The recruiting process flow chart is the perfect complement to every hiring process. With so many moving parts and so many people involved, it helps immensely to have a structure to guide the process and weed out unsuitable candidates. It’s critical to find the best job candidates. After all, the success of any organization greatly depends on its team members.
This article will explain what a recruiting process flow chart is and what kinds of information should be included on one, as well as the rest of the recruitment process steps that can make it easier to track down the most qualified candidates.
What Is a Recruiting Process Flow Chart?
Also referred to as a recruitment workflow, a recruiting process flow chart is a diagram that divides the hiring process into steps, using various symbols and arrows. It starts with phase one, sourcing, and goes all the way through to the final phase of onboarding.
A recruiting process flow chart provides a visual guide for the recruiter, the HR team, and the hiring manager. It helps create a uniform hiring process, ensuring that your hiring team will stay on track no matter what role they are sourcing candidates for. Furthermore, a recruiting process flow chart leads to better internal communication among your team members — and, as a result, a better candidate experience for your new hires.
What to Write on a Recruiting Process Flow Chart
While you can use simple software like Creately for a hiring process flow chart template, you can also make one fairly quickly by using some simple squares and ovals in your preferred word processing application. An excellent first step? Start mapping it out with a pencil and some paper.
As for the contents of your recruiting process flow chart, you’ll want to begin by considering some important questions about how the hiring process should work at your organization. Your answers to these questions will help to fill out the flow diagram:
What Are Our Hiring Needs?
Communication between human resources and the hiring manager is essential to ensure the selection process yields the best candidates to take part in the interview process. The HR department will need to understand the hiring manager’s top priorities, the hard and soft skills needed for the role, the new employee’s responsibilities, and the job’s start date, at the very least.
What Are the Most Important Details of the Job Description?
A job description that is too long will be skimmed by potential candidates — or it may not even be read at all. It’s time-consuming to create a job description, and a waste of time if it gets skipped over altogether. So be sure to edit your job description down to the most important details like:
- The title of the open role
- Company location
- Required hours (full time, part time, freelance, or contract?)
- The mandatory skills and experience required
- A brief summary of the daily responsibilities
- A bit of background on the company
- The anticipated salary and benefits
Keep job candidates engaged and intrigued by keeping the job description short, sweet, and relevant.
Where Can We Find Potential Candidates?
Depending on the role, you might have success with job boards, referrals, social media posts (like on LinkedIn), or by putting out paid ads. If you’re interested in conducting a broader search, college campus visits or job fairs can be ideal for bringing in a high volume of talent within a particular niche.
A common mistake in the hiring process is when teams fail to consider that the new employee they’ve been searching for might already work at the company in another department. Internal referrals save both time and money in the recruitment process. Maybe more importantly, they boost morale for current employees who feel that they are working toward personal development and growth opportunities.
Be sure to send out a company email with the job opening listed to give internal candidates a chance to apply.
A recruiting process flow chart can also help your hiring team manage the different recruitment channels being used. For example, the HR department could manage all incoming applicants from the job posting on various websites, and the hiring manager could handle applicants that come through via referrals. This can be reflected easily on the flow chart to keep everyone organized and the process efficient.
By investing a little time and effort in human resources planning and using a recruiting process flow chart, your hiring process will be much more effective — and sourcing your new hire will be that much easier.
What’s Our Method for Reviewing Applications?
When you advertise your organization’s open role on multiple channels, you may be overwhelmed by the response you get. Glassdoor reports that every job posting can result in over 250 resumes, resulting in an average of five interviews and (maybe) one hire.
It’s wise to plan for how the hiring team will manage the selection process — including phone screening, interviewing, and reference checks — ahead of time with a workflow diagram.
Here are some additional tips to help you narrow down the pool of job candidates:
- Prepare and save time. Do a stellar job of whittling the job description down to the essential details, and it’ll be easy to see which candidates have the most relevant experience.
- Look for a story in job candidates’ resumes. It’s not necessarily a red flag if a candidate has changed jobs frequently, especially if it’s in pursuit of upward mobility or new challenges. If there are unaccounted-for gaps or previous jobs that you have questions about, make a note to discuss this during the phone screening.
- Categorize resumes into groups. Prioritize the resumes that match up best to your job description, and then have a second group for the less strong resumes that are still relevant. The third group is for resumes that lack the must-haves and are not worth pursuing.
What Kind of Candidate Experience Do We Want to Create?
The interview process needs to be more than a check-the-box exercise. By planning for an optimal candidate experience, you increase your chances of attracting the best candidates for your role.
Since by this point you have already vetted the candidate’s qualifications, the interview process is the perfect opportunity to delve a little deeper. You can ask questions about the candidate’s past experiences and goals for the future, answer any questions they might have, and gather additional feedback from other hiring team members.
Here are 8 tips to enhance the interview experience:
- Before the interview, confirm all relevant details with the job candidate via email, including:
- Time
- Address (or login details for an online interview)
- Transit/parking tips
- Names and job titles of the interviewers
- Dress code (if applicable)
- For in-person interviewing, ensure the environment is comfortable and free from distraction. Having a few refreshments on hand is not mandatory but is certainly appreciated by candidates who have commuted to spend time with your team.
- For virtual interviews, make sure that at least one interviewer is online a few minutes early to welcome the candidate and engage in a friendly chat before other members of the hiring team join.
- Include more than one interviewer, if possible. Having multiple perspectives helps to prevent bias and can also help to expose the candidate to relevant members of the team whom they might be working with in the future. In addition, in some cases, this can prevent the need for a second or third interview.
- Review each job candidate’s application in advance to optimize the interview time. This way, candidates won’t have to repeat information that is listed on their resumes.
- Consider having standardized interview questions for every candidate. This can result in greater objectivity, as opposed to the hiring team “winging it” during each interview.
- Allow ample time for the candidate to ask any questions they might have. Remember, as much as you’re interviewing them, they are also interviewing you, and the interview process should feel beneficial to both parties.
- Gather feedback from all interviewers immediately after each interview, while it is fresh in their minds. Doing this right away ensures accuracy, as details of each job candidate can become blurred after a long afternoon of interviewing.
How Do We Seal the Deal?
When you’ve found your ideal job candidate, don’t delay. Once you’ve conducted the reference checks, you’ll want to make an official job offer by phone, followed by an email, to your top candidate.
The last piece of the recruiting process flow chart should include your onboarding plans for the new hire. During this period, encourage your new hire to speak candidly about any aspects of the job they are nervous about. It can help to tailor their onboarding plan to feel supportive rather than overwhelming.
Make Your Recruiting Process Flow Chart
We’ve covered why a recruiting process flow chart is helpful and the questions to consider before creating one, and now here are the steps to get started on your own chart:
- First create a recruitment plan using the questions above.
- Design your chart with a starting point (sourcing) and an end point (onboarding). Decide how you want your chart to be oriented: from top to bottom or from left to right.
- Make a box for each step in the hiring process. Use arrows to logically connect the boxes in chronological order — the arrows show the “flow.”
- Rather than overloading the flow chart with too much information, consider creating separate charts or using another shape to indicate any additional information that deviates from the main hiring activities.
- Use a maximum of three colors to visually highlight the stages of the recruitment process. You can use the different colors to show various sourcing channels, to indicate levels of urgency, or whatever makes logical sense to your team. Keep in mind that using more than a few colors can be visually distracting and can actually complicate your flow chart.
Prepare to Create the Optimal Recruitment Process
A recruiting process flow chart will make it easier to find qualified candidates and provide an optimal candidate experience. It also helps to keep the members of your hiring team in alignment with one another.
Pulpstream is all about making business processes more efficient in the easiest possible way. Our unique tools support HR management through secure automation and no-code processes that improve accountability and visibility between stakeholders during the hiring and onboarding processes. If you enjoyed the tips in this article, be sure to follow the Pulpstream blog for more ideas on how to streamline your business processes.
