8 Strategies for Auditing and Improving Your Hiring Practices

Hiring is one of the most important functions in your business, since it’s the gateway to building the teams responsible for making your business a success. If you’ve been struggling with the hiring process, or if you’re not fully satisfied with your existing teams, consider auditing your hiring practices so you can eventually master them.

The Impact of Hiring Practices

Hiring the right employees, contractors, and subcontractors is crucial for your business to survive. These are the people who are going to provide leadership and direction to your business, as well as the people who will be responsible for carrying out those orders. They are the neural center of your business, as well as the body responsible for executing commands.

In a construction setting, for example, your hires will be the ones helping you find new clients, planning projects, setting milestones, and even achieving those milestones. Without good employees, your workplace might suffer in terms of productivity, efficiency, reliability, consistency, or safety.

Make enough mistakes, or fail to hire enough people, and your construction business could completely collapse.

Auditing and Improving Your Hiring Practices

Auditing your recruiting and hiring practices could be the right move, giving you key insights that you can use to develop better practices in the future.

1.   Map your current recruiting and hiring processes. First, you need to know what you’re dealing with. If you’re just starting out, take the time to map out your current hiring and recruiting practices. What are your targets? Who sets those targets? What strategies do you have for finding candidates or advertising job promotions? How do you handle intake and onboarding? Who are the people responsible for overseeing or executing these processes throughout these steps?
2.   Establish your goals. Any audit without a goal will be functionally directionless. Accordingly, you should spend time proactively establishing your goals. Are you trying to make your recruiting and hiring processes more fluid? Are you trying to hire more people or hire them more consistently? When are you hoping to see these results? In other words, what would a successful audit do for your business? What would that look like?
3.   Define the scope of your audit. You’ll also need to outline the overall scope of the audit. What are the components of your recruiting and hiring process that you want to examine? How deep are you going to dig into these matters? For example, are you going to be turning over every rock, from top to bottom? Are you more interested in one component of the process, such as onboarding? Is there a specific problem you’re trying to solve?
4.   Gather as much information as possible. The information gathering phase is likely going to be the longest one. You can gather information from a multitude of different sources, depending on the problems you’re trying to solve. For example, you can start by examining data in your recruiting and hiring software, assuming you use it. You can also interview employees within your HR department as well as new hires – to see how they feel about your recruiting and hiring efforts from the other side.
5.   Analyze each step of the process. Once you have a sufficient volume of information to review, you can analyze each step of the recruiting process. You’ll likely see better results if you treat these as individual components, rather than trying to diagnose problems with your recruiting process as a whole. That said, you should also be open to modifying your hiring and recruiting flow at the high level if you can identify points of inefficiency in it.
6.   Identify areas for potential improvement. By this point, you should be able to start identifying areas for potential improvement. What steps of the process can be accelerated? Which ones can be eliminated? Where can you save money? Where can you increase throughput? What are the biggest obstacles holding you back and how can you eliminate them? Chances are, there are at least some moves you can make immediately to boost your results.
7.   Group brainstorm new solutions. For more complicated problems, get together in a group and brainstorm new solutions. Work together with leaders and ground-level people within your hiring and recruiting department to come up with novel solutions.
8.   Experiment and measure. Finally, start employing new measures and carefully measure your results. You may even use this as an opportunity to conduct AB tests to compare alternative strategies. If your tactics work, keep them. If they don’t, try something else.

Recruiting and hiring aren’t easy, but with a solid audit and a new direction, you can refine your strategies and make them much more beneficial to your organization. Be sure to continue scrutinizing your recruiting and hiring processes so you can pursue continuous improvement.