Employers

Hiring Employees

The whole process, start to finish, and the point in each stage where most hires are actually decided.

The short answer

  • Hiring is six stages: define the role, write the posting, source, screen, interview, decide and offer. Most problems are created two stages before they are noticed.
  • The single highest-leverage stage is defining the role, because everything downstream inherits its clarity or its vagueness.
  • Screening is where time is lost and quality is won. It is also the stage most worth automating.
  • Speed is a feature. Good candidates are usually in more than one process, and the slowest employer loses them by default.

1. Define the role

Before anything is written, settle three things: what this person will be accountable for, what they must already be able to do on day one, and what they can learn once they arrive.

That third list is the one teams skip, and skipping it is how a requirements list grows to fifteen items and filters out everyone who could have done the job. If a skill can be picked up in the first two months, it is not a requirement, it is a preference, and treating the two the same is the most common self-inflicted hiring wound.

Agree the decision maker at this stage too. A process with an unnamed decider produces consensus by exhaustion, which is slow and tends to select the least objectionable candidate rather than the best one.

2. Write the posting

The posting is a filter, not an advertisement. Its job is to attract the people who would be good at this and to give everyone else enough information to opt out.

That means being specific about the work rather than about the company, honest about the parts people would want to know before applying, and clear about pay range, location expectations and level. Vagueness on those three does not widen your pool; it fills it with people who will withdraw later.

Covered properly in Creating Great Job Descriptions.

3. Source and screen

Sourcing is where the applicants come from; screening is what you do with them. The two get conflated, and the result is teams that solve a screening problem by generating more applicants, which makes it worse.

If you are getting plenty of applications and few good ones, that is a posting and screening problem. If you are getting almost nothing, that is a sourcing and reach problem. They have opposite fixes, so diagnose before acting.

Screening should be consistent: the same criteria applied to everyone, ideally scored, so a decision can be explained later. On GigFinder applicants are scored against the posting, which means review starts from a ranking instead of a stack.

4. Interview and decide

A structured interview, where every candidate gets the same core questions against the same rubric, outperforms an unstructured conversation at predicting performance and is far easier to defend.

Decide what each stage is for and do not repeat it. Three interviews that all assess general likeability tell you one thing three times. Assign each stage a distinct question it is answering, and let the last one be the decision rather than another data-gathering round.

Then move. The gap between final interview and offer is where the most avoidable losses happen.

FAQ

Frequently Asked Questions

Six: define the role, write the posting, source candidates, screen applicants, interview, then decide and make the offer. Most problems surface two stages after they are created, so a screening bottleneck is often really a vague role definition and a shortage of applicants is often really a posting that did not say what the work is.
Defining the role. Everything downstream inherits its clarity or its vagueness: the posting, the screening criteria, the interview questions and the final decision all trace back to whether anyone agreed what this person is accountable for and what they must already be able to do on day one.
That is a posting and screening problem rather than a sourcing one, and generating more applicants will make it worse. Check whether the posting describes the actual work specifically enough for the right people to recognise themselves in it, and whether requirements that could be learned in the first two months are filtering out capable candidates.
Fast enough that you are not the slowest employer a candidate is talking to. Good candidates are usually in more than one process, and the gap between final interview and offer is where the most avoidable losses happen. Speed is not a compromise on rigour; it usually comes from removing repeated stages rather than shortening them.

Related guides

On GigFinder

Comparisons

By industry

  • Information Technology
  • Healthcare
  • Manufacturing

Post a role and see what comes back

Applicants on GigFinder are scored against your posting, so review starts from a ranking rather than a stack.

Post Jobs and Contracts Employer Learning Center