The Ultimate List of 20 Hiring Best Practices

Hiring best practices refer to established and tested methods for attracting, selecting, and onboarding the best candidates for an organization’s job openings. Following these practices, HR can reduce their cost and time of hire, increase hiring quality, and enhance the overall recruitment process. 

According to LinkedIn’s Future of Recruiting Report, 87% of recruiting professionals say talent acquisition has become a more strategic function over the past year.  So, implementing best hiring practices is crucial for recruiters, and here are key strategies for different scenarios.  

Diversity hiring best practices 

LinkedIn revealed that nearly 20% of recruiters now say DEI hiring is a higher priority. DEI strategist Dr. Tana Session said that DEI is a priority to the next generation of employees because they want to know if organizations are committed to DEI long-term and not only during times of social crisis. 

So, if you want to increase the diversity of your workforce, here are the best practices for inclusive hiring: 

1. Use inclusive language in job postings that appeal to potential candidates of all backgrounds and identities. Make sure to use gender-neutral words and phrases. Avoid exclusionary terms. Refer to these blogs for more tips on crafting job ads: 

TIP: You can also use job description tools like Ongig to ensure your job descriptions are catchy and unbiased. 

2. Avoid unconscious bias by using blind hiring tools that block out candidate personal information like their name, age, or ethnicity. Examples are anonymous screening software, skills-based assessment platforms, and diverse candidate sourcing tools. 

3. Never ask questions about race, religion, age, or personal lives during job interviews. But if you can’t help it, ask unbiased alternative questions to know more about the candidate’s non-work background.

4. Craft employee benefits and perks that attract diverse job seekers, such as: 

• Floating holidays – Allow employees to choose holidays that align with their cultural or religious beliefs 
• Parental Leave – Offer paid leave for new parents, extending support to adoptive parents and same-sex couples
• Flexible work arrangements – Provide options for remote work, flexible schedules, and compressed workweeks, catering to various lifestyles and needs 

Interview best practices for hiring managers

Hiring managers have a solid understanding of the role and are ultimately responsible for the result of the hiring process. Their collaboration with recruiters is crucial for attracting top talent. 

So, if you are hiring a manager and want to hire the best talent, here are interview best practices for you to follow: 

1. Ask different types of questions: 

• Open-ended questions – delve deeper into a candidate’s skills and capabilities. Candidates can explain their responses, giving hiring managers a glimpse into their thought processes and critical thinking abilities.
• Behavioral questions – essential when assessing candidates’ fit for the job. Your best predictor of future performance is past behavior in a similar situation. 
• Technical questions – proficiency in tools and types of machinery is critical not only to effectiveness in the position but also to observing safety in the workplace, especially for technical jobs like engineering and healthcare. 

2. Evaluate if the candidate is a good addition to the company culture by asking about the applicant’s working style, values, and team experience. 

3. Listen actively by giving job seekers full attention. You must also allow them to ask questions to show you are open and transparent about the company and the role. 

4. Take detailed notes by writing down first impressions, strengths, and weaknesses. So, when you review all candidates, you make fair decisions when you have their responses. 

Internal hiring best practices 

LinkedIn’s data shows that employees stay at companies almost 2x longer if the employer is highly committed to internal hiring. The shaky economy is forcing companies to look within more frequently when filling open positions:

75% of recruiting pros say internal recruiting will be an important factor shaping the future recruiting over the next five years.

So, if you want to save on recruiting costs and boost your employee retention rate, internal hiring should be part of your HR strategies: 

1. Build an internal recruiting policy.

Establishing an internal hiring policy provides a framework for current employees to explore and grow within the organization while ensuring fairness and transparency in the hiring process. Your policy should include:

• Eligibility criteria for individuals interested in applying for open positions: years of employment in the organization, current performance grade  or job standing, location 
• A selection process with a step-by-step procedure for sending applications, screening, interviews with hiring managers, and timely updates from the recruiters until the position is filled 
• Communication campaigns, how the job will be promoted organization-wide, how managers can talk to their direct reports to apply for the internal vacancy, and how managers from different departments can encourage each other’s open roles. 

2. Prepare for internal job interviews.

Interviewing employees is just as important as interviewing external applicants, so hiring managers and recruiters should take note of the following: 

• Examining the candidate’s current job performance and contributions in the company, understanding their strengths and weaknesses, achievements, and how they’ve grown.  Instead of perusing resumes, hiring managers should look at performance reports to know whether the candidate has what it takes to do well in the role they are applying for. Past performance also helps identify areas of improvement and potential to excel within the organization. 
• Standardizing the interview process. Develop a set of standardized questions related to specific job requirements and ask them to all candidates so everyone can show their knowledge and skills. Structured interviews also prevent preferential treatment or favoring one candidate over the other when one candidate has friendly relations with the hiring manager. 
• You can also consider having an interview panel. Having multiple interviewers fosters a more comprehensive evaluation and reduces the risk of bias. 
• Understanding the job requirements of the open position so you can tailor your questions to cover the candidate’s current and future work environment and how they fit the role. 

3. Send timely updates.

After the interview, advise candidates of the timelines for the hiring process. Thank all candidates for their time and interest, even if they’re not selected for the role. Maintaining positive relationships fosters a good candidate experience so these employees will not be discouraged from applying for future positions. 

4. Evaluate your internal hiring process.  

You wouldn’t know if your internal hiring is successful if you didn’t evaluate it. Here are considerations: 

• The performance of the new hire and if they met the hiring manager’s expectations
• If the quality of the internal hire is better than that of hiring an external candidate
• If the internal hire stayed longer in the position compared to an external candidate
• The reduction in time and cost when hiring internally versus recruiting externally
• Replicate the internal hiring process for other open positions 
• Areas for improvement 

TIP: HR should survey and schedule face-to-face meetings with hiring managers and previous candidates to gather internal recruitment data to analyze the effectiveness of internal hiring. 

Volume hiring best practices 

According to Employ’s Quarterly Insights Report, 63% of talent acquisition professionals shared that their hiring volume is higher than last year. Record turnover in the job market means recruiters are hiring more candidates than last year. Talent teams are working to fill empty roles and add new positions to expand across their organization. 

If you are massively recruiting this year, here are the best practices to have a successful volume recruitment process: 

1. Recruiters must understand the whole picture and end game of the hiring procedure. They need to know what positions to fill, the number of candidates needed for each position, and the required skill sets.  

Jon Hill, Managing Partner of the Energists,  an oil and gas executive search firm, must not neglect this step before starting sourcing and recruiting top candidates: 

First, before you start searching for candidates, you want to take a second to outline exactly which positions you need to hire into, how many people you ideally want to hire into each role, and which skill sets or traits are shared and different between these different roles. In my experience working with companies, I find they are more likely to neglect this step when doing volume hiring than if they’re filling a single role. Just because you’re filling multiple positions at once doesn’t mean each one is less important for your operations and business growth, so make sure you’re giving each role the full thought and attention it deserves before you start to seek out candidates.

Finding the skills and traits that overlap can also help when you’re screening applicants and choosing your short list of candidates to move forward through the process. I find, if the roles are closely related, you may get job seekers applying for one role who are actually a better fit for a different open position, and viewing the individual roles in terms of their skills can help you to make those matches.

2. Use automation and technology to streamline your hiring procedures. Check out the following tools: 

• Skillate – resume parsing tool to extract relevant candidate information quickly
• Phenom – automate sourcing, screening, and scheduling job interviews with a conversational chatbot that answers candidate questions 
• Grayscale – allow recruiters to reach out and expand candidate outreach via SMS campaigns and text-to-apply
• Harver – administer scalable online tests and simulations to evaluate candidates’ skills and competencies efficiently.
• Hirevue –  employ video interviews to identify top candidates quickly.
• Sapia.ai – screen and interview thousands of candidates at the same time via text chat

3. Conduct group interviews or panel interviews to assess multiple candidates simultaneously. 

It’s also a chance to see how the candidates engage in a team setting, which can give you valuable insights into their communication skills, interpersonal skills, and ability to function well in a team environment.

4. Implement employee referral programs and maintain talent pools of previous candidates who may be suitable for future roles.

This can reduce time-to-hire and improve the quality of hires.

TIP: Collect recruitment data such as time-to-fill, cost-per-hire, and applicant conversion rates to identify areas for improvement and optimize the hiring process.

Remote hiring best practices

Buffer’s State of Remote Work survey revealed that 98% of respondents would like to work remotely for the rest of their careers at least some of the time. 91 % of respondents report having a positive experience with remote work, while 82 % shared that they work from home.

Upwork predicted that by 2025, an estimated 32.6 million Americans will be working remotely, which equates to about 22% of the workforce. 

Remote work is here to stay. If your organization is planning to implement work-from-home arrangements, here are the best practices for hiring remote workers: 

1. Write job ads that attract qualified candidates well-suited to thrive in a remote work environment.For example: 

Work requirements include a stable internet connection, a dedicated workspace, and remote meetings or collaboration availability.  

Highlight essential qualifications like:

• Solid communication skills – remote work relies heavily on effective communication through digital platforms
• Tech savviness – proficiency in remote work tools like video conferencing, project management, collaboration platforms, and other remote work solutions 
• Self-motivated and can work independently – candidate must have self-discipline and know time management
• Results-oriented – focus on the desired outcomes rather than specific work hours 
• Flexibility – the candidate must be able to adapt to changing priorities, work across different timezones or schedules 
• Team player – the candidate should have collaborative skills and describe how the role interacts with other team members
• Culture add – describe the company’s remote work culture to attract candidates that match the same values and thrive in remote work environments 

You should also include remote-specific benefits and perks offered by the organization. So, this includes flexible work hours, remote work stipends, professional development opportunities, or wellness programs tailored to remote employees.

2.  To attract passive candidates interested in remote work, recruiters should post on remote-specific job boards and communities: 

• FlexJobs – flexible, hybrid, or work-from-home jobs.
• Remotely – post jobs in programming, design, marketing, and customer support. Full-time and contract positions. 
• Remote.co – a job board for developers, customer service reps, recruiters, designers, and sales professionals looking to work remotely.

Alternatively, you can also partner with remote staffing agencies or executive search firms specializing in remote talent acquisition:

• Robert Half – Source experienced remote professionals globally for contract and permanent positions.  
• Randstad – Find remote jobs in the USA.

3.  During job interviews, recruiters must also ask questions that would determine if remote working is the right fit for your candidate. The goal is to identify if they have the communication skills, collaboration skills, organizational skills, time management, and self-discipline to work remotely: 

• Are you effective in working independently?
• Have you worked remotely before? If so, what did you like most about working remotely?
• What are the most significant challenges to working remotely?
• What project management and communication software have you used?
• What did you like most about the software? What did you like least about the software?
• Do you feel like part of a team when working remotely?

TIP: Include current remote employees in interviews to assess cultural fit and answer candidate questions.

4. Ensure you are tech-ready. 

Matt Erhard, Managing Partner of Summit Search Group, a recruiting firm, stressed the importance of tech tools and using multiple approaches for successful remote hiring: 

In my experience, the most effective way to hire strong candidates remotely is to take advantage of the full range of tools you have available to assess their skills and qualities. Video interviews are one part of this, but you don’t need to rely on those and resumes alone. I find it’s beneficial to also utilize personality assessments, skill tests, and asynchronous video interviews in addition to a video conference interview and resume/portfolio assessment. Using multiple approaches in your process can help you to get a more complete sense of the value the candidate will add to your team and can be very beneficial in hiring the right remote talent.

TIP: Consider a short-term paid trial period to evaluate candidates’ remote work performance.

Why I wrote this: 

At Ongig, we support the professional development of recruiters by providing information on the latest hiring practices. For writing writing unbiased and effective job descriptions, contact us to schedule a demo. 

Shoutouts: 

1. The Future of Recruiting 2023 – LinkedIn 
2. Employ Quarterly Insights Report | Q3 2022 – Jobvite 

April 3, 2024 by Gem Siocon in HR Content