Make the right decisions with a flexible hiring process

Hiring the right talent is a tough decision with major consequences. You have to pick a person who will work with your team, ideally for an extended time, on limited information collected over a short period of time. Many tools exist which help build an overall profile of candidates and their soft and hard skills, such as individual interviews, panel interviews, online tests, or assessments. All candidates must complete the same steps in the same sequence to ensure comparable information across candidates and enable you to land a well-informed and unbiased hiring decision. Without a well-structured process bringing all these tools together, your hiring process is subject to incomplete and inconsistent information across your candidate pool and higher likelihood of missing out on your best fit candidate. The process to find the right candidate is different for each industry, organization or even position, making it extremely challenging to get the best results using a one-size-fits-all approach in your hiring process.

Start simple…then tailor hiring to your needs. Microsoft Dynamics for Talent: Attract doesn’t squeeze candidates into one blanket hiring process. Attract starts with a simple basic hiring process to help you get started quickly, paired with additional options to then configure the process for your unique requirements. Let’s explore the basic building blocks of configuring your hiring process.


Set up your hiring process with Stages. Whether your business utilizes a one-step interview process, or a sequence of steps such as initial phone vetting, screening, first round interviews and final interviews, you can fit the hiring process in Attract to your business. Start by creating hiring ‘stages’ aligned to your overall process steps – as many or few as needed – during which specific activities will take place as a candidate advances through the process. Whether your business uses a one-step interview process, or a sequence of steps, once Attract is set up you can be confident that each candidate will be managed through an equal, transparent hiring process from application to offer.

Collect information during the hiring process using Activities. As part of each step of the hiring process, you can define various activities, and their behavior, that need to be performed in order to collect information about your candidates. For example, you may want to require the candidate to complete an online assessment as well as a phone interview as part of a screening stage, or ensure that a background check is performed as part of the offer stage. Whatever is needed, you select the activities and configure the behavior in each stage to ensure you make an educated decision to reject or advance a candidate through your process. Out-of-the-box, Attract provides a growing list of activity types you can pick from and setup to fit your needs.

 

Add Activities supporting the core candidate process. Every organization is different and requires an individual set of meetings during the hiring process, in addition to the activities with the candidate. You may want to schedule a team meeting to discuss the interview strategy, or a panel meeting to review a candidate’s previous work result as a group. Attract can include those supplemental meetings in your hiring process by adding a ‘schedule activity’ – either as a new stage of the process or within an existing one. A ‘feedback activity’ collects feedback about candidates in a structured way and keeps it all together with the candidate’s other data for easy review by the hiring manager.

 

Candidate-level transparency. Attract gives a clear picture in the hiring process activity feed of where a candidate is in the process – which stages and activities have been completed so far and what’s next. In addition, you are always able to easily access and review information from a previous stage.

Don’t work around the constraints of your hiring tools, use the configurable hiring process in Attract to tailor hiring to your business process. Try it out today using our free 60-day trial, and don’t forget to head on over to our community to discuss and also head on over to our Ideas forum to give us your product suggestions.