Part of the hr playbooks cluster. This is educational, operational guidance that connects to the wider site — the employee lifecycle, employer operations, metrics and templates.
Use it as a framework and adapt each step to the role.
Why it matters
A consistent recruitment process is faster, fairer and produces better decisions. A repeatable play means anyone can run a hire to the same standard and you can improve it over time.
It connects attraction to a clean onboarding handover.
Key concepts
- A defined sequence of stages with owners.
- Consistent criteria and evaluation.
- A realistic, tracked timeline.
- A clean handover to onboarding.
Operational framework
- Define the role and success criteria.
- Plan the process: stages, owners, timeline, channels.
- Source and screen against the criteria.
- Interview and evaluate consistently with scorecards.
- Decide, make the offer, and hand over to onboarding.
Common challenges
- Sourcing before the role is defined.
- Inconsistent stages across hires.
- Slow decisions losing candidates.
- Weak handover to onboarding.
Best practices
- Define the role before sourcing.
- Use the same stages and scorecards each time.
- Track time to fill and act on it.
- Hand over context to onboarding.
Common mistakes
- Improvising each hire.
- Shifting criteria mid-process.
- Optimising only for speed.
- Treating the offer as the finish line.
Measure this with the time to fill metric, put it into practice with the recruitment planning template, and run it as a system via hiring forecasting.
Export, edit and share documents
The documents, policies and templates this involves can be exported, edited, signed, stored and shared as PDFs with the HELPERG PDF Editor.
Free, printable HR resources
Practical, ungated resources to put this into action — no signup.