Best Practices - How to plan for your next hire
Until we have a set process, hiring can feel a lot like a fire drill - someone quits, or is promoted, and suddenly there is an extreme urgency to fill their spot. With the tips below, learn how to make hiring repeatable and scalable, as well as how to know (ahead of time!) when it may be time to post that next role.
Successful Hiring Practices are repeatable and scalable.
When hiring practices are standard and repeatable, they quickly become scalable - and way less work for your team day-to-day. Below are some ideas to help your team reach this point, or level up your existing hiring practices.
Have a solid Trakstar Hire Administrator
We recommend having a few folks on your team who knows Trakstar Hire, and your hiring process, inside and out. If you have new folks you'd like to train on deeper Trakstar Hire knowledge, they should enroll in our Admin E-Learning! Learn more about resources for new admins here.
Make creating openings easy using hiring templates
When creating openings, having a template to start things off makes the creation process faster. This also ensures that the key information is in the opening each time! You can build opening templates easily within Trakstar Hire. Learn more about how to do this here. Once your templates are created, you can use the "Copy Details From" feature to duplicate this template for your future openings.
Custom Hiring Stages with Structured Evaluation Forms
Each opening you create should mimic your hiring plans using custom hiring stages. Custom hiring stages allow your team to know where the candidate is in the hiring process, and where they need to go next. It also helps clarify who is in charge of the candidate at any given time - so no one falls through the cracks. When building Interview and Review stages you can also create Structured Evaluation Forms - which allow you to guide your team when they're leaving interview and review feedback.
Email templates
Email templates are a great way to save you tons of time when writing to candidates. They also allow you to have standard language across your hiring. We suggest building email templates for any message that you send regularly - such as a request for an interview, directions to your office, or a rejection message. You can find great examples of email templates here.
Plan for the future
When you aren't actively hiring, there are still activities to do to maintain your hiring process (refine the items above!) and also keep engaged with your current staff and potential candidates to have a pulse on upcoming hiring needs.
Communicate "Not now but later"
When you complete hiring for a particular role, it's important to communicate with the existing candidates in the funnel, to share that you're no longer hiring for this role. For any candidates that you screened and were interested in, using language in this message that says you'd like to consider them for future roles keeps the door open if you need to hire for this role again in the future.
You can also continue to reach out to these candidates over time with updates in your company. You can do this quickly and efficiently via the expanded Bulk Email feature - which lets you email all candidates in a given filter.
Plan for future hires with Succession Planning
Hiring often feels chaotic because we didn't expect it. We didn't expect that employee to leave, or we didn't plan for a backfill for their promotion. Leveraging a 9 Box Grid report gives you what you need to prep for upward movement or find out who needs additional training.
Succession Planning is available within our Trakstar Module - interested? Reach out.
Cut down on surprises by knowing the satisfaction of your employees
We have all been there as managers - an employee says "They need to talk" and then boom - they let you know that they're leaving - and you had no idea it was coming. The engagement feature allows administrators to conduct surveys, check-ins, and polls to measure employee engagement across your organization’s workforce.
Engagement is available within our Trakstar Module - interested? Reach out.