How to Create a Hiring Checklist

What is a Hiring Checklist?
Consider the possibility of having so many good candidates that it is difficult to decide which on to hire. These days with layoffs of good people that is not a fairy tale.

Complicate that by the fact that in a lean economy, it is more important than ever to hire the right candidate because estimates of cost to replace a bad hire run from 2x to 14x the cost of employees salary and benefits.

Throw in an ever increasing legal minefield for employers and hiring people can be a huge task. So how do you deal with all these issues?

The solution is the hiring checklist.

A hiring checklist is nothing more than the list of steps involved in a hire at your company. Start to finish and with as much detail as possible. Add in all legal and employment requirements and you have got yourself your hiring checklist.

Steps in the Process
There are 3 parts of the hiring checklist, the work prior to starting the hiring process, the search and selection of candidate and the final step, the interview and hire. Each step should have sufficient detail regarding your hiring checklist so as to make it clear to anyone reading it the nature of the process involved in filling an opening at your organization.

How to Create Your Own Checklist
The simplest way is to look at what others have done for a starting point and adapt to your company. For example over at Staffing and Recruiting Essentials.

The 3 steps are broken out into 7 separate elements in the outlined process. Each calls out steps that can be examined independently. Take for example, the first two elements, they are the analysis and documentation of needs and creation of a recruitment plan.

These steps are important and necessary but you may already have much of it complete in your organization. If that is the case because you already do a lot of hiring then you are already 1/3 of the way home. As a side note, if you do not look at things like success factors, applicant tracking and performing a job analysis, you may want to review and revise your process to be sure you don't overlook a key step in the hiring process.

This Sounds Like a Lot of Work...
It is...but it can save a lot of time and money in the future. When comparing the time and money to the estimated of the cost of a bad hire (up to 14x the cost of salary and benefits), it does not look so bad. Even a person making 40K a year can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Weight that against 30 to 40 hours of effort to create a checklist and hiring plan.

To keep your search on track, focused on finding top talent and giving yourself the best possibility of finding that "A" candidate instead of settling for the "B" or "C" candidate, make a hiring checklist. Get those top candidates working for you and your company!