The process of recruitment refers to all the steps you go through to fill an open role at your company by making a hire. While many hiring managers and companies take an ad hoc approach to activities such as creating job listings, conducting interviews and making hiring decisions, our use of the word “process” is a good indication that that’s not the approach we’d recommend.

At Greenhouse, we advocate taking a structured approach to hiring, which begins well before you start speaking with candidates. Why does this matter? Structured hiring helps you weave consistency, fairness and alignment into all stages of the recruitment process. It’s designed to help you effectively assess talent, facilitate hiring team collaboration, improve candidate experience and reduce hiring bias. To learn more about the benefits of structured interviews, see this blog post.

The steps in the recruitment process

Let’s say you’ve decided you’d like to set up structured hiring in your company (good choice!) – what are the main steps in the recruitment process you should make sure to do? It’s worth noting that there are many activities that fall into the broader category of talent acquisition (including sourcing, employee referrals, talent pools and employer branding efforts), but for now, let’s focus on the steps of recruitment specifically. By the way, for best results, we recommend that hiring managers and recruiters work together on most of these steps.

Step 1: Scope the role with intention

Start by defining the ideal candidate through the business objective of the role. Think about the long-term contribution they will make to your company and map out the core attributes you want to screen for.

Step 2: Prepare for the interview

Once you’re aligned on core attributes, design an interview process that effectively screens for them. Populate an interview scorecard with the skills and attributes the hiring team should be looking for. If you’ve never used an interview scorecard before, these structured hiring 101 worksheets will guide you through the process. Next, decide what interview questions you will ask to assess soft skills. When it comes to assessing hard skills, consider whether you need to add a take-home test task stage to the interview plan.

Step 3: Conduct the interview

Make sure that everyone who will be involved with interviews has access to the scorecard and has a clear understanding of the role requirements, focus areas of their interview and questions they’ll be asking. Remind them of the importance of sticking to their assigned questions and taking notes or providing feedback as soon as possible after the interview.

Step 4: Make a data-driven hiring decision

When all the interviews are complete, it’s time to review interview feedback and make an informed hiring decision based on data and evidence from your interview process. Your scorecards, take-home assessment, interview feedback and other documentation should give you the necessary, unbiased data to identify your superstar candidate. We highly recommend hosting debriefs with the interview stakeholders at this stage to make a collective hiring decision and discuss any scorecard feedback that might require deeper analysis.

3 tenets for a structured recruitment process

If you’re new to the concept of a structured recruitment process, it’s easy to get overwhelmed by all the new information and steps to take. But at its core, there are three simple tenets of structured recruitment:

• Who will you hire?
• How will you evaluate candidates?
• What will the interview process look like?

You’ll want to start with the first question, “Who will you hire?” so you have a clear idea of the skills, attributes, experience and personality traits that will lead someone to be successful in this role. Once you’ve come up with that list, you can start to design the interview and evaluation process to ensure that you’re giving candidates the chance to demonstrate how well they meet your criteria.

If you’d like more guidance on setting up your own structured interview process, this interactive workbook will walk you through each step.