How to Attract Top Talent in 2023: Our Global Hiring Process in 11 Steps

The recruitment industry worldwide faces some significant challenges dealing with hiring complexities across borders, cultures, regulatory regimes and economies. However, there are also some positive changes happening, such as the use of collaboration tools for remote workers, which have made it possible to build high-performing teams with talented people from all over the world.

Whether recruitment is being done for a specific location or the entire globe, two important success factors are market knowledge and a well-tested and organised recruitment process.

Some companies create their hiring capability, based on their needs as they go along. Others integrate ideas from experienced recruiters or agencies. Some even hire other companies to handle the whole recruitment process for them.

With a decade of experience in the IT sector, we, a global recruitment agency, have developed our own, rigorous and well-exercised process. In this article, we aim to share some essential steps and techniques to enhance your recruitment processes and to uncover, recruit and onboard the ideal candidates for your company.

Here, we will walk you through every stage of the worldwide hiring process, offering guidance from creating captivating job descriptions to carrying out virtual interviews. Our insights and advice are geared towards helping you secure top-tier talent in 2023.

Companies also use our help to source high-quality resources, such as project managers, quality assurance specialists and even internal recruiters.

The IT market is one of the most challenging when it comes to finding and hiring the right person for the job.

Recent mass layoffs in tech, spearheaded by giants like Amazon and Meta, have created a very peculiar situation: top talent is now out there searching for you – alongside numerous amateurs created by the temporarily increased demand which emerged during the COVID pandemic. Although this is a great opportunity, singling out the “real” top players requires time and expertise.

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At the same time, top-level employees who survived the lay-off storm are entrenched in their jobs as never before. It will take a lot of convincing to win them over.

If your process is to hire tech professionals on your own, without access to an experienced in-house recruiter, it might take up to a few months to fill a vacancy. But there is always the outside chance that you may still get lucky and accomplish this mission in a couple of days.

However, you might not be up for taking chances, would rather concentrate on your day job, or have a better use for your time. In this case, a recruitment agency could find you a great new employee within three to four weeks. The minimum time to close a position is, in our experience, three days. So, just let us know you’re aiming to hire fast.

For whatever reason, you may choose to have a go at recruiting global resources yourself. The hiring process, although it includes several stages, is very manageable with the right experience. Knowing in advance where the pitfalls are will set you on the right path.

Here are a few considerations:

• The appropriate salary may be hard to determine.
• The market may be oversaturated with less relevant specialists while recruiting top-guns in your niche may take a lot of headhunting.
• The vacancy you are looking to fill may be in short supply, with a fierce contest for new hires. In this case, your applicants will likely get targeted by the competition, sometimes before you have had the chance to onboard them.
• You invest in attracting the best candidate, but the new employee ends up failing to complete the probationary period and you have to start over.

In this post, we reveal how recruiters like ourselves overcome the challenges of talent acquisition in a global workplace. Use our tips as an action plan for attracting and hiring great employees into your organisation.

Get Your Terminology Right: Are We Talking About Recruitment or Talent Acquisition?

These two terms are often used interchangeably, however, there is a small but critical difference. Recruitment is the overall process, and talent acquisition is a component of the process, alongside other components such as strategic planning, improving company culture, streamlining processes and elevating the employer image.

In this article, we discuss specifically full-cycle recruiting which spans everything from analysing the position to measuring recruitment success. The planning of this process starts with specifying who does what in a recruitment team.

11 Steps for Finding and Hiring the Right Employees Globally

Intention planning and ongoing evaluation are prerequisites for attracting and retaining top talent. Before you take action, take time to outline a recruiting strategy.

Think of the sourcing techniques – the methods you will use to find the qualified candidates you are going to need based on your business needs and budget. But don’t reinvent the wheel. Take our proven framework and tailor it to your company’s rules and policies.

So, what are the steps in the hiring process that make for successful recruitment? We suggest the following eleven-phase talent management plan.

1. Job Analysis

Planning begins far ahead of the first interaction with candidates and even choosing the job board. Planning starts with identifying which vacancy exactly you need to fill – a process known as job analysis. Job analysis focuses on collecting and analysing information relating to the content of the job and the skills required.

Consider four components of the position in question:

• Activities in the role
• Job settings
• Crucial skills
• Personality traits

Talk about these aspects with the department that the future employee will join and their manager. For now, focus on the practical requirements – you need to build a detailed ideal candidate personality profile at the subsequent stages.

Once you have collected sufficient job analysis data, you can address more specific elements of the role. These include employment format (onsite, remote or hybrid), bonuses, benefits and most crucially, salary. For the latter, check the pay range for the job across the following sources:

• Glassdoor
• SalaryExpert
• Salary.com
• Indeed
• Clutch
• Upwork
• And other

Finally, don’t forget that salaries for the same position and skill level may vary from country to country and industry to industry. The best way is to conduct targeted job market research – a recruiting company like Eureka can help you with this.

2. Set Up a Foolproof Recruitment Process

This step intersects the preceding one and could even replace or encompass it. However, we believe you should be setting up an effective talent acquisition strategy after the job has been studied and no related questions are outstanding.

The planning of this process starts with specifying who does what within a recruitment team.

Roles in a Talent Team

Depending on the organisation’s specifics, some or all of the following members may have a role to play in the hiring process:

• The CEO
• The Head of Human Resources
• Internal hiring manager
• Internal recruiter
• Direct supervisor
• Team members
• External recruiter (e.g. Eureka)

These people collectively work towards attracting talent and building relationships with candidates during the hiring process. Specific recruiter duties may vary from company to company.

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Other Recruitment Steps to Plan Ahead

You will have to consider a few other things in your talent planning. Those may include the deadline, success metrics, the number of interviews, interview types and more.

Keep reading to learn about various planning aspects in the subsequent paragraphs – or take a shortcut and reach out to us for assistance in setting up a customised recruitment process for you.

3. Building the Ideal Candidate Profile

Having identified the critical work requirements at the point of analysing the job, you need to outline the key selection criteria for the resumes before they start piling up on your desk. Think about the skill levels, personality traits and experiences a CV will need for it to stand out.

Now decide what to write in the job description. Aim for simple, clear, concise professional language, and keep jargon to a minimum. Remember at this stage, attention spans are measured in seconds so be strategic about the message to attract candidates with the right qualifications. Make sure you include the people who will be working with the new hire in this process.

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If the role is remote and you need people specifically from your region, you should specify this at the top of the description. And if your ideal candidate needs to be a master of a specific language, software or industry, put it all up there as well. All mission-critical qualifications and skills need to be declared right up-front to cut out the number of zero-chance candidates the team will be required to sift through.

Finally, ensure that candidates have read the job description thoroughly by inserting a code word and asking them to answer a related question. For instance, “Answer “mango” when asked what your favourite fruit is during the application process.”

4. Job Posting

Companies recruit employees across different channels. In our experience as recruiters, the best job candidates come from two sources: peer referrals and internal candidate databases (your company’s or partners’).

However, nothing will suggest how to attract top talent better than your job specifics.

For instance, we get great results by hiring developers through niche private forums and online communities, however, gaining access to and credibility within these communities takes time and continued engagement. Alternatively, your hiring process can use more traditional sources like your corporate website, mainstream job boards and social media.

At Eureka (https://eurekaos.com), we usually concentrate on communities hosted on LinkedIn, Telegram, GitHub, Slack, Discord and our internal databases, as well as those provided by our partners.

You can also attract world-class talent by posting job-related content. Professionals need to stay up to date and are always learning, so if you have valuable experience in their field, don’t keep it to yourself. Turn your knowledge into blog posts and case studies and insert job ads throughout this content. For instance, we are now working on articles about the most effective recruitment channels – stay tuned.

Eureka started as a software development company, and our team can provide you with technically relevant, engaging and well-written content that will help pull in tech talent.

5. Sourcing Candidates

There are two modes of approach to prospective hires: reactive and proactive.

In reactive recruitment communication, you contact your applicants. You can do this after the first round of selection when you have already decided who looks like a potential hire and who doesn’t.

Proactive staffing is the opposite. You first source potential candidates and then use good old outreach, cold or warm. The former applies to custom databases and peer referrals, while the latter is for social media.

How do you find potential hires for cold outreach on social platforms?

Here are a few things to look for:

• They have posted about looking for a new job.
• They have, at some point, expressed interest in your company updates by liking, commenting on or reacting to them in other ways.
• They have started following your competitors’ pages lately.
• They have recently been more active on the platform than usual.
• They have been working for a competitor and could be waiting for you to contact them.

Sourcing and screening can be the most time-consuming stages, but you can’t cut corners here. It is at this step that you lay the groundwork which will determine the quality of your prospective employees during the subsequent selection process.

Still, there are mechanisms to save time without sacrificing the quality of your candidates. For instance, recruitment communications can be easily outsourced.

6. Pre-Screening Your Candidate Selection

At this step, you will need to narrow down your top applicant list. And while you can face a talent shortage in some areas, your choice in other domains will be more than ample. Whether the former or the latter in your case will determine how many steps the selection process should include.

You start by rejecting the irrelevant or no-hoper applications (e.g. no appropriate experience) and notifying them of the decision (Always notify, and do it nicely – people hate being ghosted and hate being disrespected. These behaviours will damage your reputation far more than the cost of the effort involved in being polite). After this, you can hunt for the good prospects amidst that, now smaller, pile of resumes.

The methods of candidate selection could involve:

• Verifying resume information;
• Filling in a questionnaire;
• Taking an aptitude test;
• Recording a self-presentation video;
• A brief pre-interview call from the recruiting team.

At this stage, address any uncertainties in the resume and confirm the applicant’s professional and educational background. And make sure to assess the selection criteria that are not obvious from the resumes.

For example, you could use the Ten-Item Personality Inventory (TIPI) a.k.a. the Big Five (OCEAN) personality test. It’s a brief assessment of five personality traits: openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and emotional stability.

Another useful, but less common testing format. is the Six Factor Personality Questionnaire (SFPQ). It allows you to assess a personality across 6 dimensions and 18 facets. This testing can be outsourced, and this is another role which Eureka can undertake.

LIGHTFIELD STUDIOS

Shortly, you will have received responses and results to refine your analysis. If all is well, you will have enough candidate information to decide who should be invited to the interview. These materials may include:

• Video and audio recordings
• Questionnaire results and analytics
• Reference letters
• Work samples (for instance, code in a GitHub repository, a designer portfolio or links to an author’s publications)

Once you’ve made up your mind, we need to do the administration. Notify and thank unsuccessful applicants (No ghosting) and set up the interviews.

7. Job Interviews

Job interviews are an indispensable part of any process. They give you more information than pre-recorded video presentations and extensive cover letters because they include dialogue, spontaneity and non-verbal communication (even when conducted on a video call). Consider these five types of job interviews:

• A phone or video call (10–30 minutes)
• A face-to-face interview at the employer’s premises (30–90 minutes)
• A behaviour-based interview where the applicant is asked about their past experiences to model your expectations.
• A panel interview involving several decision-makers at once.
• A technical interview to assess the candidate’s job-critical technical skills

The way an interview is structured matters a lot. It needs to give the candidate and the interviewers a clear sense of what to expect at each stage and help them prepare accordingly. Consider using this sequence:

• The interviewee and the recruiter introduce themselves to each other.
• The parties engage in small talk to break the ice.
• Each party collects information by asking questions.
• The meeting wraps up with the parties achieving an agreement on the further action plan.

Interviews are both essential and onerous for both parties. When preparing for interviews, consider carefully how many rounds it should involve, and be transparent about the process with the candidates. Fewer is better unless your organisational specifics require more than one or two.

You will also need specific queries to ask the interviewee. Now, before you search for “what questions to ask a candidate in an interview”, consider a different approach. Instead, take your cue from the key selection criteria you have outlined in the previous steps.

How Do You Negotiate Salary with Your Candidate?

Salary negotiation often makes one or both parties feel awkward. Have a salary negotiation strategy planned. Communicate anticipated salaries early in the process to avoid wasting anyone’s time if they are wildly out of kilter. No one wants to do four interviews, an assessment centre and a test to find out the offer is half of what they were expecting. Reputational damage looms.

When you are ready to start the closing and offer dialogue, swing the conversation toward the interviewee’s expectations, and if they struggle to provide a clear answer, approach this by articulating a range. You will craft a more concrete proposal later, once you’ve considered all your choices.

Do External Recruiters Sit in on Interviews?

You may be wondering how you should expect an external recruiter to aid your interviews. We, for instance, usually pre-screen resumes against the necessary hard skills and evaluate the candidates’ soft skills during an introductory call.

Sometimes we will accompany your internal recruiting team in a shadow mode to help analyse the process and the outcomes.

How Many Interviews Should It Take?

The number of interviews will depend on the information that needs to be verified and the internal interviewers’ availability. Usually, it takes 2–3 interviews to single out the top talent.

Most companies prefer to conduct technical interviews themselves when hiring professionals like software developers and QA engineers. But occasionally, appropriately experienced specialist agencies can undertake this as well.

Including a listening recruiter in a shadow mode has proven to enhance the hiring process. During an interview, requirements may emerge that have not been included in the job description, and these need to be taken into account when sourcing or screening other candidates for the same vacancy or company.

8. Selection Process After Interviews

Once the interview phase is complete, you move on to the candidate selection phase.

So, what is the hiring process after an interview?

Selection is a top-down process, which means you reduce your choices after every step. Define a threshold, score your candidates and see how they rank on a scale from the highest to lowest.  Very simply, only the candidates at the top and above the threshold make it to the next stage. Inform both groups and move on.

At this point, both you and your candidates have invested significant time and energy in the process. It is only fair that rejected candidates start to receive detailed and honest feedback about the rationale for rejection. If they are on a job search, this feedback could assist them in moving forward and securing another role. Be honest and non-confrontational – the process should be seen as a positive for both parties and if done right will improve the company’s reputation.

At this point, through the interviews, you have already assessed your candidates’ soft skills. Next, you will need to undertake any required technical assesment.

The final selection phase is when you choose your top player – the applicant who looks like the best cultural and professional fit. And to confirm the choice, don’t forget any required background checks – this applies to education, financial rankings and criminal records. This is something that external recruitment agencies specialise in and can be simply outsourced.

Ideally at this stage, you would also confirm what the strategy is if the negotiation phase fails. Who are the second and third options? Can they be kept on-hold, but still in-process, whilst attempting to close on the preferred candidate? This is a delicate process that needs a careful communication strategy. Hotly contested skillsets may just move onto another opportunity if they perceive that an opportunity has gone cool on them.

9. Negotiation

Selection doesn’t stop when the top candidate has been chosen. As recruiters, we will follow up on your candidate to make sure that both parties are on the same page. We will try to understand that person’s impression and find out how their expectations align with yours.

This step involves negotiating the starting salary and date, job benefits, time off and similar employment aspects. Employers need to consider that, particularly when dealing with highly sought-after skillsets, candidates might be choosing between several employers.

Recruiting agencies have an advantage here over direct recruitment in managing this. Because by acting as a mediator for the candidate, it makes it easier for them to negotiate and ask direct questions than for the prospective employer.

Once all is clarified, the job offer is formalised.

10. Onboarding

The onboarding stage varies from organisation to organisation. However, the global hiring process has two specific challenges that many businesses will encounter: relocation and employee poaching.

Relocation

The position may need to be carried out on-site and not in the employee’s region or country of origin. In this case, you’ll need to address some of the following problems:

• Legal paperwork
• Transportation
• Accommodation (Transitional and permanent)
• Family settlement (Schooling etc.)
• Cultural adaptation
• Language courses
• Lifestyle consulting

If you don’t have in-house experts in international law, consider working with global recruiting agencies who have extensive experience in these processes.

Employee Poaching Prevention

It would be a shame if a competitor stole your new superstar developer or if the candidate failed the probationary period. Both of these are real threats.

According to HR News, 20% of new employees in the UK leave their jobs within the first 45 days. In the US, 31% quit within the first six months. (Zippia)

You can do your best to ensure the newcomer sticks with you, and yet they may end up leaving. And there are other risks to take into account:

• The candidate lied about the skills or experience at the interview
• Background checks failed and turned up some unexpected issue
• Cultural match failed
• There are job aspects/requirements which the candidate hadn’t expected
• Situations beyond the parties’ control (e.g. the project closes unexpectedly or the candidate is forced to move home)

This is where the second, third, or fourth preferred but previously unsuccessful candidates can come into play. This list will save you from starting the search from scratch. Confirm the job spec and reach out to each in turn and see if the dialogue can be revived.

Better yet, if you work with a recruitment agency, they will have their own pool of candidates with pre-verified criteria. This can speed up a search dramatically. If you used Eureka to attract your hire, we will not collect the full fee until you have successfully fully onboarded your hire. We oversee the process through the probationary period to collect feedback from both parties, confirm all goes smoothly and monitor for any signs of poaching.

Should they still end up jumping ship, Eureka will replace them without further charge. This is the best guarantee of successful recruitment, whether onsite or remote.

11. Measuring Success in Recruitment

After a successful hire, you may want to assess your hiring process as-is and make modifications to improve your candidate conversion rates going forward. Here are some commonly used metrics used by recruitment agencies or recruiters who deal with a large amount of vacancies:

• Source of hire. Compare all the channels you have used and rank them by value.
• Days to hire. Calculate how long it takes from a successful candidate’s application to offer acceptance.
• Hiring manager satisfaction. Talk with your hiring manager to find out what they think about the hiring experience.
• Offer acceptance rate (OAR). The percentage of your offers accepted by candidates.
• Candidates per opening (CPO). How many people apply for the position, or how attractive and visible the job description is?
• Recruitment funnel effectiveness. Divide the number of applicants who have made it past the first stage by the CPO and estimate how well-targeted your hiring campaign has been.
• Selection ratio. Divide the number of hired applicants by the CPO and see how many options you need to evaluate before a hire is made.

Use these recruitment KPIs to optimise your hiring process and spend less time and money on this in the future.

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Ready to Attract Top Talent?

The recruitment plan we have outlined in this article can form the basis of your talent management framework in 2023. The formation of a long-term strategy needs to begin way before job analysis – set off early with the ongoing promotion of your company culture in the right forums, consolidate this with an open, honest and transparent recruitment framework and use this groundwork to deliver long-term employee retention.

Eureka is confident that, if you follow the process we have described, you will navigate the recruitment maze to a successful hire. Good luck!

If you are considering taking on external help in recruiting, be it the entire process or the outsourcing of some components, we will be happy to help. Eureka has significant experience in hiring professionals across various domains, locally and globally. Background checks, tests, onboarding, negotiation – we can help you every step of the way.

Contact us today to discuss filling your vacancy risk-free.