualified candidates, try creating a decision matrix to structure your comparison and make an evidence-based choice. 

10. Complete a background and reference check

At long last, you’ve decided who to hire! But before you extend an official offer, it’s important to run a background and reference check. Here’s what each entails: 

A background check usually involves working with a background check agency to verify details on the candidate’s job application, like their employment history, education, and any criminal history. 

A reference check involves calling each of your candidates references, which are typically former coworkers or managers. Usually the hiring manager or recruiter does this step, and the goal is to double check that the candidate meets your hiring criteria—plus see if there are any red flags you may have missed. 

11. Make a job offer and negotiate

Finally, it’s time to make an official job offer. If you’re partnering with a recruiter, they typically make the initial offer and handle any negotiations. But regardless of who’s responsible, here are some things to keep in mind:

Once you finish negotiations, send an official offer of employment in writing. A verbal offer and acceptance isn’t binding like a formal written offer. 

Let the candidate know how long they have to make a decision. 

Once they’ve accepted the offer (fingers crossed), make sure to let other candidates know that the position is closed. 

Next step: onboarding

Like hiring, it’s important to have a standardized onboarding process. To build your own, check out our employee onboarding template—plus articles on how to create the ultimate onboarding process and overcome common remote onboarding challenges. 

Related resources

Fix these common onboarding challenges to boost productivity

How Asana uses work management to optimize resource planning

Understanding dependencies in project management

How Asana uses work management for organizational planning

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Hiring Process Timeline Best Practices

Table of Contents

The quality of your employees can have a major impact on the success of your business. Although you may be tempted rush through the hiring process to find new staff and get them onboarded as quickly as possible, hiring the right employees is a critical task that shouldn’t be rushed. Skipping steps along the way can cost you in the long run. Here are some best practices for a solid hiring process.

What is the hiring process timeline?

It’s important to be flexible with the hiring process timeline, because you might find you need to adapt it based on the requirements of the role, your industry or your company. However, you shouldn’t necessarily customize the selection process for each candidate. Doing so often leads to excessive time spent with candidates for high-level positions and insufficient time spent with candidates for low-level positions. You need good people at all levels. Remind yourself that finding the most qualified candidate is worth the effort, no matter the job level or business environment.

With that in mind, when you’ve identified the need to hire someone, use this model to guide you through the process:

• Create a job announcement. The job ad should have an accurate job description. The right description combines two elements: what the company is looking for in a candidate and how the company will help the new employee succeed. In many cases, you’re writing for a specialized audience with specific expectations. Omitting important information about your company and the job might prompt a qualified candidate to look elsewhere.
• Post the job opening. Circulate the job announcement on jobs boards, industry websites, social media and professional networks.
• Look for outside insight. Discuss your hiring process with trusted professionals, personal advisors or anyone who has shown a knack for providing insight into your business and industry. Sometimes, outsiders can offer fresh perspectives that will send you and your HR team in an exciting new direction. They might even name the person who eventually gets the job.
• Talk to recruiters. Contact recruiters who have been effective in your industry.
• Reach out to your network. Recruit candidates directly through social media or other more traditional networking methods, such as making phone calls. It never hurts to remind people that their talents are held in high esteem, even if they don’t apply for this particular position.
• Receive and review applications. Within a week of posting the job, you should have some applications and résumés coming in. Start looking through them to identify some good fits.
• Conduct initial interviews. Once you have identified some qualified candidates, you can start conducting phone or video interviews.
• Ask for additional information. Request more information from candidates (if needed). Have them answer emailed questions, take an editing or programming test, or provide work samples.

Embed video here

• Schedule and hold in-person interviews. Based on your first round of interviews, start scheduling and holding in-person interviews. In emergency situations, video conferencing might suffice.
• Finish the first round of in-person interviews. Depending on the position you’re filling and many other factors, the number of weeks you spend on the first, second and additional interview rounds will vary.
• Hold the second round of interviews. Schedule and conduct second-round interviews, and set up candidate presentations and group interviews.
• Do reference checks. Contact references. The hiring manager or HR specialist may do this step earlier in the process, but if they haven’t, now is the time.
• Conduct follow-up interviews. If necessary, do another round of interviews, often with applicants meeting with senior management.
• Have candidates make presentations. Schedule and hold sessions in which selected applicants make presentations.
• Finalize the shortlist. Narrow your list down to a few candidates you would feel comfortable hiring.  
• Make a job offer. Once you have a top candidate in mind, make an offer. Be sure to have all of the particulars, like salary and benefits, outlined in your offer.
• Not every candidate will jump at your first offer. Be prepared to negotiate salary and other terms of employment.
• Conduct background checks. Before you finalize any hiring agreement, make sure everything in a background check (if you choose to conduct one) has been addressed.

A standardized hiring process can help reduce hiring errors or discrimination that may occur due to unconscious biases.

How long does the average hiring process take?

According to Get Hired by LinkedIn News , the hiring process takes about three to six weeks, on average. However, the timeline for completing the hiring process, from the initial job posting to the acceptance of an offer, varies among industries and companies.

For example, five industries with some of the longest hiring timelines include government, aerospace and defense, energy and utilities, biotech and pharmaceuticals, and nonprofits.

The industries with the shortest hiring processes are those with dynamic staffing patterns and a greater emphasis on abilities than educational credentials, such as restaurants and bars, private security, supermarkets, automotive, and beauty and fitness.

Your company’s hiring timeline will be unique to your business, and possibly even the department or position you are hiring for. In addition to looking at the average hiring timeline for your industry, you can get an estimate for how long your hiring process will take by asking yourself these three questions:

• Does your company put a large emphasis on cultural fit? Hiring managers are increasingly keen on finding candidates who fit into a particular system of customs, goals and values. Finding such people extends the selection process with additional interviews, sometimes in informal settings.
• Is your job opening for a position that requires significant judgment and creativity? As automation eliminates many routine, task-oriented jobs, a higher percentage of positions require advanced thinking skills. That means you must think longer about whom to hire. Tools such as skills assessments and personality testing are often worth your investment.
• Does the job description emphasize customer service skills? Customer service skills have never been more important to business, and they are measured more accurately in a lengthier interview process.

Although these three instances can add extra time onto your hiring process, it’s important to assess each position carefully.

You may be tempted to rush through the hiring process, but the last thing you want is to make a panic hire or accidentally hire a deepfake because you didn’t do your due diligence during the hiring process.

How to create an effective hiring process

Your HR team must create a hiring process that is comfortable for both the company and job applicants. Tests of general intelligence and specific knowledge have their place, especially in identifying candidates who do not meet the minimum qualifications. Nonetheless, the final decision on a candidate typically depends on the judgment of a hiring manager or senior executive.

Hiring managers oversee all steps in the selection process, including recruitment, screening, scheduling and holding interviews, testing, and, finally, the negotiation of job offers. But senior executives can also be involved in the hiring process, at least in an advisory capacity. After all, they are ultimately responsible for who works at the company and how well employees perform.

The ideal hiring process needs to be flexible enough to heed the wishes of senior executives. Companies with the best people tend to be those in which an HR specialist and a CEO talk to each other.

The complexity of your hiring process will depend on various factors, including the following:

• Company size
• Degree of profitability
• Position within a competitive market
• Company history
• Company culture
• Number of positions you’re seeking to fill
• Level of the position
• Whether the position is a new role for the company
• Number of people involved in the hiring process

How to speed up the hiring process

Taking the time to hire the right person can prevent mistakes, but it can also give your favorite candidate the chance to wander off to a different opportunity. In addition, a leisurely hiring process means other projects may not get the attention they deserve.

Craft a job description that is clear and specific.

The description of the role should be complete but not laden with details of every possible demand that the new hire will face. The right job description can act as a road map for the entire hiring process.

Consider only the best candidates.

Be true to your screening process, and bring in only select candidates for interviews. Trust your instincts about candidates after reading their résumés. A certain candidate might look interesting, but will that person really be a good fit for your company? Instead of scheduling five to 10 people for a first interview, you might want to go with three to five. Avoid interviewing too many candidates who might look interesting but do not meet the minimum qualifications for the role.

Don’t overlook internal candidates.

Internal candidates may not be perfect, but neither are external applicants, despite their impressive résumés. And even if an internal candidate is interviewed but not hired, at least that person will not feel taken for granted. “Recruiting” people who are already on board is a way to build better communication links within your company. [Read relate article: Why You Should Promote from Within Your Company ]

Simplify the application process.

Go the easy-apply route, instead of requiring detailed information upfront in a lengthy application, which can discourage would-be candidates. At the outset, ask simply for a cover letter and a résumé. It takes only a few minutes to glance at this information. If you like what you see, you can get more detailed information during the next stage of the hiring process.

Get a head start on references.

Contact job references earlier in the hiring process, rather than later. Tacking this step onto the end of a series of interviews can delay hiring. (A key contact might be on vacation, for instance.) Also, checking references is an important way to evaluate talent and should not be treated as an afterthought. Knowing more about a candidate who comes in for an interview will help your HR team ask better interview questions, leading to a richer exchange of ideas and information.

Be flexible.

If a candidate does not have a particular advanced degree or the same background as everyone else at the office, must that be a dealbreaker ? If you cling to too many preconceived notions about the ideal candidate, you might overlook someone who could bring new ideas to your business. This is especially true as Gen Z makes its mark on the workforce , many of whom don’t subscribe to the belief that a college degree isn’t needed to have a successful career.

Outsource certain tasks.

If you anticipate becoming overwhelmed by the hiring process — and that might happen, for reasons out of your control — outsource some of the process to a professional staffing agency .

There can be many challenges during the hiring process , but this list of the 10 do’s and don’ts for hiring can help you smooth out the process.

Frequently Asked Questions about the hiring process

Here are a few common questions — and their answers — many small business owners have about hiring new employees.

How much does the average hire usually cost?

The cost of a new hire depends largely on their starting salary and any immediate perks. There are, however, nearly universal costs associated with hiring that occur even in dramatically different industries.

The average cost for hiring a new employee is roughly $4,700, according to SHRM . That includes the cost of HR to process the new employee, payment to the employee that will likely not yield productive work (such as during orientation or training), and myriad other expenses that are part of the process.

What tools can help make the hiring process more efficient?

Applicant tracking systems are popular. They help HR post job listings, they parse and organize candidate resumes, they identify well-qualified candidates, and they help companies track candidates throughout the hiring process. Other, more comprehensive, highly rated HR software can also be used to streamline the hiring process if you want something that can help hire, onboard and manage workers through their entire employee lifecycle.

Another useful tool is a good old-fashioned referral. Employee referral programs require an investment to set them up, but they can generate big rewards by attracting quality hires to your company who may not otherwise hear about your company.

Does the hiring manager make the final hiring decision?

Yes, the hiring manager is the final decision-maker when selecting which candidate will receive the job offer. Recruiters or other HR professionals may be involved in the hiring process, but the hiring manager has the final say.

Does the hiring manager or HR make the job offer?

Although HR and hiring managers will often work closely together throughout the hiring process, the hiring manager will be the one to reach out and extend the job offer to the selected candidate. They are the ones who will be working directly with the candidate after they are hired.

What day of the week/time of day is best to make a job offer?

Tuesday tends to be the most popular day of the week for employers to extend job offers. This is because Mondays are typically reserved for catching up on administrative tasks, yet hiring managers want to get to viable candidates as soon as possible. If a decision is made later in the week, many managers also opt for Thursday, so they can get the offer in before the weekend.

The most popular time of day for extending an offer is 11 a.m. It is considered late enough in the morning that most people are awake and alert. It is also before lunch, which gives offer recipients a likely opportunity to respond to the offer.

Skye Schooley contributed to this article.

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How To Build a Successful Recruitment Plan

Katherine McDermott - Guest Contributor

Benefits of having a recruitment plan

How to create a recruitment plan, track your recruitment plan’s results, an effective recruitment plan helps your business identify its hiring needs and attract suitable candidates..

A recruitment plan is a strategic roadmap for successful hiring, onboarding, and retaining new employees. As small businesses compete fiercely for top talent, a structured recruitment plan can help them streamline the hiring process, maximize efficiencies, and build a positive candidate experience.

Business leaders and hiring managers have to utilize varied recruitment strategies to devise a recruitment plan that aligns with the overall business goals, targets the right candidate, and measures the success of the recruitment efforts.

In this article, we’ll learn the benefits of a recruitment plan and how to build and measure one.

An effective recruitment plan is a strategic blueprint for hiring, outlining responsibilities, timelines, processes, and tools. This document can help businesses manage the onboarding and interviewing process efficiently. Here are the benefits of having a recruitment plan.

   Ensures consistency and standardization

Recruitment plans help small businesses align internal teams with the business's strategic hiring initiatives. It clearly outlines the business’s needs, budgets, and processes, increasing transparency and accountability within the internal team. It helps businesses consistently adopt high-quality talent with a step-by-step guide for new roles. 

   Increases productivity and streamlines hiring

A recruitment plan streamlines the hiring process, reduces inefficiencies, and clarifies roles and responsibilities between hiring managers and recruiters. It accelerates time-to-hire, enhancing productivity as roles do not remain unfilled for too long.

   Enhances flexibility to leverage AI

The rapidly changing artificial intelligence (AI) landscape has pushed HR professionals and business leaders to understand the core capabilities of leveraging automation for HR-related work. As per Gartner’s research report, 79% of hiring managers want to leverage automation for more efficient recruiting, using technology like applicant tracking systems, chatbots, screening tools, and job description automation. [ 1 ]

Many small-and-midsize businesses have adopted automation to improve HR operations, including candidate screening and payroll distribution.  Seventy-two percent of Capterra’s 2023 HR Chatbot Survey * respondents claim to use chatbots to summarize or evaluate job applicant resumes or cover letters.

   Consistent development of talent pipeline

A well-formulated recruitment plan spaces out hiring appropriately, giving each role its time and focus to stay on schedule. As a talent pipeline is constantly developing, new candidates enter your ecosystem, helping the HR team maintain a list of quality applicants who can be reached when a new job opening exists.

   Adapt to market trends

A recruitment plan helps mitigate changing marking conditions as the pendulum swings between the employers’ market and the job seeker. It clearly lists all the salary and budget expectations and goals so teams can remain accountable during fluctuating market conditions.

Developing a well-structured recruitment plan can help your business speed up hiring-related processes. Here’s how you can create one for your business.

1. Define your position needs

The first step to creating a recruitment plan is determining what roles must be filled. While some departments might have urgent needs, others could allow you more flexibility in hiring time. You may use workforce management tools to identify skills gaps, giving you a more robust picture of your hiring needs.

2. Set hiring goals

Establish clear hiring goals across the company, departments, and individual teams. Also, build in ideal timelines for priority hires and stagger hiring as needed throughout the year to mitigate cash flow.

3. Set your recruitment budget

Research industry benchmarks to create an estimated annual recruiting budget. Your planned hiring budget should include additional costs for candidate sourcing, onboarding, and technology costs for applicant tracking systems , communication hubs, and other employee-hiring-related needs.

If you have seasonal hiring needs, your recruitment budget should be flexible and adjusted according to the business’s demands. 

4. Identify target audience to craft job descriptions

Analyze your top performers to asses the ideal candidate's qualities. Clearly list your requirements for candidates’ formal education, certifications, or technical skills. Identifying a defined target audience for your candidate search will help you craft a job description that communicates the roles and responsibilities to be handled by the hired candidate.

Use AI-enabled tools to craft compelling job descriptions, adopting inclusive language to help recruit a more diverse workforce.

5. Choose your recruiting methods and channels

Consider varied platforms to post your job description, including social media channels and job portals. You may check multiple job portals’ metrics and reviews to assess the quality of candidates they can help you find. Sponsoring or featuring your job posting on specific job portals can enhance visibility, reducing the time-to-hire.

You can also consider hiring staffing agencies to help source candidates on your behalf, saving you time and resources for other important tasks.

6. Screen candidates

Once you begin sorting through resumes and identifying qualifying applicants, it’s time for screening interviews. These are typically quick, informal chats done by a recruiter or HR manager to assess the applicant’s basic qualifications, communication skills, salary range, and overall job fit. Candidate screening helps you create a more filtered list of top candidates that you can send to the hiring manager for detailed interviews.

7. Conduct interviews

Candidates who pass the initial screening are passed on to the next stage, where the hiring manager conducts detailed interviews with other hiring team members. Establishing an interview panel for each role is important so that every candidate speaks with the same individuals. To get a well-rounded picture of the candidate, each interviewer should focus on different topics, including their technical skills, go-to-market strategy, and work ethic.

8. Make an offer

Once interviews are concluded, the hiring manager can make an offer and negotiate with the right candidate. The staffing agency will complete this step if you hire one. Create a formal offer letter, including details about the hired candidate’s salary, annual bonus, perks, and benefits. A well-crafted offer letter helps you build a healthy relationship with the employee right in the beginning.

9. Onboard the new employee

You can start the onboarding process after the candidate has accepted the offer and signed the formal offer letter. You can now establish a start date and begin working on the transition or onboarding materials. This might include product training, documentation, administrative tasks, and company policies knowledge sharing.

After you’ve hired several candidates using a planned recruitment process, you should set aside some time to measure its success rate. Here are some questions to consider when checking if your recruitment plan needs adjustments. 

Was the recruitment process positive for the hired candidates?

Are hiring managers interviewing an appropriate number of people?

What is the average time-to-hire?

What were the reasons for candidates denying offers?

What recruitment channels or partners are performing the best?

Is any technology being used helping or hurting the overall recruiting process?

Are you meeting diversity metrics?

An effective recruitment plan should set your business to find the right candidates, move them through the interview and assessment process, and make a strong offer to your top candidate in less time.

Set up your recruitment plan

A structured recruitment plan is key for small business leaders and hiring managers. It helps streamline the hiring process and attract high-quality candidates who can drive the business toward success. Following the above-mentioned steps to craft a recruitment plan will help you devise the right hiring strategy and execute it to attract qualified candidates.

Check out the below resources to learn more about hiring and recruiting for your small business:

Top Recruiting Agencies

Are HR Chatbots Ready for the Spotlight?

Hiring the Right Talent

Methodology

*Capterra’s 2023 HR Chatbot Survey was conducted in March 2023 among 300 HR employees at U.S. companies to understand how they're leveraging chatbots in their current job.

2023 Recruiting Innovations Bullseye Report , Gartner

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About the author.

Katherine McDermott is a product marketing expert in B2B technology and SaaS.

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How to Create a Recruitment Plan in 6 Easy Steps

Keeping a company brimming with the best talent requires a detailed recruitment plan , one that can be adapted quickly to internal and external changes.

Follow the steps below to create a steady flow of job candidates and help your business kick up a storm in your industry.

TL;DR – Key Takeaways

• What is a recruitment plan exactly? It’s the strategy that the hiring team uses to carry out recruitment. Done well, it can help the team be more effective and impactful business-wide!
• Wondering when you need this plan? Lot’s of occasions could warrant a recruitment plan. Think annual planning or a big change in your industry, for instance.
• The benefits of a successful recruitment plan range from working smarter and reducing hiring costs to freeing up your time for core tasks and more.
• Finally, we share the 6 steps you need to create a kickass recruitment plan that’ll help HR align smoothly with the business and contribute to impactful change.
• P.s. Within every recruitment plan, you’ll find a candidate screening and assessing requirements. For a modern, automated, all-in-one skills testing solution, check out Toggl Hire today.

What is a strategic recruitment plan?

A recruitment plan outlines a company’s approach to recruitment and how it will implement its recruitment processes most effectively. The plan should include all the relevant details required for making strategic future hires, such as hiring goals, procedures to follow, and the hiring budget, for example.

A good recruitment strategy will align with the organization’s goals to ensure the hiring manager is contributing to company growth and helping to manage any organizational changes.

Are Recruitment plan and Recruitment strategy the same thing?

While a company typically develops its recruitment strategy and recruitment plan in parallel, the terms refer to different components of the recruitment process. The easiest way to tell the two apart is to think of the recruitment strategy as the overarching, high-level document that covers the ‘ what ‘ and the ‘ why ‘, while the recruitment plan is more of a step-by-step detailed roadmap that outlines the ‘ how ‘ and ‘ when ‘.

When is the best time to create a recruitment plan?

If you’re wondering whether your company needs a recruitment plan or can wait a while before developing one, consider whether you’re in one of the situations listed below.

Annual planning — is your organization about to undergo its annual planning process? At that stage, hiring managers have an important role to play in aligning hiring strategy with the company goals during this process.

Organizational changes — if your company is growing , starting a new initiative or has seasonal hiring needs, a recruitment strategy will be essential in attracting quality candidates for your talent pipeline .

High turnover rate — if the business is losing it’s talent too fast, recruitment plans can help patch up any gaps in the workforce and ensure the best approach to improve retention .

External changes — a big change in your industry or shifts in the market could mean that your business needs to adapt its recruitment strategy to continue attracting the best candidates.

Why does our team need a recruitment plan?

A recruitment plan is your guiding star when it comes to predicting and meeting the company’s staffing needs. It provides a framework for all stakeholders that keeps everyone aligned and working towards the same deliverables in a structured, effective way.

With a detailed hiring plan, your team can streamline the hiring process and reduce recruitment costs . But the benefits don’t end there.

Recruitment Planning: 5 Key Benefits

The benefits of creating recruitment plans.

Next, let’s dive a little deeper into what hr professionals, businesses, and applicants will get out of making planned recruiting efforts.

Smarter decision-making

Hiring teams need to work effectively and make smarter decisions throughout the talent acquisition and onboarding process.

By working with tools such as a recruiting funnel and modern recruitment software and using metrics throughout the process, the team can continually make accurate data-driven decisions to improve their output.

Delivering a streamlined hiring process

A recruitment plan can help recruiters work strategically , resulting in a continually improving hiring process that saves time and enables more focus on high-priority tasks.

Providing an engaging candidate experience

A well-executed recruitment plan improves the overall candidate experience . Treating applicants like professionals will likely enhance your company or department’s reputation and increase the likelihood of attracting top talent.

Meeting specialized hiring goals

The hiring team can include and adapt its recruitment strategies to reach specific hiring targets , such as diversity and inclusion goals , and the right candidates.

Reducing hiring costs

By continually updating and improving the hiring plan, the team can optimize metrics like Cost-per-Hire and more easily stick to the recruitment budget .

Boosts adaptability to internal and external changes

Hiring managers can predict and adapt to any internal changes , like a new office location, or external changes , like an economic crisis, to ensure an optimal workforce at all times.

Ok. Now that we’ve explored the benefits of a recruitment plan, let’s get you started on the right steps for how to develop a recruitment plan successfully.

6 steps for creating a successful recruitment plan

Keeping the hiring team and other stakeholders on the same page with proper planning will ensure everyone’s work complements each other, and enable you to make smarter decisions faster .

Plus, you can provide feedback quickly to queries from those who need to know (and those who are just sticking their nose in. 😉 )

Following these 6 steps will help you prepare for your recruitment planning period.

#1 – Setting recruitment goals

A recruiting plan means nothing without including specific goals . Rather like building a house without an architectural diagram, it could result in things going horribly wrong! That’s why your hiring team needs to set short-term and long-term goals , to ensure that your recruiting plans are set for success.

Note : It’s essential to define and assign a metric for each goal too. Without metrics, you won’t know how well you’re achieving your goals, or whether you’re lagging on some of them.

Why separate long-term and short-term goals?

Short-term and long-term recruitment goals are typically a bit different. While a short-term goal may be to update your career webpage, a long-term goal could be to improve the diversity of your candidate pool.

Over the hiring timeline, it can help a lot to split goals into short-term and long-term targets. Here’s why:

Improved team focus — so your team can more easily prioritize tasks, know how to best manage resources, and keep a focus on immediate needs and future goals.

Ensure a feasible plan — by marking goals as either short-term or long-term, the team can rest assured that not everything must happen immediately. And prevent a feeling of mental overwhelm.

Facilitate continuous improvement — short-term goals are the best opportunity for testing new ideas or recruiting tactics, like trying out a new candidate screening tool. Once you’ve established how effective the initiative was, you can adjust it so it delivers long-term benefits, like improving the candidate experience .

Examples of short-term vs long-term goals

#2 – identifying hiring needs.

Before you start planning your new hires, you need to know what skills and competencies the business will need over the next year. So, how do you evaluate and prioritize these hiring tasks?

High-priority needs could include things like analyzing the company’s annual goals and strategy to align recruitment planning and successfully complement the rest of the business. Or performing skills gap analysis to spot any skill gaps between the current workforce’s capabilities and the skills that you’ll need to have onboard in the long term.

While medium priority tasks could include evaluating your staff turnover rate to ensure sustainability and keeping a close eye on industry and workforce trends .

On the other hand, improving the collaboration between HR and other departments is a good example of a lower-priority hiring need .

Ok, but how do you know which roles to prioritize?

You can make your hiring activity choices based on factors like these below.

#3 – Setting your hiring budget

Think about the costs associated with these components of the hiring process to optimize your hiring budget (and put a smile on your hiring manager’s face 😊).

• Recruitment marketing — what you’re spending (and will spend) on advertising roles and improving your employer brand, including social media advertising, job posting, job boards and career events.

Recruitment technology — the tools your team uses to streamline the hiring process, such as chatbots, applicant tracking systems, and candidate relationship management ( CRM ) software.

Assessments — an online skills testing platform for screening applicants.

Interviewing costs — any costs incurred through in-person or video interviews.

Recruitment team salaries — the total salary cost for your team.

External recruiting — if you need the services of external recruitment agencies, perhaps for a new or niche role.

#4 – Attracting and sourcing the best talent

You need to get the word out through as many channels as possible to keep your recruitment funnel topped up with qualified candidates. Your sourcing methods are essential in attracting potential candidates for your job postings.

For the candidate selection process part of your recruiting plan, you could include components like:

Defining your target candidate profiles — what skills and experience do they need for the role (and include this info in the job description ).

Updating your employer value proposition (EVP) — the EVP is what a company offers its employees in return for their work.

Recruitment events — including job fairs, conferences, and internship recruiting .

Managing candidate engagement — staying in touch with your candidate pool via email, social media or another medium.

Employee referral program — getting your employees to refer the great talent they know personally saves your team time.

Need some inspo on new approaches for hiring new employees?

#5 – Streamlining your recruitment process

It’s possible that not all parts of your hiring strategy are as effective as they could be. There may be some methods or tools the team has used for too long that need updating, for instance.

Here are a few tips to help you refresh your recruitment process :

Revamp your application process . Consider letting candidates apply via skills tests instead of CVs, for instance!

Set clear evaluation criteria , such as clearly defined job requirements .

Craft clear and engaging job descriptions that include all the details a candidate needs to know to see if they’re a good match.

Deliver an effective screening process . Your team can save time by automating screening tasks.

Conduct structured interviews using set interview questions and techniques, and skills tests results to inform your interview prep and guide your interview questions.

Use the right candidate assessment tools and homework assignments to screen whether applicants have the right skills.

#6 – Analyzing your recruiting plan

The best way to assess the efficacy of your recruiting plan, and continually improve it, is by using a recruitment funnel (a framework that helps you organize, manage and enhance every stage of the recruiting process).

With a recruitment funnel, you can use recruitment metrics , such as Time to hire, Quality of New Hire made, and Cost per hire, to determine how well you’re doing at each stage of the funnel.

Along with leveraging the findings from your metrics, you can also receive and implement any feedback from candidates and hiring managers.

Managing the latest recruitment trends and technology

Staying up-to-date with industry trends and best practices will ensure hiring teams operate efficiently and help the organization retain a competitive edge . Luckily, this is where technology comes to the rescue.

For instance, think about the major industry shift towards skills-based hiring practices. Harvard Business Review shared this recently about how skills-based hiring is on the rise:

Many companies are moving away from degree requirements and toward skills-based hiring , especially in middle-skill jobs, which is good for both workers and employers. HBR

And when hiring teams have the right recruitment tools, their tasks become easier, and the technology saves them time. So, don’t waste time rebuilding everything in-house when you can plug and play an all-in-one skills platform at affordable prices .

Juste loves investigating through writing. A copywriter by trade, she spent the last ten years in startups, telling stories and building marketing teams. She works at Toggl Hire and writes about how businesses can recruit really great people.

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Building a Strategic Hiring Plan for Your Business

Saying there are a million moving pieces to your strategic hiring plan is hyperbolic.

However, it’s no exaggeration to say ongoing coordination and optimization are a must to maintain a well-oiled (read: predictable, repeatable, and scalable) hiring machine that converts high-quality candidates into high-performing employees who help your business grow.

Though the U.S. and international economies are still in a state of flux and employers — likely including your business — are downsizing (or rightsizing, depending on who you ask) or simply pausing on hiring, it’s critical to be ready for when hiring eventually picks back up.

That means it’s vital for you, as your org’s talent leader, to ensure your recruiters are ready to roll when new requisitions start pouring in again.

“Given how hard it will be to find talent in the coming years, you need to ensure your hiring machine remains solid, enabled, and ready to fire once we get back to business as usual,” SocialTalent CEO Johnny Campbell told SHRM.

And there’s no better place to start with your preparation than optimizing your existing strategic hiring plan (or tearing it down and starting from square one) to ensure your recruiters are set up to succeed with their sourcing, nurturing, and interviewing efforts post-downturn.

How to create a strategic hiring plan (and execute it with ease using an ATS + CRM solution)

Revisiting language in job descriptions. Tinkering with nurture campaign templates and cadences. Cleaning up your candidate database. Assessing your source quality.

There are many seemingly minor tasks that, when tackled in tandem by your entire talent acquisition team, can lead to more seamless and systematic recruitment processes (e.g., the ability to evaluate, archive, and advance leads with increasingly greater speed and efficiency).

While they take on this behind-the-scenes work, you need to focus on the bigger picture:

Implementing a more strategic hiring plan that leads to offers extended to qualified candidates and the employment of premier prospects who can fill key roles and satisfy all hiring stakeholders.

This proven three-step approach can help you formulate and execute said plan.

1) “Rip and replace” your legacy applicant tracking system (and ASAP)

If you already researched the talent acquisition technology marketplace to find a top-tier solution that empowers your team to work smarter, not harder (like you had to with your previous ATS), move on to the next step below.

If you’re still stuck with an old-school ATS system that deters your team from being as quick, efficient, and productive as you need to be to achieve your respective recruiting-related KPIs, it’s time to overhaul your TA tech stack.

In short, without a best-in-class recruitment platform, your recruiting staff can’t :

• Store all info tied to ideal candidates they’ve engaged over time, due to the lack of a centralized system of record that features dynamic profiles for each prospect
• Easily access and review said profiles in just a few simple clicks to resurface relevant leads (based on their profile qualifications) for both active and upcoming roles
• Analyze intricate elements of their day-to-day TA work and long-term recruitment efforts through “auto-updated” dashboards with easy-to-parse data visualizations
• Get a holistic view of all pipeline activities, including leads’ progression through each recruiter’s individual funnel and prospects’ nurture messaging engagement

Entrata invested in LeverTRM to solve exactly this issue. The software company’s previous applicant tracking system was “rigid” and slowed down all TA processes.

That’s no longer the case, since onboarding our complete ATS + CRM solution.

“As a tech company, you’re only as good as the people you hire , so a lot depends on your talent processes,” said Entrata Director of Talent Acquisition Emma Corbett.

“We knew LeverTRM would help us succeed,” Emma added. “It’s designed for recruiters, it’s intuitive, and it’s going to make our jobs much easier.”

2) Work with leadership, hiring managers, and HR on annual hiring planning

With the proper (read: effective, user-friendly, powerful) recruiting software in place for your entire TA team, your next step to create a hiring plan that’s more impactful for your business is to work with all other hiring stakeholders (and often) .

Executive decision-makers

Your CEO and CRO lay out lofty company goals each year. It’s your job as a talent leader to speak with your executive team about said said goals

The more questions you ask and clarification you request, the better your instruction to your recruiters will be and the more you can show your e-staff you’ll implement a hiring plan that aligns with their desired headcount growth outcomes .

Human resources leaders

Your CHRO will help you construct a hiring plan template based on these goals and, more specifically, the hiring needs of each department and location.

For instance, your HR leader will have distinct insight (from their team’s HCM/HRIS) regarding where skills gaps exist company-wide — data that can inform the places and types of candidates your team will need to source .

People/hiring managers

Your hiring managers want to ensure their time isn’t wasted (e.g., having to evaluate what turn out to be mostly poor-fit prospects advanced by your sourcers).

Learning what they deem is an “ideal” candidate can only help your talent acquisition team’s collective efforts to identity, engage, and advance only top talent in the recruiting cycle .

Moreover, these chats can also improve the hiring strategies developed for each business unit.

3) Continually optimize your recruiting strategy by leveraging your TA data

Analytics powers that most successful talent acquisition teams and strategies today.

Specifically, it’s what can enable you to make data-driven “micro” modifications to distinct facets of your daily recruitment activities and “macro” changes to your strategic hiring plan.

• Does your recruitment marketing data shows social media ads promoting open roles are missing the mark in terms of click-through rate and application conversions? Adjust your keyword targeting and/or try new channels.
• Does your job board data shows job postings on certain career communities (LinkedIn, Indeed, Glassdoor, Wellfound, etc.) aren’t getting the traction you anticipated? Put some marketing spend to amplify those listings’ reach.
• Does your diversity recruiting data shows few members of certain underrepresented and marginalized groups are included in your existing talent pool? Reexamine the efficacy of your current go-to sources and test new avenues.

Lever customer Verafin understands the value of leveraging data tied to engaged, archived, and hired candidates and its full-cycle recruiting process.

The TA team at the financial crime management software provider has sped up reporting by using the in-depth, dynamic dashboards in Visual Insights.

This frees up time to for Verafin’s recruiters to tackle other crucial tasks — and enables its talent leader to make strategic, data-backed adjustments to its hiring plan .

“Before [LeverTRM], I would have to manually create all of our reporting and put it into a slide deck,” said Verafin Team Lead Recruitment Heidi Murphy. “But, with LeverTRM, it’s easy. I can even slice and dice the data by type of hire, area of business, or location.”

Learn all about LeverTRM, our native talent acquisition suite, and how our solution can help you develop a more strategic recruitment plan and smarter hiring process.

Further reading

How to drive greater hiring efficiency in your company, overcoming generational stereotypes in recruiting: 7 lessons learned, 15 integrated recruiting tools & how to choose them.

How to build a recruitment plan, step-by-step

• Recruitment Strategy

Job reqs are boom or bust, so you’re either scrambling to cover everything or worried about proving your team’s value. Every hiring manager has different expectations on compensation and time to hire, and when they change their mind, you always feel like the last to know.

To break the cycle, what you need is a robust recruitment planning process. A full recruitment plan should include an agreed-upon workforce plan, hiring approach, and marketing strategy. If you don’t have time for the full process, you can also do a quick-and-lite version if needed, though we recommend going through all the steps eventually.

A proactive recruitment plan is the first step to becoming a true strategic partner in the organization. You can get ahead of hiring manager requests, set clear expectations, and demonstrate how critical talent is for achieving the broader goals of the business.

We’ve asked our own recruitment team, as well as experienced recruiters from a range of industries, how they do recruitment planning. Here’s their step-by-step guide, along with the real templates they use every day as part of their recruitment strategy. 

Get your free recruitment planning template

Step 1: assess the situation, collect the headcount plan.

Ask each team to share the roles they plan to open this year, and how each role supports their team’s annual goals. For example, this can help you understand which roles must be hired by a certain date, and which roles are more flexible.

You need to understand what the company is trying to accomplish, how that rolls down to [each] department, and then how they see all these hires contributing to that. Mike Bradshaw, PHR Head of Talent Acquisition, Pinpoint

Review internal and external materials

Start by auditing your core metrics. Check internal reports and your ATS’s reporting for core hiring metrics, including:

• Time to hire
• Time to fill
• Average time in each interview stage

Candidate attraction

• Hires by source
• Candidates by source
• Offer acceptance rates
• Cost per hire
• Actual vs. budget
• Net Promoter Score
• Performance after hire
• Retention rates
• Candidates by demographic groups (race, gender, age, disability, veteran status, etc.)
• Hires by demographic groups
• Conversion rates on specific jobs by demographic groups

Then move on to qualitative materials, such as:

• Feedback from candidates (surveys, Glassdoor reviews, coffees with new hires)
• Feedback from hiring managers and leaders (surveys, performance reviews)
• Internal notes on what has and hasn’t worked before

And take a look at your current candidate experience, including:

• Careers site
• Job descriptions
• Communications sent to candidates

Ask for feedback

Have an open-ended conversation with your stakeholders about how they think hiring is going. Consider requesting feedback from:

• Recent hires
• Hiring managers
• Department leaders
• HR and recruiters 

Where do they see untapped potential? Where do they want to see improvements? What attracted them to the company and what was their candidate experience like?

Identify opportunities

As you review all this information, look for signs of issues and potential opportunities. It’s also helpful to write down your baseline in each area so you can track improvements over time. 

Typically, the opportunities you find will fall across three areas: Talent sourcing, employer brand, or new hire onboarding.

Finding talent: Are there untapped opportunities?

• Channels that work and don’t work, untested networks or tactics
• Channels that are delivering volume but aren’t delivering quality
• Channels that have delivered quality, but aren’t getting the attention they deserve

Branding: Are you selling your company?

• Is your employee value proposition (EVP) strong? How can it be improved?
• Is your messaging and branding cohesive across your careers site , branded emails , and job postings? 
• Is your EVP included in each job post?
• What are candidates saying about you in candidate surveys and review sites like Glassdoor?

Onboarding: What happens after a candidate accepts your offer?

• Are systems in place to give HR what they need to set up new hires for success?
• Is your onboarding process streamlined? 
• What’s the feedback from new hires and hiring managers about the onboarding process?

Step 2: Develop the headcount plan

Now that you have context, data, and feedback on previous hires, you can start planning for the future. The more an organization invests time into these exercises, the easier and more likely it will be to meet recruiting goals on time and within budget. 

Understand team goals and priorities at a high level

Organizational goals are driven by your employees. Meet with senior leadership and department heads to discuss company goals for the year. Is this a year of growth, or efficiency? Are there certain departments or regions we want to develop? Answering these questions will help your team to be aligned with leadership on the hiring mission and messaging. 

Design dream staff plans—then prioritize

Give department heads the opportunity to design their ideal team to reach that year’s goals, budget notwithstanding. This will grant you greater visibility into their vision for the department, and what skills they want on the team. 

Then, help department heads refine each job description and prioritize each role, based on actual needs and realistic expectations. Some roles may be less vital this year, or could be solved without a full-time hire. In these conversations, you can help shape the plan for each department, manage expectations around hiring, and avoid frustration later on. 

Get on the same page about levels

Internal alignment on levels ensures your hiring plan is both competitive and equitable. In a competitive labor market where remote work opens up more opportunities for employees, it is even more important to offer the right rate to hire the right person at the right level. 

At the same time, you want to avoid overpaying or overpromising. Not only will this impact your budget, but it could contribute to internal equity issues, which disproportionately affect women and people of color . 

Outline what is required at each level and define salary bands to mitigate the risk of some employees being unfairly valued. If it becomes harder to hire people at the right level because of pay, then it may be time to reassess trends in the market and adjust compensation levels accordingly.

Tip: Salary transparency attracts quality candidates. On Pinpoint, companies that include salaries in their job descriptions move 15% more applicants to the interview stage

Depending on the size of your organization, there are two ways to approach leveling: 

• Uniform leveling: Everyone across the company follows the same track (associate, manager, director, etc.)
• Functional leveling: Each department has a specialized and unique track. For example, the marketing team may have associates, managers, directors, etc., while the engineering team has engineer Is, engineer IIs, staff engineers, senior staff engineers, etc. 

Determine what makes sense for your organization based on your size and complexity. If developing levels from scratch, the process may take upwards of 9 months, but it will give your whole organization greater clarity.

Plan for backfills and promotions

In addition to new hires, you’ll also need to plan for people who are leaving their roles to minimize the impact of losing skills or capacity on the team. To anticipate backfills, consider past year attrition and industry benchmarks along with current economic factors (growth in the sector, recession, etc.). 

Then, look at your current team to understand who is at risk of leaving their role due to performance, attrition, or promotion. Meet with managers to understand who is on track to be promoted and when so you can plan for their backfill. Be conservative with your budget and resourcing plans so you aren’t surprised when the needs arise. 

Set realistic and fair budgets

With defined level expectations and a conservative hiring plan, it will be easier to set budgets for new hire compensation. To stay on top of industry trends and remain competitive, we recommend these resources:

• Comprehensive.io

Include a budget for the resourcing you will need to reach hiring goals. It can be difficult to anticipate how challenging it will be to hire certain roles, and your talent team may be impacted by attrition as well. It’s possible you will need to increase the capacity of your talent team with new hires or external support from contract recruiters, recruitment agencies, or recruitment process outsourcing provider (RPO).

Any budget proposal will inevitably result in pushback. By working through these steps, your plan should already be aligned with company priorities, but you can make your case even stronger by:

• Demonstrating past recruitment cost per hire and recruiting budgets as a reference, and reiterating how the organization wants to improve this year
• Leveraging leaders who are most invested in making good, fast hires to advocate for the budget
• Using research (benchmarks and models) to illustrate estimated return on investment of those hires for the company 

An iterative approach

A workforce plan will set you up for success, but won’t be set in stone. Shifting priorities, feedback from hiring managers and candidates, and macroeconomic factors will alter your plan over time. Regularly report on data, solicit feedback from stakeholders, and realign on goals to stay on top of these changes. How often you should check in on this plan will depend on your team size and existing processes, but here is an ideal cadence: 

• Weekly: Meet with hiring managers while you have active roles open
• Monthly: Meet with department heads if you are hiring for their teams
• Quarterly: Meet with all department heads to review goals, along with potential backfills and promotions

Step 3: Set realistic timelines

Manage expectations for your team and increase the likelihood of hiring people on schedule by setting estimated timelines. Outline the process for hiring managers and any other stakeholders to ensure they know what is required of them, like submitting requisitions in a timely fashion and allocating time in their schedules for interviews. When recruiters and hiring managers know what actions they need to take and when, your team will be able to respond quickly when strong applications come in. 

To set timelines, refer to historical hiring data along with industry benchmarks . Keep in mind that other economic factors may impact timelines. For example, post COVID-19 and the Great Resignation, more people have reevaluated their priorities and found that they could find better options that fit their values , meaning employers have had to act fast to land top talent. 

For hiring managers, the wait always feels long. Be upfront and provide a detailed timeline so they can see what is involved in the hiring process and feel assured that work is being done.

Example timeline from the Pinpoint Recruiting Team:

• Day 1: Job is posted
• Gather initial results from job posts and adjust accordingly (title, salary, location, etc.)
• Fine tune alignment on required skills and background with real world profiles
• Ramp up sourcing and screening
• Initial screening conversations with 5-10 candidates per week
• Hiring manager interviews with 3-5 qualified candidates per week
• Continue to fine tune alignment on job post and target profile
• Continue to source as needed to meet benchmarks for qualified candidates
• At Pinpoint, most roles can be filled in 60 days or less (time to accepted offer). Executive (Director and above), technical, or highly specialized roles could take up to 90 days to get to an accepted offer.

At Pinpoint, we dedicate a section of our internal communication tool to share documentation on the recruitment strategy and approach so the whole team has visibility. We also share reports from our ATS to keep hiring managers and senior leaders up-to-date on the status of open roles. 

If you still receive pushback, explain the value of having recruiters conduct a thorough, high-quality screen. With more time to vet applications, recruiters can protect hiring managers’ time and only forward the best candidates. If hiring managers become the bottlenecks, here are tips for staying on pace without adding more work to their plates:

• Ask hiring managers to share a sample of CVs or LinkedIn profiles that reflect the ideal candidate and align on what “great” looks like 
• Reserve interview blocks on interviewer calendars in advance 
• Bring in additional interviewers for various parts of the recruitment process
• Utilize automatic scheduling in your ATS to allow for one-click booking
• Align on the priority of roles to expedite those that are most immediately needed

Step 4: Launch the search

Search kickoffs are about identifying what kind of candidate you would like to hire, how you’ll get their attention, and how you’ll keep the search on track. 

Start by getting detailed information about what the hiring manager actually wants and needs via a Requisition form. It’s most helpful if they share this in advance so you can review it before the first conversation with them. You can then verify and expand upon this information when you meet.

While it can be tempting to publish open roles as quickly as possible, it’s worth investing time to customize job postings so they communicate your Employee Value Proposition and attract the right talent . This will allow you to bring in qualified, interested candidates more quickly. 

This also applies to marketing the role—collaborate with the hiring manager to think beyond your typical go-to job boards and identify if there’s anything new or different you can try for this particular search. 

Schedule an initial kickoff meeting with the hiring manager to establish your processes for working together. Identify a day and time to meet each week to check in on the search. Confirm the interview process early on so that everyone knows what to expect and this information can be shared with candidates, ideally in the job posting. 

Step 5: Coordinate the recruitment process

Once the search has started, recruiters will be overseeing a lot, including hiring managers. For them, hiring is essential, but it amounts to just a small percentage of their day. An ATS should make it easier for recruiters to keep the process moving without adding excessive work for hiring managers. Here’s advice from some of our customers on how they’ve been able to increase efficiency up to 70%, in part by collaborating better with hiring managers:

Hiring manager portals

The New York Public Library has about 400 managers who are involved with hiring, in addition to their many other responsibilities. The NYPL team set up a streamlined hiring manager view that made it easy for their team to comment, tag, rate, and share feedback on candidates all within Pinpoint. 

Hiring managers now have greater visibility and a more active role in the process, resulting in greater outcomes for everyone.

It’s really allowed us to coach our hiring managers to be better at creating a great experience for candidates. Craig Senecal Senior Director of Employee Experience, NYPL

Interview scheduling

Franklin Electric hires across a complex and international organization. Balancing people’s schedules and time zones can be a huge challenge. For them, the best solution was to find an ATS with automated interview scheduling . Hiring managers are thrilled to have the access and functionality to fill roles faster, without having to wait on HR.

It’s been a game-changer in terms of the impact and how easy it is. Amanda Hecht Corporate HR Manager, Franklin Electric

Icario is always looking for more data behind their hiring decisions, especially to keep track of their diversity and inclusion goals. After implementing Pinpoint, they began using candidate scorecards to standardize the feedback process and make more informed decisions. If your ATS doesn’t have built-in scorecard functionality, you can use this manual score sheet template .

It’s been really cool to see the type of metrics that we get, or that we can even get metrics in the first place! Rachel Todd Senior Talent Acquisition Specialist, Icario

Step 6: Report on progress

To track team goals, you’ll want to get a quick snapshot every week (or more likely everyday) of whether your search is on or off track. Your ATS should be your go-to source for data, with reports and dashboards that allow you to calculate key metrics. 

In some systems, you may need to create or download a report to get this information. If all else fails, you can also manually track this data outside your ATS (e.g. Google Sheets). 

Top 5 metrics to track during a search:

• # Days Open
• Average Number of Daily Applications
• # Candidates in Each Stage
• # Candidates Who Reached Each Stage (aka Historical Activity)
• Conversion Rates (aka Ratios)

These daily or weekly numbers are most useful when compared against benchmarks. You can establish benchmarks based on your own organization’s historical data or public information about the performance of organizations similar to yours. These benchmarks will vary based on industry, company brand recognition, company size, location, level of specialization, management level, and recruiter experience. 

Example: Benchmarks for Days Open

• By 21 days open, should be hitting goals for weekly candidates sourced, screened, and interviewed
• By 45 days open (for non-technical roles), should have 2-4 strong candidates in final stages
• By 60 days open (for technical roles), should have 2-4 strong candidates in final stages

Example: Benchmarks for Candidates in Each Stage

• 25-50 candidates receiving messages from sourcing outreach per week
• 5-10 candidates interviewing with the recruiter per week
• 3-5 candidates interviewing with the hiring manager per week

If you find yourself struggling to meet benchmarks as the search goes along, continue to revisit and ask questions about your sourcing and marketing plans. 

• Do you need to try new channels or new strategies to reach more candidates with the target profile?
• Has the target profile evolved?
• Are there enough people who fit your target profile to realistically fill the job in a reasonable amount of time? (E.g. if you’re looking for someone with niche technical skills within close proximity to a physical office, there may simply not be enough people in that target profile to find someone without providing relocation.)
• Should you try different messaging in outreach to candidates or in the job posting?
• Are you and the hiring manager both clear and aligned on what good and great candidates look like? 

Step 7: Improve year-over-year

The only constant in recruiting is change. Once you’ve devised your plan, be prepared to return to it repeatedly, iterating and improving on your recruitment strategy as you learn. 

With a hiring tracker and reports showing key metrics, your team will be more aware of what is working and can pivot quickly if needed. When you embed reporting into recruitment, your team will be able to see the forest through the trees and have more control over the process. 

And it’s never too late to start. Even if you are beginning this process mid-year, by the time you are planning for the next fiscal year, you will have more documented information to drive decision-making. 

By working directly with senior leadership, department heads, and hiring managers, you will also have greater visibility of the organization and more advocates on your side. With each subsequent year, you will be able to improve efficiency, collaboration, and the candidate experience. 

A final word of advice

As you’re going through the process, “ask a ton of questions and be selfish with your time,” says our own Head of Talent, Mike Bradshaw. When he took over the role—as the company’s first dedicated talent leader—he used a recruitment plan similar to the one outlined here to understand and prepare for upcoming hiring needs. 

Every one of us that's involved in recruitment—from leadership all the way down to individualized hiring managers—has improved the way that we think about talent as a result. Tom Hacquoil CEO Pinpoint

To get that kind of trust from the leadership team, don’t worry about asking a silly question; just focus on making sure you get all the information you need.

“Some people are sort of timid about asking questions, or asking them again, or asking for more time,” says Mike. It’s natural to want to look confident and autonomous, especially if you’re taking over a new role. 

“But then you end up making a lot of assumptions, and you might start running with something and find it doesn’t work out, and then you have to take a step back,” warns Mike. “Ask all the tough questions. Really try to understand what’s going on, good or bad.”

Further reading

Inbound recruiting vs. outbound recruiting, programmatic recruitment advertising: a recruiter’s guide.

Ready to get started?

How to Create a Hiring Process in 5 Simple Steps

Scaling a business requires top-level talent. 

To find and retain the right people, you need an effective recruiting, hiring, and onboarding process.

Any holes or gaps in this process can be costly—leading to high employee turnover and unfilled positions.

But once you’ve nailed the hiring process, you can scale with ease. You’ll quickly fill open jobs and retain staff for the long haul. 

5 Steps to Create a Hiring Process

This guide will walk you through the steps required to create an effective hiring process for your business.

• Sign up for recruiting software
• Customize your recruiting pipeline
• Create a new job
• Qualify the best candidates
• Hiring and onboarding

The Easy Parts of Creating a Hiring Process

Finding qualified candidates is something that most hiring managers struggle with. But this is actually relatively easy if you’re using the right tools. 

Manually submitting open positions to different job boards is time-consuming and ineffective. Instead, you should be taking advantage of modern hiring tools like recruiting software. 

Recruiting software lets you blast open jobs to multiple job boards simultaneously and helps qualify candidates automatically. So you can spend less time sorting through resumes and more time dealing directly with people who actually fit the position. 

This platform takes a significant burden off of your hiring managers. You can post open positions to 200+ job boards with a single click. Workable makes it easy for you to find qualified candidates with employee referrals, AI-powered sourcing, and more.

It’s essentially a one-stop-shop for all of your hiring needs. The software has been used to hire more than 1.5 million employees by over 27,000 companies. 

For organizations with occasional hiring needs, Workable starts at $149 per month. The base plan includes e-sign, offer letters, 200+ job boards, AI sourcing, integrations, and everything you need for an effective hiring process. If you need unlimited active jobs, the cost goes up.

The Difficult Parts of Creating a Hiring Process

While recruiting software can definitely make your life easier, there are still several challenges with creating a hiring process.

Finding qualified candidates is just one small step. From here, you still need to conduct interviews, which can sometimes be a challenge. Candidates that appear to be a good match on paper don’t always pass the interview, which is frustrating for hiring managers.

Even after you’ve found someone you want to hire, you could be competing with multiple companies sending job offers to the same candidate. So if your offer isn’t competitive or your benefits aren’t attractive, you may lose out on your top prospects. 

Assuming you’ve found a good match and they want to work for you, the initial onboarding and training period isn’t usually fun. Training is expensive, and you could be paying someone for several months who isn’t directly impacting the business just yet.

On top of all of this, you need to make sure you’re following labor laws, tax laws, and remaining compliant with all regulations. 

Step 1 – Sign Up For Recruiting Software

As previously mentioned, you can’t create an effective hiring process without the right tools. So getting signed up for a modern recruiting tool is the logical first step. 

For the purposes of this tutorial, we’re going to walk you through creating a hiring process with Workable . 

The steps will be the same no matter what tool you decide to use. But the dashboards and user interface will vary from platform to platform. 

Recognize Your Hiring Needs

You need to figure out how you’ll be hiring in the short-term and long-term alike. What’s your plan?

Companies looking to hire two or three candidates over the next year won’t have the same needs as a business hiring five to ten employees per month. 

Lots of recruiting tools have different solutions based on hiring volume. Here’s a closer look at Workable’s packages:

For infrequent hiring, the Starter plan is suitable for most businesses. It starts at $149 per month, and you can try it right now for free.

This is not some stripped-down essentials plan at all–you have access to everything you need to create an end-to-end hiring process. You’ll be able to position yourself well to attract the right candidates, track them through every step, collaborate with your team, and sign new hires quickly.

The annual plans, Standard and Premier, allow you to hire for as many jobs as you want.

Step 2 – Customize Your Recruiting Pipeline

Once you’ve solidified your hiring needs, it’s time to get organized with a recruiting pipeline. This step is often overlooked, but it’s arguably the most critical part of the process.

Your recruiting pipeline essentially sets you up for success with every remaining step of the hiring process. 

The idea here is to define exactly what happens from the minute you decide you must fill a position all the way through the official hire and onboarding. It ensures that the process is repeatable, and each candidate goes through the same stages.

For example, you won’t want to schedule an interview before reviewing the resumes and finding the right qualified candidates. For the interview process, maybe you want to have a quick phone call to screen candidates before scheduling a formal in-person or video interview. All of these rules can be defined in your hiring pipeline.

Here’s a basic example of recruiting pipeline we created in Workable:

To replicate this, head to Settings and then select Workflow from your Recruiting menu.

You can add new custom stages or change the order based on your unique hiring process as well. By default, every sourced candidate will go through the same recruiting pipeline.

While this might seem obvious to some, many companies start trying to recruit before nailing down their entire process. They will find themselves at odds with the needs of the hiring manager, the HR team, and the candidate if the process is not clear.

If you’re hiring at scale, you might want to create a different pipeline for various positions. For example, an executive-level position might involve a more rigorous hiring process than an entry-level job.

In addition to creating the steps of the pipeline, you’ll want to designate who is responsible for what parts of the process. For example, maybe your internal HR department (if not using an agency) is responsible for posting the job ad and screening resumes but the hiring manager for the role writes the actual job description and signs off on the shortlist of resumes to interview.

And the HR department may be responsible for scheduling interviews and doing the initial screening phone call but the hiring manager is present for all in-person interviews. Note who does what to keep the lines of communication clear. 

The pipeline should also include the steps of the interview process. How many interviews will there be? Who checks the candidate’s references? Who makes the final decision? Who sends the offer letter? And more.

Step 3 – Create a New Job

Now that your pipeline is set up, it’s time to fill your hiring needs. 

From your Workable dashboard, navigate to the Jobs menu and click the Create a New Job button.

Workable makes this process easy with its intuitive forms. Rather than starting from scratch, you can just simply fill in the job details it asks for.

The basics include:

Then you’ll go into greater detail with the job description.

Write a Job Description

The job description is one of the most important parts of your hiring process. It’s what your potential candidates will be reading when they decide whether or not to apply.

The description needs to be a balance between explaining the position but also marketing the company. You don’t want it to sound bland, boring, or too challenging for prospects. 

Include key areas of responsibility and any soft skills required to complete the job. The idea here is to be specific but not so ultra-specific that it turns away potential prospects. 

For example, in a sales manager position, you could include something like “ Managing a team of 5-7 inside sales reps.” It’s specific enough that the candidate knows what to expect without going into too much detail. 

If you’re stuck and drawing a blank on what to include, Workable has 1,000+ job description templates . 

Based on the title, Workable automatically pulls common responsibilities for that particular job. Then you can just select the ones that best fit the needs of your company and add your own. 

The job description needs to include additional details related to pay and employee benefits.

Rather than listing an exact salary or hourly wage, you can give a range that will appeal to a broader potential audience. Most candidates aren’t searching for an exact salary—they use a range filter on various job boards. 

Include additional qualifications in the description like experience level, required education, and other details.

The employee benefits section will help you recruit top-level talent as well. Everything from health insurance to 401(k) matching and free snacks in the break room is worth mentioning. If you have a space for bicycle parking in the office, include it in the benefits section of the job description.

Remember, a job description is meant to attract people to your role and your company, so add any perks and what makes working for you unique.

Share Open Positions Online

Next, you need to get your job out there to attract candidates. With a single click, Workable lets you publish open positions to 200+ job boards and social sites.

Workable’s AI recruiting tools will even suggest qualified candidates based on factors like your job description, skills, and location. 

You can even use Workable to create a branded careers page on your website. So job seekers can view open positions and apply directly from here as well.

To customize this page, go to Settings and select Careers Page from the Recruiting menu.

Step 4 – Qualify The Best Candidates

Candidate screening and qualification can be a bit intimidating. That’s why it’s so important to use recruiting software because the tool should automatically filter out unqualified applicants. 

With that said, there are still some additional steps you need to take here to narrow your options.

Review Applications

Some bad applications will still slip through the cracks. So you need to review all of the resumes by hand and narrow down your top picks. We like the idea of choosing five top candidates as a starting point. 

Depending on the size of your company, this can be completed by the hiring manager or the HR team. If you have a recruiting department or you’re using a third-party recruitment firm, they’ll handle this for you. This should be clarified in step two when you’re creating the pipeline.

Conduct Interviews

Every business has a different interview process. Some of you might just have one round of interviews, while others will have several.

In most cases, the initial interview is a one-on-one meeting between the applicant and the hiring manager. However, second rounds might involve other members of a hiring committee, other managers, or team members. 

You can conduct interviews on the phone, in person, or through video conference software—whatever works for you. 

One cool feature about Workable is that it has a built-in Zoom integration. You can enable this by navigating to the Integrations page of your Settings . 

So you can manage your interviews directly in Workable while limiting the number of third-party tools required. This is especially useful for businesses hiring remote employees. 

Check References

While it’s nice to trust people, you should still double-check some of the things your applicants tell you. It’s worth picking up the phone or writing an email to references they’ve provided. 

A simple “would you rehire this person?” is usually sufficient enough to get a feel for the former manager’s sentiment toward the applicant. Though for a more executive or key hire, a more in-depth conversation should take place.

In many cases, a quick reference check will just help you verify that the candidate didn’t lie on their application. 

Step 5 – Hiring and Onboarding

Once the interviews are over, you’ll likely have one or two top candidates to consider. But you need to make a final decision on the applicant you think will be the best fit for your company.

One common mistake hiring managers make here is notifying other applicants that they’ve been rejected too soon. Don’t do this quite yet. 

Wait until you’ve secured the candidate you want before telling other people they don’t have the job. Your number one candidate might reject the offer, so it’s good to have a backup option in this scenario.

Create an Offer Letter

To formally hire an employee, start by drafting an offer letter. Workable has offer letter templates built into the software, which makes this process easy.

Head to the Templates section of your Recruiting menu to get started. Then just select one of Workable’s offer letter templates and customize it to fit your needs.

As you can see, Workable has e-signature capabilities integrated into the platform. So you can send contracts and other attachments to the offer letter as well. 

To streamline your onboarding process, be sure to send everything the candidate needs to get started. Examples include:

• Non-disclosure agreements (NDAs)
• Employee handbooks
• Drug screening information
• Background consent forms
• Tax forms (W-4, I-9, etc.)
• Direct deposit forms

Sending all of this with the offer letter eliminates too much back and forth communication with the candidate. It helps you onboard them as quickly and painlessly as possible.

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Building an Effective Hiring Plan: A Step-by-Step Guide for Hiring Managers and Recruiters

• December 6, 2023

Hey there, I’m thrilled to share some gems from my own journey in the world of hiring.  This article will kick off a series where I discuss what it takes to run a great hiring process.  I’ll cover the essential skills and habits that I’ve gathered from the best hiring managers I’ve worked with, and through my own several decades of learning and experience. We’ll start by talking about hiring plans.

The Kick-off: Developing your hiring plan

Think of this step as a project kick off – you are going to explicitly identify the hiring team, process, and objectives upfront, so you are ready to focus on finding the best candidates possible and will have clarity when it comes to recognizing and pursuing the ideal candidate.  

This is an essential step that is often missed by people who are new to hiring.

1. Understand the Role

First things first, let’s talk about the job title and its core responsibilities.  I’ve found the more specific you are here, the easier it becomes later.  This step goes beyond drafting the job posting (which I’ll cover in a different piece).  

The goal here is to make sure you really, clearly understand the 2-3 essential characteristics about the job, so you can carry these expectations over into all other steps of the process – from search, to screening and even new-employee onboarding.  

The clearer and more specific your thinking is during this step, the easier it will be for you to recognize suitable candidates and gain conviction through the hiring process.  Be sure to cover all of the following points.

• Screen the job title: Ensure it reflects the roles importance and scope. 
• Detail core responsibilities: Link them directly to your organization’s goals 
• Define competencies:  What are the ideal behaviors this role requires?  This perspective is useful for discerning between two equally qualified people with similar skills and experience. 
• Impact expectations: How will an amazing candidate make your team better?  How about you personally?  Consider defining impact thresholds that separate a good candidate from a great candidate.

2. Determine Employee value proposition

Ask yourself, why would an “A” player want this job?  What is it about this job and team that can attract an “A” player, and cause them to stay long term?  Hiring and changing jobs is easier than ever these days, and so it is essential to have a compelling employee value proposition for every role you hire.

I often capture this in a short 1-2 sentence paragraph, with perhaps a few bullet points on the most compelling items.  Bonus points if your messaging is aligned to your professional social media presence and company website.

3. Evaluating Performance

• Identify KPIs:  Identify 2-3 measurable performance indicators.
• Set performance factors:  Identify your non-KPI driven expectations.

4. Compensation Strategy

5. The Interview Process

• Who is involved in the decision?
• How many interviews are planned? 
• What types of interviews? (single, panel, case study, etc) 
• Will there be any testing steps? (ie, behavior or technical) 

6. Timelines 

7. pulling it all together .

          – Job title           – core responsibilities           – required competencies           – impact expectations 2) Employee value proposition  3) Performance expectations with 2-3 measurable KPIs  4) Compensation defined 5) The interview process defined; and 6) The timelines including an end-date and time blocked out for 1st and 2nd interview rounds

8. Impact of technology  

  wrapping up.

This approach ensures a comprehensive and aligned hiring strategy and gives you the best chance of landing a superstar hire for your team. 

  Additional Resources

Also, if you want a comprehensive job analysis template to get started on finding a perfect fit for your team, you can access our template for free here .

Author - Kent McCrea, Chief Executive Officer

With over two decades of experience in the technology sector, Kent specializes in leading business and technology initiatives, both internally at Procom and on behalf of its clients.  He’s built teams, led projects and navigated critical business transformation initiatives along the way.

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Understanding the Hiring Process in 2024: Tips, Strategies & More

Published February 26, 2024

Published Feb 26, 2024

REVIEWED BY: Heather Landau

WRITTEN BY: Genevieve Que

This article is part of a larger series on Hiring .

• 1 Defining the Vacancy
• 2 Budget Allocation
• 3 Job Posting & Application
• 4 Resume Review & Screening
• 5 Interview
• 6 Background Check
• 7 Candidate Selection
• 9 Bottom Line

Getting the right candidate is always the goal in hiring, which is a tall order for hiring managers. While it might be challenging, you can find the right individual that aligns with your company’s values if you have a set of hiring process steps.

These steps include identifying, attracting, and choosing qualified candidates to fill specific positions within an organization. The specific hiring process steps and components may vary depending on the company’s policies, as well as the nature of the position being filled. The common elements, however, include:

Defining the Vacancy

Before you start looking for candidates, you need to identify the specific needs and requirements within the organization that necessitate the search for that position. This involves a detailed analysis of the tasks, responsibilities, and functions of that position. Think of it as your guide—your north star—for the entire hiring process. If you don’t understand what you need, you won’t be able to find the perfect fit for the role.

Here are some of the best practices when defining the vacancy:

Conducting a Job Analysis

This involves asking current employees who have had similar roles what their daily tasks and long-term expectations are. It will give you real-world insight into what the role is, including the skills and experiences required to do the job successfully.

Setting the Expectations

This step involves creating a list of non-negotiable skills, experiences, and educational backgrounds that are necessary for the candidate to successfully fulfill the responsibilities of the position. Doing so will help you or the recruiting team eliminate applications that do not meet the basic criteria. It will also streamline the selection process and ensure the quality of the applicants.

Creating a Job Description

After defining the core aspects of the vacancy, you need to translate this understanding into a comprehensive job description. Check out our step-by-step guide on how to write a job description .

Discussing Growth Prospects and Compensation

Additionally, you should also discuss the growth opportunities and compensation package to attract not only the candidates with the right qualifications but those seeking a rewarding career path. These two items are also important to millennials and Gen Zs. Now that these generations make up a great percentage of the workforce, organizations must recognize the significance of aligning job opportunities with the values and aspirations of these generations.

To learn more on how to attract and retain Gen Z and millennials, check out these articles on How to Manage Gen Z and How to Manage Millennials .

Budget Allocation

In a competitive talent landscape, you need to invest if you want quality. Thus, allocating a budget for your recruitment process ensures that it will work smoothly and seamlessly. Take into account how much you’re going to spend on recruitment channels, background checks and screening, onboarding and training, and more. You also need to compare the ROI the position can generate to the recruitment cost of hiring for the position.

Is creating a budget plan difficult for you? You might need a budgeting software that will help you forecast the amount you need and create a budget. Here’s our top pick for the best budgeting software .

Job Posting & Application

Job postings have come a long way from the traditional job ads. With a wide range of digital channels to choose from, evaluate how effective each one of them is. Understanding the limitations of each source enables hiring managers to tailor their approach and maximize the visibility of job postings among potential candidates.

Here are our recommendations for the best job posting sites that have wide reach. Some of these sites have mobile apps, candidate matching, applicant tracking, and other features that can make your candidate search much easier.

Here are other suggestions how to create an effective job posting:

• Leverage Technology: Utilize AI to find the right recruitment platform for your job ad. Machine learning algorithms can help you identify where your potential candidates are more active and present.
• Optimize for Mobile: A large number of job seekers, especially Gen Z and millennials, use their mobile phones to search for a job. Ensure that your application process is mobile-friendly to reduce bounce rates and increase the pool of qualified talents.
• Diversify Application Methods: Consider offering different application methods, such as virtual interviews or video resumes. This can give you a more comprehensive assessment of the candidate’s skills and abilities.

Resume Review & Screening

This initial screening helps hiring managers manage the volume of applications and focus on the individuals who are highly suitable. It eliminates the risk of a skill or company culture mismatch. It also helps you spot any legal compliance issues, like improper background checks, early on. Performing an effective resume review, however, requires practice. Here are a few things to keep in mind when screening applicant resumes:

• Look For Key Skills
• Evaluate Their Achievements
• Identify Career Gaps and Changes
• Check Additional Sections

Aside from looking at the applicant’s relevant work experience and accomplishments, you should also look for the key skills that are necessary for the role. The candidate should have a balance of technical and soft skills that match the job description.

Look at the candidate’s contributions and achievements in their previous roles, especially their quantifiable achievements that showcase their ability to deliver results and create a positive impact in their work. Examples of these quantifiable achievements include the applicant’s ability in meeting sales targets, implementing innovative solutions, leading successful projects, and more.

These can give you valuable insight into the applicant’s career journey. They highlight the candidate’s resilience, adaptability, and capability in navigating different work environments. However, they should be able to explain these changes later on during the interview. Their ability to justify these shifts demonstrates transparency and self-awareness. On the other hand, these can be red flags if the candidate is unable to explain these changes.

These provide supplementary insight of the candidate’s professional evolution or career growth. These include a candidate’s summary, skills, and professional affiliations.

The summary gives a concise yet powerful snapshot of the candidate’s professional identity. The skills section focuses on the applicant’s core competencies. Check the strategic alignment between the candidate’s skills and the ones required for the role. Lastly, professional affiliations indicate the applicant’s commitment to continuous improvement and networking. It also shows their dedication to stay abreast of industry trends and their willingness to engage with a broader professional community.

For more tips and strategies in finding the employee who’s the right fit for your business, read our guide on how to find the employees you’ll love .

Shortlisted candidates could undergo an initial screening to evaluate the candidate’s qualifications, communication skills, and overall fit for the role. After that, the list is further narrowed down and the selected candidates are invited to have another set of interviews.

Before conducting in-person interviews, some companies conduct a preliminary phone or video screening. For one, it’s a cost-effective method to assess a candidate’s communication skills and professional attitude. These types of interviews work for professional service industries like banking, accounting, IT, and more, where the nature of their work requires interpersonal skills and analytical skills.

On the other hand, for industries that are fast-paced and focus on customer service skills, an in-person interview is ideal. The face-to-face interaction allows the interviewer to assess the candidate’s adaptability and cultural fit to the operation.

The types of interviews depend on the interviewing committee, as well as the position that needs to be filled in. We have several articles that discuss different types of interviews and questions in depth. Here are some of them:

• How to Interview Someone for a Job (includes a free checklist)
• 50+ Interview Questions to Ask Candidates
• Common Illegal Interview Questions & How to Avoid Them

Background Check

Background checks serve as a due diligence step for businesses, although the timing varies. In positions where high levels of security are required, companies conduct the background check before extending an interview. The step aims to identify any red flags that could disqualify a candidate from moving to the next level. On the other hand, some companies do this after the job offer or before they onboard the new employee. This costs less because it only involves those who passed all the processes.

No matter which part of the hiring process they fall, exercise caution when conducting background checks because there are certain situations where it is considered illegal. Read our guide on background check policy for more insights on how to ensure your background check process complies with state and local regulations.

Using a background check service saves your business from costly mistakes. Here’s our guide to the best background check companies to help you get started.

Candidate Selection

After concluding the interview round, the hiring team will make a decision using the following procedure or steps:

Evaluation of Candidates

Here, the hiring team evaluates how each candidate fared during the interview. They will look at how the candidate responded and how they demonstrated their skills. During this stage, the hiring team will also look at the overall fit of the candidate with the company culture.

Assessment of Results

The hiring manager gathers all the interviewers’ feedback and determines how well each candidate aligns with the organization’s needs. It also includes a comprehensive review of the candidate’s qualification, experience, and potential success in the role.

Reference Check

The hiring team conducts reference checks to verify whether the information the candidate provided is true. Reference checks may include previous employers and colleagues. When conducting reference checks, be careful of the legal issues surrounding it. Find out what they are in this employment reference guide for small businesses . Furthermore, here are the 15 reference check questions to ask when trying to get some information.

Once the final decision has been made, the selected candidate receives a job offer letter. The offer includes the compensation package (i.e., salary, benefits, etc.) and other important terms of the employment. Need help in crafting a job offer? Here are different job offer templates you can download and use for free.

After the job offer has been signed, the onboarding process begins. The new employee will be asked to submit all the necessary documents and coordinate the start date with the hiring team. They will also be introduced to the policies, procedures, and culture of the company. If you have a hybrid team and need to onboard a remote employee, give them an engaging onboarding experience with these 15 virtual onboarding ideas . For a smooth onboarding process, you might want to use an onboarding software. Here are our top picks for the best onboarding program.

Hiring Process Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

How long does the hiring process usually take.

The duration of the hiring process depends on how complex the role is, your company’s procedures, and the number of candidates. Generally, however, it may take a few weeks from application to job offer.

How do you measure an effective hiring process?

An effective hiring process can be measured using different key performance indicators (KPI), such as cost-per-hire, time to fill the position, quality of the hire, candidate satisfaction, offer acceptance rate, and more.

Bottom Line

Creating an effective hiring process is essential to the growth and success of an organization. The steps and strategies we provided serve as a guide to help you and your hiring team in identifying, attracting, and selecting the right candidates to fill the specific position. Feel free to use them in crafting your own hiring process.

About the Author

Find Genevieve On LinkedIn

Genevieve Que

Genevieve has more than 13 years of writing experience, working with different clients in various industries. Genevieve also worked as an HR Head of a local manufacturing company, and has helped small businesses set up their business and HR processes.

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How to write a business plan for recruitment in 2024 (template included)

• Published on June 3, 2020
• Updated on February 12, 2024

Writing a business plan in recruitment has always played a crucial part in the interview process for a number of recruitment agencies around the world.

A comprehensive business plan can demonstrate a recruiter’s commitment, knowledge and commercial acumen. During economic uncertainties in 2023, these qualities are more important than ever.

Arriving at an interview armed with a comprehensive business plan before you’re even asked will no doubt set yourself apart from other recruiters.

During economic uncertainties, managers will need to present a business case to leadership for budget approval in order to make a hire. Your business plan will be an important element of this business case. An impressive business plan could be the difference between landing an offer today, or falling into a pipeline of other candidates.

In this article, we share a step-by-step guide outlining how to create a comprehensive business plan. We walk through the key components and include examples.

At the end of the article, you can download a free recruitment business plan template which is tailored towards the key components mentioned in this article.

A business plan should be packed full of relevant information but should be compressed and to the point. Avoid verbiage, stay specific and keep to 4 – 6 pages.

Introduction

Start with a title. Include your name and the company you’re writing the business plan for. A little personalisation will go a long way.

Underneath your title, outline the objective of your business plan and again personalise it towards the agency you’re interviewing with. While you have the hiring manager’s attention, this paragraph is an opportunity for you to demonstrate how comprehensive your business plan is. The aim is to capture the hiring manager’s interest so they continue to read each component:

“The objective of this business plan is to outline the value I can add to employer’s name.

In this business plan, I have highlighted my specialism, hiring activity in my market, my candidate and client strategies, my methodology, how I plan to recruit through economic uncertainties in 2023, my competition and my personal revenue projections over 12 months.”

You can use this paragraph as a way to introduce your business plan verbally if you’ve called up a hiring manager. You can also use this extract in a cold email.

Your specialisation

This is a crucial positioning statement for your value-add. It sets out precisely where your network and experience lies and what you intend to bring to the table in your new role.

Your specialisation can be described clearly by outlining what roles you will specialise in, what industries you will target, what level of seniority you will focus on and what geographies you will cover.

For ease of reading, you can use each component as a title and use bullet points to expand upon your answers.

Taking a Technology recruiter as an example:

What roles I will specialise in:

• Product Management permanent roles
• UX/UI Design permanent roles

What industries I will target:

• Series A – C funded technology startups (high investment, high growth and high volume of roles)

What level of seniority I will focus on:

• Mid to senior (120 – 180k salary range for Product Managers, 140 – 200k salary range for Designers)

What geographies I will cover:

• Based in Singapore, the local market will be my core market
• Secondary markets include Jakarta, Bangkok and Kuala Lumpur due to less competition from recruiters and high volume of roles

Hiring activity trends

The hiring activity trends section provides an opportunity for you to demonstrate and portray your knowledge of the market.

The 3 important components of this section are: hiring activity over the past 3 years, hiring activity for next year and how you predict hiring activity to shift beyond that.

Utilise your own knowledge of the market but back it up with research gained from reputable sources related to your market e.g. Tech in Asia, Tech Crunch, Channel News Asia, The Straits Times or The Financial Times.

You’ll want to cover how hiring activity has increased or decreased, what the drivers of growth are in your industry and what the threats and challenges are within your sector.

Candidate strategies

Moving on from market trends, this section indicates how you will acquire candidates for your desk. It offers an opportunity for you to demonstrate the experience you’ve learnt in candidate management from your previous firm, but also an opportunity for the employer to ensure that your approach aligns with theirs.

3 key components of this section include: how you will generate candidate leads, what challenges you expect to face and how you will overcome these challenges.

Taking a Front Office Banking & Financial Services recruiter as an example:

How do I plan to generate candidate leads:

• Direct headhunting using a LinkedIn Recruiter account, this costs approximately $X amount, the key benefits being access to a high volume of InMails and enhanced search capability. This has been the sourcing tool for 60% of my previous placements

Challenges I expect to face:

• In light of economic uncertainties in 2023, highly sought-after candidates may be risk-averse and may not see this as a good time to move jobs

How I will overcome these challenges:

• I will develop relationships with these candidates for the future but I will adjust my sourcing strategy accordingly by increasing volume of direct approaches

Client strategies

A similar section to candidate strategies but geared towards clients. Arguably more important than candidate strategies during a recession as the market could be job-short – even in the good times, strong business development capabilities in recruiters are harder to find.

This section includes 6 key components including how you plan to onboard new clients, how you plan to sustain relationships with clients for repeat business, what industries your clients are in, the challenges you expect to face and how you will overcome these challenges.

Take these bullet points as a basic example:

How I plan to onboard new clients:

• During a recession, I plan to cultivate relationships by helping and consulting clients on non-recruitment related issues, such as advising clients on the current state of the market
• I plan to generate leads by making 25 cold calls per day during the ramp-up period, to again offer support and advice where needed, and to leverage any open roles
• A soft approach of connecting with hiring managers, HR contact and C-Level candidates on LinkedIn, to establish working relationships and eventually convert into clients

How I plan to sustain relationships with current clients and win repeat roles:

• The most important way to sustain relationships is by offering a service that is superior to competitors. That is by being transparent, sticking to deadlines and delivering results
• Regularly catch up with clients on a monthly basis to see how they’re doing and see if you can generate new roles
• Keep yourself updated on company news and congratulate clients on milestones e.g. if they generate a Series C round of funding

What industries I will target clients in:

• Series A – B funded technology startups
• During a recession there is less of an appetite to use agencies due to an unprecedented volume of great candidates available in the market
• Offer free support to companies currently not using agencies, provide an impressive service and convert into paying client post-recovery

The 6th component is “examples of target clients” and this is where you can really demonstrate tangible market knowledge. Use company names, find the potential contact in each company and add your comments, such as the volume of roles you expect from that client. 5 examples should be enough to peak your hiring manager’s interest.

You can use a table to display this information with ease:

It goes without saying that you should never be tempted to use information that is proprietary to your previous employer. This information can be openly found with some basic LinkedIn research.

My methodology

Are you a recruiter that is focussed on crunching numbers? Are you a recruiter who is focussed on cultivating long-term relationships? In this section, you can include a few quick bullet points to explain how you approach recruitment. This information gives your hiring manager an indication about whether you hold similar values and whether you have similar working styles.

How you can adapt to recruiting during a possible economic downturn

This section is a new one in response to market conditions in 2023 but can demonstrate how you are prepared to deal with current and upcoming challenges.

You can use this section as the title and include bullet points to outline how you will adapt to these market conditions.

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My key competitors

Which recruiters and agencies offer the greatest competition? Demonstrating your knowledge in this area highlights that you are commercially aware outside of your core market.

Include about 5 different competitors who are directly competing in your patch. You can use the table below to display this information:

Personal revenue and target projections

In many business plans, financial projections are of utmost importance and can demonstrate your commercial acumen. If you’ve ever watched Dragon’s Den, you’ll know what happens when you don’t know your numbers!

Project your personal revenue for 4 quarters. You can start your calculations by predicting the average annual salary of a candidate in your patch. You can project your average percentage fee agreed with clients and from there you can calculate your average fee. Once you have this, you can predict the amount of placements you’ll be making per month.

Make sure your revenue projections are realistic and achievable. Avoid the temptation to predict vastly optimistic revenues, especially during a possible recession. You must allow time to ramp-up and there must be a logical relationship between your historical and predicted revenues.

The plan only includes project revenue. Your historical revenue should be on your CV.

Take the below as an example:

My predicted average annual salary of candidates:

My predicted average percentage fee agreed with the client:, my predicted average fee:, my predicted average placements per month, my projected revenue over 12 months.

Underneath, you can also include the KPIs you will set yourself to guide you in achieving these numbers. For example, you can set yourself a guideline for how many CVs you need to send, how many candidate meetings you need to arrange, how many client meetings you need to arrange and so on.

The template

We’ve constructed a free template built around the components mentioned above, so you can create your own for when you reach out to hiring managers.

To download this template, please add your email below and you’ll be redirected to the template.

By downloading our busines plan, you agree to our  Privacy Policy and Notification Settings .

This step-by-step guide should give your hiring manager a clear idea of your plan. If executed successfully, you’ve already demonstrated your commitment, knowledge and commercial acumen before even attending an interview.

The way you’ve structured your plan will give your hiring manager a very clear indication of your methodology and whether you’d fit their structure. Keep in mind that if your methodology is focused on high volume recruitment, it’s not going to work well with an executive recruitment agency.

As a next step, learn this plan inside and out. Be prepared to pitch your plan to your hiring manager and answer detailed questions surrounding each component.

Leave your interviewer with no room for concern and secure that role! Lastly, if you enjoyed the article, please consider subscribing or following us on LinkedIn to have new articles for recruiters like this delivered directly to your inbox.

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As Founder of Charterhouse Partnership, I led the opening of 5 international offices, hiring & training hundreds of recruiters. Please subscribe to our weekly newsletter where I share my insights on the recruitment industry.

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Self-Employment 101: A Guide to Starting the Process

A re you considering taking the path of entrepreneurship but feeling unsure where to begin? Well, you’re in the right place! Our guide below will go over some tips for starting the process of your self-employment journey and joining the 16 million Americans who identify as self-employed.

Keep reading to learn more about being self-employed.

Identify Your Passions and Interests

When you start a business, you have the chance to turn what you’re passionate about into a profitable venture. First, you will need to take some time to do some self-reflection. Think about what activities you enjoy and what you’re truly passionate about.

Also, think about the problems you enjoy solving, either for yourself or others. Most businesses emerge from addressing certain challenges. So, if there’s a problem you’re passionate about solving, this could be your starting point for your business venture.

Once you have some things in mind, it’s time to conduct some market research. You want to explore niches and industries that already exist. The goal is to find any gaps where your idea can fit in and help others.

Create a Business Plan

Creating a business plan is a critical step in starting any business. Briefly describe your business idea, its unique value proposition, and the problem it solves. Outline your short and long-term objectives and what you aim to achieve with the business.

You also want to define the purpose and mission of your business. Think about the legal structure of your business. The most common choices are sole proprietorship, LLC, and partnership.

It’s also important to analyze the industry your business will operate in and its current trends. Define your target audience and their specific needs in your business plan. You will also have to do a competitor analysis, where you evaluate who your competitors are along with their strengths and weaknesses.

Your business plan will need a section where you write all the details about your product or service. Highlight what makes your business product unique and different from anything else out there.

There should also be a section for your implementation plan. Create a timeline for launching your business where you include key milestones. Write down the tasks and responsibilities for you to implement the plan.

Keep in mind that the business plan you create will continue to evolve as you get started. You want to revisit this and adjust the plan as needed. Think of this plan as your roadmap that will help with day-to-day operations and even securing funding.

Legal and Practical Considerations

Once you have a business name and have decided on which legal structure is best, you will need to register your business. Depending on where you live, there are certain local, state, and federal authorities you will need to follow to stay legit. This is also where you have to see if your industry or location requires certain licenses or permits to operate legally.

For example, if your business deals with food, public health, or hazardous materials, you might need specific health and safety permits. If your business impacts the environment, then you will more than likely need environmental permits.

You can’t forget about Uncle Sam because self-employment taxes are a must to avoid any fines or legal issues in the future. You will have to keep track of all your income and expenses. It’s also a smart idea to estimate quarterly taxes because it will help you not fall behind when tax season comes around.

We recommend setting up an accounting system to help you manage all the money that comes in and out for business purposes. If you don’t have the time or are not good with finances, then you might want to consider hiring an accountant. There’s also the option to use accounting software that is linked to your bank account that does most of the sorting for you.

If you have a brand name, logo, or product that you feel people can easily use as their own, you might want to consider protecting it through copyrights and trademarks. Also, if you deal with sensitive information, then you want to use confidentiality agreements to help safeguard your data.

Marketing and Branding

The foundation of your business image is your brand identity. Part of your brand identity is your business logo, name, typography, and color scheme. The more consistent you are with these elements, the more you will create a strong and memorable presence where people start to associate your colors with your business.

For example, most people think of Target when they see red circles or Starbucks when they see a certain shade of green. The reason is that these brands have been very consistent with their color scheme throughout the years.

When you are working on your marketing, you want to identify what your unique selling proposition (USP) is. These are the things that set your business apart from the competition. When you highlight your own USP, it will help customers understand why they choose your products or services instead of your competitors.

You have to understand your target audience so that you can speak to them through your marketing. During your research, you have to identify where your target audience likes to spend their time. The goal is to show up where they are hanging out so that you can reach them.

This includes speaking to your target audience through social media platforms. This is a great place to meet and speak to your target audience.

Now You’re Familiar With Starting the Process

Taking on the task of becoming your own boss can be both exciting and challenging at the same time. Sometimes you will find yourself working a lot more than a 40-hour work week, but it’s satisfying because you are doing it for your own company instead of growing someone else’s company. As you can see, starting the process doesn’t have to be complicated.

Did our article help you out? We have more helpful guides, so make sure you check out the rest of our business section.

This article is published by NYTech in collaboration with Syndication Cloud.