Recruitment: from job description to offer

The hiring process

1. Requisition: the manager raises a need; confirm budget, role level and urgency.
2. Job description (JD): purpose of the role, key responsibilities, must-have vs nice-to-have skills, location/remote, compensation range (increasingly expected), and what makes the company attractive. Use inclusive language; avoid unnecessary requirements ("5 years' experience" for an entry-level job) that shrink the pool.
3. Sourcing: job portals (Naukri, LinkedIn, Indeed, HireSol for freshers), the careers page, employee referrals (often the best quality), campus hiring, social media, agencies, and passive sourcing with Boolean searches.
4. Screening: resume review against must-haves, phone screens, skill assessments or short work-sample tasks (much more predictive than resumes alone).
5. Interviews: structured interviews with defined competencies and scorecards.
6. Selection and offer: debrief, references, offer approval, verbal offer, offer letter, negotiation.
7. Pre-joining engagement: keep in touch to prevent offer drop-outs (a real problem in India's notice-period culture).

Boolean sourcing

("data analyst" OR "business analyst") AND (SQL AND (Tableau OR "Power BI")) AND (Pune OR Bengaluru) NOT (senior OR manager)

Structured interviews reduce bias

• Decide the competencies before interviewing.
• Ask every candidate the same core questions.
• Use behavioural ("Tell me about a time…") and situational ("What would you do if…") questions.
• Score each answer against a rubric, independently, before discussing with other interviewers.
• Avoid illegal or irrelevant questions (marital status, family plans, religion, caste, age).

Common biases: halo effect (one strength colours everything), similarity bias ("like me"), first impressions, confirmation bias, and the college-name bias that skills-based hiring tries to remove.

Recruitment metrics

• Time to hire (from application to acceptance) and time to fill (from requisition to acceptance).
• Cost per hire.
• Source of hire and source quality.
• Offer acceptance rate; offer-to-join ratio.
• Quality of hire (performance and retention of new hires).
• Candidate experience (feedback scores, response times).

Check yourself

• Write a Boolean search for React developers in Hyderabad with 1–3 years' experience.
• Why are structured interviews fairer than unstructured ones?
• Calculate the offer acceptance rate: 40 offers made, 32 accepted.