How to Run an Effective Vetting Process for Candidates in 2019

According to Glassdoor, the average company in the U.S. spends about $4,000 to hire a new employee, and takes up to 52 days to fill a position.

Undoubtedly, recruiting and hiring candidates is an expensive and time-consuming process. Additionally, it can be tricky to figure out which candidates are most qualified to succeed at your company for the long haul.

To ensure your recruitment strategy is inclusive, fair, and efficient, it's critical you focus your efforts on creating a good vetting process.

Vetting process for employment

Companies use a vetting process to evaluate a candidate's background and qualifications, and eliminate unqualified candidates from the pool of applicants. A vetting process allows companies to save both time and money by ensuring they minimize the amount of in-person interviews they conduct. A vetting process can include conducting background checks, sending applicants follow-up questions to answer, a brief phone screen, an initial video interview, or other assessments to test an applicant's qualifications.

A vetting process will depend on the size of your company and the type of role for which you're hiring, but it should include a few critical elements. Here, we'll cover how you can run an effective vetting process to ensure your strategy is as efficient and unbiased as possible.

How to Run a Candidate Vetting Process

1. Write an accurate job description.

Your vetting process will be easier start-to-finish if you take the time to write an accurate and compelling job description.

I spoke to Claire McCarthy, a HubSpot Sales Recruiter, who told me the job description can help both you and the candidate ensure a mutually beneficial fit from the start -- "We have pretty comprehensive job descriptions," McCarthy told me, "And we want candidates to take the time to read them and ensure the role is a good match for their background and skill set, as well as their long-term goals. In the job description, we focus on attributes -- for instance, for a Sales role, we might list, 'customer-first mentality' as a requirement."

It's equally important to ensure your description is crafted to attract a wide pool of diverse applicants, since diverse teams perform better, and come up with more innovative ideas.

If you think your diversity and inclusion initiative doesn't start with your job description, think again -- a Hewlett Packard internal report found the majority of women won't apply for a job unless they meet all the qualifications, while most men will apply if they meet only 60% of them.

To ensure their job descriptions attracted a diverse range of talent, the Atlassian rewrote their job advertisements using a tool called Textio, which allowed them to detect patterns for how job posts perform. Textio also recommended specific language to best attract a wide pool of applicants.

Ultimately, it's critical you ensure your job description allows you to correctly identify qualified candidates from the start, while enabling you to attract the widest pool of applicants possible.

Take a look at 12 Marketing Job Descriptions to Recruit and Hire an All-Star Team [Free Templates] if you need help getting started.

2. Review the candidate's application materials using software.

A vetting process should allow you to filter out candidates who don't have the skills necessary to succeed in the role. To do this, you'll want to start by vetting the applicant's resume, cover letter, and other application materials they've submitted for review.

Additionally, a vetting process can support your diversity and inclusion initiative by ensuring your HR team remains fair and unbiased when evaluating potential candidates. For instance, you might implement a blind search system in which resumes are scanned by software, such as ADP Recruiting Management's Visual Search.

By ensuring your resumes are automatically sorted based on skill, you're circumventing some of the unintentional biases that might lead your HR employees to make unfair judgments.

3. Use video interviews prior to phone calls.

McCarthy told me HubSpot uses video interviews -- which prompt candidates with questions, and record candidates' responses to each question -- to vet candidates before moving onto a phone interview.

McCarthy said, "Candidates are required to answer the questions in one minute. We do this for high volume roles, and use the video interview as a qualifier for whether or not the candidate moves forward with a phone interview."

Ultimately, there are certain questions you can ask to decipher whether or not a candidate has the correct skills for the role. You don't want your recruiters spending valuable time on phone calls, when you can just as easily collect that information another way. Consider using video interviews to limit the amount of phone calls your HR team needs to make each day.

4. Evaluate with other assessment tools.

To evaluate whether your candidate will succeed in the role, consider offering initial assessments. As a HubSpot writer, I was asked to write a blog post from scratch using one of HubSpot's prompt topics before being invited for an interview. This makes sense -- why waste your time, and your candidate's time, if your candidate doesn't have the skills you're looking for?

You might consider offering role plays for customer facing positions, case studies for functional roles, or coding assessments for engineering positions.

5. Stick to a process.

You'll want to remain consistent in every step of your process, from background checks to assessment tools. For instance, it's important your team uses the same background check for each potential employee, and doesn't require any additional information that does not apply to the job.

Ultimately, a vetting process is only effective if it's consistent and replicable. As McCarthy told me, "A vetting process is about establishing a process at the beginning and sticking to it -- additionally, it's important to use a vetting process to operationalize how we review candidates and decide which ones are most qualified to move forward to next steps."

Using these five tactics, or any alternative options you feel will help you determine a mutual fit for your candidates and teams, will mitigate the time and money your HR team spends on recruitment in 2019, while ensuring you hire the best applicants -- a win, win.

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