Your company might have been a startup with three to four employees in the beginning. All companies start small. However, now that your company has become larger, you might need to recruit a larger number of new employees in a shorter period of time. Sometimes, it’s difficult to scale this process according to the company’s growth.

In order to improve your hiring process, you should take a few steps that will go a long way into making your team grow without a hitch. Here are a few things you can do to make sure you’re hiring the right employees while acting fast.

Have an accurate job description
Sometimes, the people who are hiring don’t know what to look for in a candidate. In the early days of most companies, people are hired through referral from other employees, especially from personal networks on platforms like LinkedIn.

However, as a company grows and several teams develop different needs, that’s no longer enough. All the several people involved on the hiring process must be on the same page. This will help prevent disparities across the interviews and the selection process, since all people will know what to look for in your new hire.

Use an interview script
Many interviewers forget to follow their scripts at the interviews and end up asking different questions to each candidate as the conversation flows. It’s important to make sure you’re measuring the same qualities in every candidate. Create a script for each round of interviews and make sure your hiring team follows it.

Develop focus areas in your interviews
If there are several people from different departments interviewing the same person, it’s important that each person knows what to ask about.

Assign each interviewer with some questions that are relevant for them and for the job description. This way, you’ll get a deep knowledge of the strengths and weaknesses of each candidate through different areas and it’ll be easier to figure out if the person is right for the role or not.

Use test assignments
For most jobs, it’s useful to have an assignment that will help weed out incompetent or lazy candidates. If you’re hiring a UX designer, have them design a mock page for a fake customer.

If you’re hiring a developer, have a skills test prepared for them. If you’re doing test assignments, do not use real client situations – that will give your candidates a feeling that they’re working for you for free. Use mock situations that will display the skills required for daily tasks at the job you’re hiring for. You can do these tests in-house or give them as a home assignment for less pressure.

Develop a rating system
Before your interviewers talk to each other about a candidate, it’s essential to have them rate each candidate according to a rating system. It can be as simple as “hire/no hire” or a 1 to 5 points rating system according to how much the interviewer thinks this person is a great fit for the job. This will prevent any bias that people might get from discussing candidates early on. It’s important that the right candidate will be consistent in the ratings he gets from each interviewer.

Have a quick hiring process
Your candidates value their time as much as you do yours. Give them feedback as soon as you can so that they know if they’ve passed on to the next step in the recruitment process.

Don’t keep a good candidate waiting before you come up with a proposal. It’s of the utmost importance to be fast when you find the right person, and to have a quick recruitment process so you can get your new employees working as fast as they can.

Check every candidate’s references
A lot of people lie in their resumé – and they might lie in their interviews as well. To avoid that, always check everyone’s references before you consider hiring them. Talk to former employers, especially.

Beware of phony references – some candidates might refer to their friends in the same industry, which will, of course, give them glowing reviews. That tends to happen more with business people and less with engineers and the such – but it’s always good to be aware of it with every candidate.

Get diverse candidates to interview
This can be achieved by several ways. To avoid bias when reading resumés, try hiding the name and gender of the person before handing their curricula out to be reviewed.

Keep in mind candidates will want to feel reflected in your company’s culture as well, so check for bias in the language used in your job offer and the places in which you post it on. Giving benefits like paid parental leave will make you achieve a lot more diversity in your working place. This will help your employees focus more on their jobs since they’ll feel rewarded by their loyalty.

Use digital recruitment specialists
As your team grows, its need for new hires will be exponentially wider. Digital recruitment specialists help you scale up this process by creating a job description that fits your needs, helping you by sending the right resumés and even interviewing your candidates using the focus points you required. If you live near the Manchester area, there are tech recruitment agencies in Manchester.

As an example, WunderTalent helps you with digital recruitment staffing in Manchester and London. Do not be afraid to use a recruiter when you feel like you need to hire more people than you’re able to interview. It will save you time, a lot of hassle, and give you excellent advice in hiring the perfect person for the role.

Don’t forget the onboarding process!
When you have a new employee, they’re going to need to be trained. Whether they’re a developer, or a web designer, you’ll need them to know about the company’s processes, benefits… The first thing you should do is send an email to your new employee and to all the people he/she is going to deal with. Introduce them, their role, include a small bit of information about themselves that they’re willing to share (like an uncommon hobby, for instance).

That small fact can serve as an ice-breaker between the new member and the rest of the team and help ease them into the company’s culture. You can even have a welcome pack – with a signed note from the company’s CEO welcoming them into the team, a t-shirt or a hoodie with the company’s logo, a book about management that introduces some of your goals to the newbie with a learning approach. These are just examples – there are other goodies you can include in your welcome pack to make their transition into the team quicker and easier.

Another factor of the onboarding process is having a “buddy” system. This “buddy” will be someone the person is not going to report to, but someone from the same team who will teach them all about the company’s jargon, common policies and such, and answer all the questions your new team member might be too afraid to ask his superiors.

Finally, remember to set goals for each month and each trimester. Those will serve as guidelines for your new employee to feel challenged and be eager to learn.

Beware of old-timer mentality
You probably have employees at your company who have been there ever since the company started. It’s important to make sure that these employees know their place is safe, but it’s also important that they keep updated as the company’s policies and procedures change.

They are probably used to discussing everything directly with the CEO – but as a company grows, that becomes impossible to manage. Make sure you keep even old-timers on the loop as your team changes and evolves, and you’ll be able to keep everyone happy.

These steps show that hiring for a large company is an exhausting process. If you think this is too much to take on, consider getting digital recruitment specialists like WunderTalent to do the biggest chunk of this job for you. You’ll be relieved from much pressure and getting help from someone who is an expert in digital recruitment staffing in Manchester.