Is there a right way to recruit and select people to work in your business?

After you create your own business, thinking about its growth is key. After all, if it all goes smoothly, expansion is inevitable regardless of whether it’s a digital business or not.

When it’s time to expand, tasks may become overwhelming and you might feel that working on your own is getting harder.

So, the need to recruit and select people to work for you arises.

For the entrepreneur who’s just getting started, this can be a complicated assignment. After all, how do you hire people with the right skills for your business?

If you are currently going through this situation and have questions about what to do, we’ll show you 5 tips to help you find great talent for your business.

The difference between recruitment and selection of people

Before we show you the 5 tips that we’ve set aside for those who wish to expand their business, it’s important to make it clear that there’s a huge difference between recruiting and selecting people.

Recruitment is a type of, or a set of techniques to be applied when filtering out potential candidates to work for you. In other words, it’s the initial moment before you really choose someone.

Selection, on the other hand, is done immediately after the recruitment and consists of choosing, among those people you recruited, the one that fits best in your organizational structure.

Recruitment can be done in three ways:

1. Internal;
2. External;
3. Mixed.

We’ll be talking about each one below:

Internal recruitment

Internal recruitment involves the selection of people who are already working at the recruiting company in the first place.

There might be a specific job opening and any employee already working for you could be reassigned or chosen to fill another position.

This is one of the easiest forms of recruitment and selection of people, because selected employees are already known by everyone in the company, they know the processes, in addition to being acknowledged in the work environment by their leaders, who believe that they are the ideal people to occupy the job opening.

Therefore, there’s no secret to conducting internal recruitment. Just pay attention to how your employees work since they joined the company and how they can improve their duties and set of skills.

External recruitment

This is one of the hardest recruiting processes, because in this case, it’s imperative that the company understands and trusts the first impression given by the candidates for the available job opening, in addition to carefully analyzing resumes.

It’s important to contact other professionals for whom the candidates have worked previously so you can have an idea of what they are like in the professional environment.

In addition, search for the skills you want in the resumes so that you don’t waste time interviewing people who aren’t suited for your business.

Mixed recruitment

The mixed recruitment process is considered neutral: it allows both company employees as well as outside candidates to show an interest in applying for a job opening.

The mix of personality types, ideal professionals and potential talent increases exponentially.

How to select and recruit people

The fact is, there’s no right or wrong method for recruiting and selecting people.

However, there are ways of assessing your company’s future employees, and also a few tips to filter out professionals. Thus, it’s easier to ensure that those you select are the ones that can fill the job opening suitably.

We’d like to stress that the methods we’ll talk about are not necessarily correct for all companies, considering most of the times the ideal selection of employees depends greatly on your company’s culture and on what is expected from the candidates.

Actually, what we have are good practices that you can use as guidelines when you select new professionals for your company.

1. Advertise your job openings

The idea when you recruit and select people for your company is to find someone who can perform a specific job well.

Whether in the area of human resources or metal welding, professionals need to know which duties they’ll be performing in the company.

Therefore, the first thing you need to do is assign and specifically delimit all the main duties, and what you expect from candidates when you advertise the job openings.

If professionals submit their resumes and don’t understand their duties in the company, both the employee and the employer might be disappointed, since certain skills might not be fulfilled.

Therefore, explain in detail the duties to be carried out in the job opening.

Advertising the job opening and the type of media used to do so is also very important.

Understand which communication channels are most used by those you believe are the best candidates to work for you and advertise your job openings on those channels.

Use LinkedIn, internal notices, website subscriptions, resume websites or even consider using unconventional methods, such as sending emails. What’s key here is that the job opening reaches the potential candidates.

2. Select the best candidates

After you advertise your job opening, it’s important that you select the best candidates, or at least, those who are apparently the best, based on the information they provide in their resumes.

But, in addition to analyzing the skills required for the position, also try to understand a little about the candidates’ personal characteristics, especially their aptitude for teamwork. This helps when you filter out candidates that will be interviewed.

In addition to selecting good professionals or potential talent, this helps you ensure that there won’t be a waste of the employer’s or the candidates’ time.

3. Prepare for the interview

There are various types of job interviews: unstructured, planned, behavioral and situational.

Each one is suitable according to the job opening to be occupied. Therefore, it’s important to be prepared before calling in candidates to be interviewed.

Below, you will find a brief explanation so you can quickly understand each type of interview:

• Planned: Is an interview where you only ask questions, especially of a professional nature, and that is entirely planned before the interview takes place.
• Behavioral: Analyzes the interviewee’s behavior and emotional state, and that is when you try to recognize how it will affect the professional performance if they were to be hired.
• Situational: Proposes problems to be solved by the interviewee, and it’s important so you can observe the candidates’ development and their reaction to situations that may occur in your company.
• Unstructured: This interview is more improvised and attempts to establish a more informal contact with the interviewee, with questions that arise from what is said.

4. Apply psychological tests

A practice that is very common in companies is the use of psychological tests.

There are a few tests designed to observe and analyze if candidates’ are really suitable for the job opening, in addition to observing their skills in solving certain problems.

Certain aptitudes are also tested with these psychological tests, and without doubt, they serve as a guideline when choosing a specific professional.

5. Give feedback

Finally, we emphasize that giving feedback is one of the most important steps in improving your company’s selection process.

In addition to providing candidates’ with positive and negative points, and the reasons for their acceptance or not, you can also ask for an evaluation regarding the full selection process.

By doing so, you contribute to the candidate’s development, in addition to being able to enhance certain points in your recruitment and selection process.

Therefore, create a communication channel where the voice of those who participated in the selection process can be heard, and that is open to receiving criticism also. Only by doing so, will you be able to improve your selection process.

Are you ready to expand your business?

As you’ve seen, there’s no magic formula for finding the best people to work for you. However, applying these 5 tips might be the path to improving your recruitment and selection process.

Recruitment is important to filter out good professionals and the selection process is only done after each possible candidate has been interviewed. This way you’ll be able to understand who the best professional is to work for you and help you in the mission of expanding your company.

Nevertheless, we remind you that each entrepreneur needs to observe their own business and improve their own professional selection methods.

Evaluating the selection process for the first employees or testing an initial method to recruit the first employees and improve it over time, is a good option. But it will only be through practice and the application of these techniques that you’ll be able to select the best professionals to work for you.

Here at Hotmart, we have a recruiting and selection process that has undergone a few changes in order to reach to point we are now at.

Would you like to read more about this story?

If so, check out how Hotmart created a selection process to hire its first employees.