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Sometimes it looks like good employees are hard to search out in the US and Western Europe. This is often the case, especially when the market is saturated with vacancies.
There are countries where the dynamics are different, though. You probably know India or the Philippines, but there’s also Eastern Europe, where there are often more good candidates than jobs.
There are many staff in this market who need to learn and work inside a competitive budget, individuals who are interested and trying their best.
My video editing company has over 100 employees in Eastern Europe and we are greater than completely satisfied. So how do we hire in this market? I would really like to share our approach, which will probably be particularly effective when hiring line staff.
Step 1: Take time to organize
First, we’d like to find out what kind of personality we would really like to rent for a given position.
According to Competence and loyalty frameworkEach worker can be placed on a scale and assigned to one of 4 categories:
- High competence and high loyalty
- Low level of competence and loyalty
- High competence and low loyalty
- High loyalty and competence
For us, it is necessary to search out and train highly loyal employees, even if they are barely less competent. Everything we do during this recruitment process is aimed at finding potential.
Our system is designed to help people improve and grow over time. It is necessary to say that this method only works if you have a strong department leader who can mentor their employees.
Once we have established the desired characteristics, we describe the candidate, outline their responsibilities, and write an engaging job description. We publish it on each paid and organic channels, and then move on to the next steps.
Step 2: Collecting the appropriate variety of applications
We have specific expectations for each recruiting situation. For example, we know that out of 70 candidates, only one video editor will probably be a good fit. When hiring a manager, we typically have to think about 100 candidates. This helps us estimate how many applications we’d like to gather.
These proportions proved to be consistent, with only minor fluctuations, which allowed us to plan for scaling our team. We learned that hiring the required number of individuals from fewer applications simply wouldn’t get us the results we would have liked.
We will probably be able to launch as soon as we reach our goal variety of submissions.
Step 3: Conduct two interviews
Because we typically receive so many applications, it will take weeks to conduct over a hundred interviews.
That’s why we’ve implemented a more practical approach – group interviews. We typically invite 10–15 candidates to those sessions. We assess the candidates’ experience, how well they fit our role and company values, and see how they interact in a competitive environment.
This method also saves us a lot of time when introducing a company. Instead of doing it 10-15 times, we do it once for the group.
After the group sessions, our hiring manager discusses the candidates with the head of the relevant department. Together, they discover the individuals who impressed them the most and schedule individual interviews.
These are more traditional: we talk about the candidate’s ambitions, discuss how our company can support their skilled development, and ask detailed questions about their previous work experience.
Step 4: Distributing Test Assignments
The next step in our recruiting funnel is a real-world test task for candidates who make it this far. We give them a few days to finish it, ensuring it reflects the actual work they’ll be doing with us.
Over the past yr, we’ve had to revamp all of our test tasks to be AI-proof. As AI helps candidates, it’s harder to gauge their true skill level.
Once the assignments are submitted, I review each task for client-facing positions. For technical positions, our Video Editing Manager takes over.
We provide detailed feedback to every candidate, no matter whether or not they are a good fit or not. We highlight what stands out, areas for improvement, and job search suggestions. This ensures that everybody who invests their time gets something helpful in return. It also leaves the door open for future hires.
Step 5: Internship
Following this assessment, we invite the best candidates to affix us for a paid two-week internship, which is a serious opportunity to enhance their skills. This experience allows them to learn more about our work environment and exhibit their skills.
During this era, the best candidates work on real tasks under the supervision of a manager to use their knowledge in practice.
It’s a win-win. Candidates really get to see what it’s wish to work with us, and we get to see how they perform in the real world.
It’s not only about hard skills. We give them a mentor who provides guidance and observes how well candidates can listen, receive feedback, and adapt—in other words, how well they fit into our corporate culture.
If so, it is a strong signal that they have the potential to develop and succeed on our team, and it is also a major warning sign for us.
In the end, we stick with the candidates who do it best. That’s how we went from 100 candidates to 2.
In the world of recruiting, there is a lot of effort on either side. It’s not only about time, but also about the emotional investment. However, the energy we get from a successful hire is multiplied many times over. Once we have our process and our approach in place, there is no turning back.
We will lose much greater than we save if we skip any step in our recruitment funnel. However, if we do all the pieces, the reward at the end will make the effort value it, giving us a improbable return on investment.