4 cornerstones of a solid recruitment policy

No business can afford to be without a recruitment policy. Small and large businesses both need some sort of documented hiring policy in place—the only difference between the two will be the scope and complexities of the recruiting policies they need to implement.

Hiring the right candidates to maintain the success of any business is crucial. And the work that goes into selecting your future employees is at the heart of success.

This means that you should always have a pipeline of potential candidates to accommodate restructuring, expansion, resignations, and retirements. Sound overbearing? That’s why having a recruitment policy in place is so important. Without a recruitment policy in place, it can be easy for everything to snowball, leading to poor decision-making and burnout.

What is a recruitment policy?

A recruitment policy is a standardized framework that clearly outlines all your business’s recruitment methods and practices. The purpose of a recruitment policy is to promote consistency, transparency, compliance, and adherence to labor laws and legislation.

At its core, a recruitment policy simply answers how you hire candidates. It’s your company’s hiring strategy and process, and should include: 

• Your hiring philosophy
• Your recruitment procedures
• Your hiring standards
• Your hiring vision

Each of these components play a key role in hiring success, making them crucial to include in any recruitment policy.

The importance of a hiring policy

It’s tough to overstate the importance of a hiring policy. This documentation is the cornerstone of an effective and values-driven recruitment policy. They establish a clear, consistent, and transparent framework for the recruitment team, ensuring that every step in the hiring process aligns with the company’s objectives, values, and legal obligations. 

Here are five reasons why a hiring policy is so important, 

1. It ensures consistency in hiring practices. A hiring policy provides a standardized approach to recruitment, ensuring that all candidates are evaluated against the same criteria. This consistency helps in maintaining fairness and objectivity, reducing the risk of bias in hiring and ensuring that all applicants are given an equal opportunity. It streamlines the recruitment process and helps hiring managers make decisions that align with the company's goals and values.
2. It ensures legal compliance. A comprehensive hiring policy ensures that all recruitment activities comply with local, regional, and federal laws, minimizing the risk of legal issues. This includes adherence to anti-discrimination laws, proper documentation of hiring decisions, and ensuring that all recruitment practices are transparent and justifiable.
3. It helps to improve employer branding. A clear and well-communicated hiring policy can significantly enhance your employer brand. It demonstrates your commitment to fair hiring practices, diversity, and inclusion, which are increasingly important to job seekers. By highlighting your structured and fair hiring process, you can attract and hire top talent and build a positive reputation in the market.
4. It facilitates better decision-making. A recruitment policy helps teams make informed and unbiased decisions when selecting candidates. It outlines the necessary qualifications, skills, and attributes required for each position, guiding hiring managers to select candidates who are the best fit for the role. This structured approach helps in avoiding common pitfalls such as hiring based on gut feelings or personal biases, ensuring that decisions are based on merit and alignment with the company’s long-term objectives. 
5. It improves the candidate experience. Having a transparent hiring policy improves the candidate experience by setting clear expectations from the outset. Candidates appreciate knowing what to expect during the recruitment process, including the stages of the hiring process, the criteria for selection, and the timeline for decisions. This transparency can enhance the candidate’s perception of the company and increase their likelihood of accepting an offer.

Implementing a recruitment policy is a strategic imperative for any organization aiming to build a competent and committed workforce. It ensures consistency, compliance, and fairness in the recruitment process, enhances the employer brand, and improves decision-making. Ultimately, a well-defined hiring policy lays the foundation for attracting and retaining top talent, driving long-term success for the organization.

Key components of a recruitment policy

As we mentioned, a recruitment policy should revolve around three critical components: your hiring procedures, your standards, and your philosophy. But what do each of these components mean? And what do you need to dig into for a successful recruitment policy? We’ve got the answers. 

1. Your hiring philosophy 

Your hiring philosophy is the starting point of your recruitment policy.

The opening statements must define your company’s distinctive standpoint and attitude. This will include your brand purpose as well as your company values and ethics.

• You need to expand on what your brand has already achieved and still wants to achieve to improve the experience and lives of your customers.
• Your brand purpose must be clear, compelling and written with the intent to draw the attention of the type of people you want to attract.
• Your company values and ethics must reflect transparency and honesty. 
• What you look for in an ideal candidate, and what values they need to share. 
• Who on the hiring team takes on which tasks, and who is responsible for the hiring decision. 
• Where you source candidates from, and how you ensure equity and diversity. 
• How much flexibility and autonomy recruiters and hiring managers have to make decisions about a candidate.

Whether it’s a commitment to uplifting communities, up-skilling unskilled or semi-skilled workers or ensuring diversity in the workplace, be sure to practice what you preach.

In this section, don’t be afraid to also outline what your company stands against. For example, you can say that you don’t believe in unpaid internships, or that you take a stand against bias or nepotism in recruitment. This is your place to clearly outline who you are, and who you are not, as an organization. 

2. Your recruitment procedures 

Your recruitment procedures should make up a large chunk of your recruitment policy. There’s a level of customization depending on the role, so we advise using a few examples from varying roles and levels to clarify the procedures. 

The key elements you’ll need to include are:

Your pre-hiring methods

Do hiring managers need to seek approval before advertising a vacancy? Do they need to speak to specific teams or employees? Will the pre-hiring process alter when hiring internally versus externally?

And what criteria will candidates need to hit in order to move onto the next stage? What are some non-negotiables that every employee must demonstrate within the company? Ensure you’ve outlined these clearly and succinctly.

Remember, too, to relate back to your company’s overall ethos and values, as these will play a large role in the answers to these questions.

Your hiring process ‍

Every organization will have a unique hiring process. There will be similarities in all of them, but equally, there will be areas that are bespoke to your company.

Further, the hiring process may adjust depending on the role, team, and seniority levels of the vacancy. Are trial tasks necessary? How many interviews will you conduct?

Map out an overall hiring process, and distinguish the more specific processes depending on variables that may adjust the previous process.

Here are some examples of hiring processes and rules that might be included in a recruitment policy: 

• The salary budget must be agreed and approved before a candidate search begins.
• Indicate who’s ultimately responsible for the approval of new hires because a new hire must be approved before a candidate search begins.
• Indicate who’s responsible for writing a comprehensive job description.
• Indicate whether the candidate search will be managed internally, or outsourced to external recruiters.
• Indicate who must be on each hiring team and where each role-player steps into the hiring process.
• Establish an interview process and how interviews will be conducted, e.g. remote interviews, one on one interviews, or panel interviews.
• Establish at what stage reference checks, skills assessments, psychometric tests and other verifications must be done.
• Indicate who’s responsible for job offers, negotiations with candidates and onboarding new hires.
• Indicate how candidate searches are projected on the company website, social media and other hiring platforms.

Your hiring toolbox and methods‍

What tools do you use for recruitment? An ATS? Social media? A company careers site? List the tools you use for hiring in this section with a short sentence explaining what they’re used for.

For further clarification, you can add company rules revolving around each tool. The methods you use to hire someone are equally as important. Do you, for example, conduct telephone interviews? Collaborative hiring?

Think, too, about the smaller details. Does your organization have a minimum and maximum advertising time before making a hiring decision? What’s your stance on internet interviewing? Should candidates be allowed to apply from other countries? 

3. Your hiring standards

Your hiring standards embrace transparency, compliance, and adherence to labor laws and legislation.

It’s vital that your hiring policy adheres to all local labor laws and legislation. Labor laws can be tricky, especially if you run your business in more than one country or across states. 

If you’re unsure of what laws apply it’s best to let a labor lawyer run through your policy document before you release it.

In this section, you also want to cover issues like hiring biases, illegal interview questions, data protection and the confidentiality of candidate information, and the employment of non-citizens.

And then there are your own internal standards like whether your company allows the hiring of relatives of existing staff or whether you’ll give first preference to existing staff when a new vacancy comes up.

The hiring of relatives can lead to compromising situations or conflicts of interest, but some companies are successful family businesses, so it depends on your company’s circumstances.

It’s usually accepted practice to give existing staff the opportunity to apply for vacancies before a candidate search begins, but it isn’t always practical.

Employees in small and even medium companies might not have the depth of experience required for every vacancy.

Considering these rules and practices will help you determine your own hiring standards.

4. Your hiring vision

Your hiring vision is the conclusion of your hiring policy.

Regard your hiring vision as your company’s overall goals. Where is your business headed and what type of people do you want to attract to help you achieve your vision?

Your hiring vision should complement your hiring philosophy. By closing your hiring policy with your hiring vision, you’re closing the circle that encompasses and illuminates your unique brand.

Apart from product and business development and growth, your hiring vision should also include how you see your employees growing and developing.

As much as you hire staff to do the job that they get paid for, you also want to gain employee buy-in if you want your business to succeed.

By having a hiring vision that sees employees benefiting from being employed by your company, you earn their loyalty and buy-in to your company brand.

Happy employees will promote their employer brand, often even long after they’ve left the company to move on to bigger things.

No price can be put on customer loyalty, and at the end of the day, your employees are your customers as well. Don’t forget to include both employee and candidate experience in your hiring policy.

Ensure that your recruitment policy is complete

Implementing a recruitment or hiring policy takes careful planning as well as consultation with all hiring stakeholders.

You don’t want to compile and execute a tailored policy only to find further down the line that crucial elements have been omitted or misstated.

Make sure that your hiring policy allows for changes and amendments as your business evolves.

Also, have a designated person or position in the company take responsibility for managing and regularly reviewing your policy to ensure that it is correctly implemented. Depending on the size of your company, this can be your HR manager or a C-suite stakeholder.

An ATS simplifies your recruitment policy

Writing a recruitment policy takes time and dedication, so you want to ensure that your policy is being implemented in all departments and branches of your company.

By signing up for an ATS, you’re also investing in a real-time system that will allow you to manage the continued use and implementation of your hiring policy.

An ATS brings your entire recruitment process into one space that’s accessible to all team members in real-time. This includes the practical elements of your hiring policy.

With an ATS, you can easily track the progress of all vacancies as well as the actions taken by individual team members. This will help you establish solid oversight and help audit whether or not your policies are being respected in practice.

Better still, you’ll have easy access to different reports at any time you need them. By integrating your hiring policy with an ATS, you’ll be able to manage both your hiring process and hiring team from your desktop or mobile device. An ATS brings all four corners of your recruitment policy out of the filing system and into practice.

Conclusion

While recruitment does require intuition and personal judgment, it should be guided by an underlying policy that ensures consistency and accountability with each new hire. Recruitment policies help to achieve this consistently by outlining the parameters through which hiring should be conducted at the organization. This ensures that recruiters understand the goals they’re working towards, and what successful hires look like, while still being free to use their judgment and expertise.