<aside> What’s this about? A hiring round is a process used to select and hire one or more candidates for an open role at your organization.

What do I need to do? If you’re trying to hire for an open role, ensure you have robust and efficient processes around preparation, outreach, processing, assessments, work trials, interviews, and job offers.

Contents

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Further reading

Templates

Databases

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Preparation & outreach

Prepare for your hiring round by writing a job description, implementing an applicant tracking system (ATS), and engaging in some proactive outreach.

There are dozens of entire books written about hiring well. Below we highlight some of the basics, and include templates throughout that we have used for each stage of the process. However we encourage you to peruse some of the further reading shared above as you get deeper.

Job description

The first step in any hiring round is to create a job description. There are several associated tasks:

  1. Establish role responsibilities: First, you’ll want to establish the roles and responsibilities for your new hire. This depends on the requirements of your organization, as well as the size of the team they’ll join.
  2. Determine candidate attributes: What sort of person do you want to hire for these responsibilities? It can be worthwhile spelling out some of your desired traits, to help candidates assess their suitability (and avoid surprises down the line!) Decide the relative importance of these attributes, and start to think about how you can best measure each of them. Consider splitting this up into "required" and "desired" and keep each list relatively short.
  3. Draft job description: Once you’ve determined the relevant requirements, you’ll want to write these up in a job description.
Section Includes…
Summary Role title, salary range, brief description of role, application link, and deadline. A 2-3 sentence summary can also work well in social media posts, newsletters, and other outreach channels.
About the organization A summary of your organization’s mission and activities. This should match the way you describe the organization on your website (and can be lifted from your website wholesale).
Key responsibilities Responsibilities of the role, such as those introduced above.
About you Desired candidate traits, such as those introduced above.
Benefits and salary A list of employee benefits, such as healthcare, retirement planning, flexible work arrangements, productivity and professional development allowances and opportunities, parental leave, and paid vacation. A salary range and a note about flexibility in that range for exceptional candidates, if appropriate.
Application A summary of the application process, including the application link, and the expected timeline.
Diversity and inclusion A recognition that various demographic factors can affect people’s willingness to apply, and an encouragement for those people to apply regardless.
  1. Create application form: Your choice of platform may depend on which applicant tracking system you use. Airtable is often a good option (and includes a form creation tool), but you might use a native form within your website CMS, or a simple Google Form. The application form is your first chance to screen candidates, but it’s also the first interaction applicants will have with your hiring round. So, you’ll want to carefully balance a) getting all the information you need to begin rejecting some candidates that miss the mark, with b) not imposing too much of a burden on prospective candidates. Make sure you collect all the relevant data (such as potential start date, location, work authorization, CV or LinkedIn profile, etc.) If you include open-ended questions, make them as specific as possible and think about how the answer would help you assess candidates.
  2. Create job ad: Summarize your job description into a brief (e.g. two-sentence) ad that identifies key points like the title, salary range, location, and deadline.

Applicant tracking system

Applicant tracking refers to the management of candidates within a hiring round.

A dedicated applicant tracking system (ATS) gives you oversight of the process, and enables more efficient candidate communication with email templates and automated messages. If your organization has an HRIS, then you might already have access to all the functions of a good ATS, depending on which HRIS you have. For more information, see Set up an HR system.

Determine a suitable ATS given your organization’s needs and budget, and configure the system to match your organization’s hiring procedures.

Outreach

Conduct outreach actively — you should expect the majority of the positive results in your hiring round to come from personal connections, referrals, and networks.

Proactively contact people who you think may reasonably be a good fit. There’s a strong positive relationship between the quality of your new hire and the effort you spend on active outreach.

It can be helpful for you to create a list of both:

This could include people that you’ve met at conferences, people you used to work with, people you met at networking events, people whose writing you’ve read online, etc. Lean toward casting a wide net. We recommend you Implement a CRM to track these outreach efforts.

You can then supplement your active outreach efforts with more traditional marketing for your role. Below are some channels with which Impact Ops is familiar:

Alongside these channels, consider contacting people and asking them to recommend candidates or to share the job description. A lot of strong candidates come from recommendations, and simply nudging employees (and contacts) to share a job description among their contacts really tends to help get access to candidates. You could consider offering a referral bounty for suggesting the successful candidate.

Processing & assessment

Your procedures for processing and assessing candidates may vary, but screening calls, 1-2 hour assessments, interviews, and work trials (in-person or remote) are common elements in many hiring rounds.

Screening & communication

Assessments