Recruiting is usually a fun part of the company, business is going all right so you´re hiring more staff and the selected new joiners are typically very happy to be chosen. Recruitment can be a happy place! However, in order to keep recruitment a happy place you will need some rules, guidelines, and policies in place to make sure everything works out well.
A good recruitment policy should focus on the selection and hiring part of the recruitment process but definitely also on the onboarding and employee policy. Because in both areas, things can go wrong if you don´t have good guidelines in place. So in order to be a good employer with a successful recruiting department, make sure you have a policy and you keep it up to date. Let´s review both of them! 
Selection & hiring policy
First of all, the purpose of your selection and hiring policy should be to comply with the law. In many countries, your company could get into deep trouble if there are signs of biased or discriminative hiring. Therefore, your recruitment policy should include how you ensure equal opportunities and you should make sure that your recruitment process is conducted in a fair and transparent way.
Apart from legal concerns, your policy should be aligned with your business objectives. How does your recruitment policy help the company in achieving its goals? This for example impacts how you write your job descriptions to ensure recruiting the person that can make the most positive contribution to the organization.
Your policy should also outline your recruitment sources, where are you going to find your candidates? This will be different for every company, for example, some companies only hire from certain universities. This kind of decisions should be documented somewhere in order for them to be known and have an effect. This sort of information should be in your selection and hiring policy.
The same applies to selection criteria, to ensure consistency in your hiring, you should establish some guidelines on what you´re hiring for. If you work with pre-determined selection criteria at all stages of the recruitment process, you will reduce the risk of biased or discriminative decisions as well. Your candidates should be evaluated against these pre-determined criteria to make sure that your evaluation across candidates is consistent.
Onboarding & Employee policy
The previously described part of the recruitment policy deals with the policy before the chosen candidate actually enters the business. It was all focused on a policy avoiding things going wrong when hiring the candidate. However, what kind of policy do you have in place when the candidate is already in the business?
As an employer, what do you do when things don´t go according to plan? This is where a good onboarding and employee policy comes in. For example, if your recent hire calls in sick all the time, leaves early to let their colleagues finish the work or shares their work on social media, what is your policy for that?
Your onboarding and employee policy should focus on the required knowledge, skills and behaviors to become effective employees of your organization. Here it is important to not solely think about knowledge and skills to get the job done, but also ways of working and your guidelines with respect to social media and online presence. In the ever more digital world we´re currently living in, many of your employees will have a strong social media presence and they might be blogging or participating in online discussion forums. What rules or guidelines do you have regarding your employees´ online behavior? Even if you have a clear policy, technology is advancing so fast that your policy might need an update now and then to keep up. With a clear onboarding and employee policy, you can avoid unpleasant surprises in those areas.
How did you design your recruitment policy? Is there anything you would add to above-mentioned topics?
