When you know you need to hire a new role, here’s some things to start thinking about

Vacancy Brief

• This helps you think about the role, and also have an artefact to send to recruiters
• Should help you craft the job ad, pre-read and the interview questions if you already know what are the must haves and bring the role to life in the day to day
• It’s also useful to share with other people in your team involved in hiring for this role.

Pre-read for candidates

• Before you speak to candidates, send them everything they need to know about the role – it’s all the stuff you couldn’t fit into the job ad.
• It’s also a good way to see how interested a candidate is, as to whether they read this document 
• Saves a lot of time on the telephone screening if they’ve already had the role and company explained

Job Ad

• Something very open to attract as many candidates as possible.
• Something short, not an exhaustive shopping list
• You reduce them down in the interview funnel

Interview Process and Form

• Doing this ahead of time means you can get going right away when candidates start applying
• Scoring is important, as it helps you make an objective, rather than subjective decision.

Technical Test

• These take a quite a bit of thought and practice. Try them out on internal people as a rehearsal
• Think about who will do these

Opportunity for team and candidates to meet

• Think about how you can get the team and the candidates to meet as part of the interview process, and at which point. You want to be sure you’re presenting them with a top quality candidate.
• Help team feel part of the selection process – means they have more buy in
• Bring the role to life for the candidate
  • Who’d they’d be working with
  • Where they’d be working
  • What the code looks like
  • How they’d be working

Arrange interview slots

• Be ready to interview quickly – good candidates get snapped up
• Try to get an interview arranged within 3 working days of a candidate applying, max of a week.

Release job ad

Now you’ve got everything ready for when you do start getting candidates through, it’s time to start sharing! As part of the vacancy brief you will have worked out how to advertise and share the role.