Finding the right developer can feel impossible, especially as hiring demands evolve. One moment, every company’s competing for talent; the next, the market cools, and you wonder if any applicants are still job hunting. Even with AI, attracting and retaining top-tier talent during turbulent times is tough. Nevertheless, with the proper company hiring practices, you can create a more efficient recruitment process. In this article, we’ll explore best practices to strengthen your hiring strategy and help you secure the right talent—no matter the market.

One effective way to implement the best company hiring practices is to enlist the help of AI tools like Noxx's AI recruiter. This technology helps you attract, screen, and hire top talent faster while creating a more unbiased process that mitigates the risk of human error and fosters diversity.

Table of Content

• What are Hiring Practices and Why Do They Matter?

• 18 Best Company Hiring Practices

• Upload a Job and Get 10 Candidates within 7 Days with Noxx (No Risk, No Upfront Fees)

What are Hiring Practices and Why Do They Matter?

Hiring practices are the strategies you use to find the best candidates for your team. They can improve your hiring process, which involves the following parts:

• Finding: Attracting candidates to your job posting is the first part of the hiring process. This step may involve networking with candidates or advertising your job opening.

• Screening: Once people apply to your position, you need to narrow down who you want to move on to the interview process. Use applicant tracking systems to review resumes and conduct phone interviews to ask candidates a few preliminary questions.

• Interviewing: An interview is your chance to get to know your most promising candidates better. You can ask them questions to learn more about their skills, experiences, and other qualifications. 

• Hiring: This is the point where you offer your top candidate the job. This part may involve you negotiating aspects such as their salary and job benefits.

• Onboarding: Once you hire an employee, the hiring process isn't quite over yet. You still need to help them become familiar with the company by outlining their responsibilities and providing training.   

Why Are Hiring Practices So Important?  

Finding hiring practices that work for your company is essential for the following reasons: 

Finding better employees

Having effective hiring practices can help you find candidates who are going to excel in your job opening. Identifying top candidates can help you hire employees with the right skills and qualifications. 

Retaining more talent

Once you hire a candidate, you need to figure out how you're going to onboard them and make a good first impression. This step is an essential part of ensuring new hires want to stay with your company rather than seeking employment elsewhere.

Creating a cohesive team

Along with thinking of how a candidate is going to perform in their position, you need to consider how they are going to work with your current team. You can use your hiring process to determine if a candidate has strong teamwork skills. 

Understanding Full Lifecycle Recruiting  

Full lifecycle recruiting refers to the entire end-to-end process of finding, screening, hiring, and onboarding new employees. It’s not just about finding a great candidate. The hiring process continues even after you’ve interviewed or made an offer. Full life cycle recruiting is typically broken into six steps, each of which moves the company closer to finding the best candidate for the job:

• Preparing: Promoting your employer brand, building a recruitment strategy and plan, and writing the job description and ad.

• Sourcing: Posting the job ad, relying on employee referrals, and searching for qualified candidates.

• Screening: Reviewing resumes and conducting phone screens.

• Selecting: Conducting interviews and evaluating candidates.

• Hiring: Sending an offer letter and negotiating job details.

• Onboarding: Welcoming, training, and integrating new hires.

As you review and refine your recruitment process, think about how you can apply these strategies to create a more holistic approach from start to finish. This kind of consistency in your recruitment process is what turns high-quality candidates into long-term employees.

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• Strategic Recruiting
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• How to Recruit Tech Talent
• How to Recruit IT Talent
• Recruitment Process Outsourcing
• How to Recruit Engineers
• Hire Offshore Developers

18 Best Company Hiring Practices

1. Use Social Media to Widen Reach and Build Employer Brand

Social media platforms are often exclusively the focus of marketing teams rather than HR professionals. Despite norms, recruiters must use social media to promote roles and the company’s employer brand. The overall goal for recruitment professionals is to match roles with the right candidates.

Recruiters can widen their reach through social media. If you’re not already integrated into your company’s social media calendar, consider seeking space in the following capacities:

LinkedIn

A professional-centered platform that enables recruiters to share industry awards, educational webinars, job descriptions, and internal company highlights.

Instagram

A visual and consumer-first platform that engages audiences with opportunities for user-generated content (UGC) and a glimpse into the employer brand. Showcase snippets from webinars or employee testimonials within the Reels or Stories features.

YouTube

A platform centered around video content. Recruiters have the opportunity to demonstrate company culture in a visual format. 

TikTok

A short-form video platform that’s perfect for engaging users with trending audio and humanizing aspects of your company culture.

These popular social media platforms will help you catch the attention of active and passive candidates while providing people with a window into your company culture.

2. Consider Referrals

Employee referral programs enable recruiting teams to tap into current employees’ networks to fill open positions. A referral is a recommendation from a current employee that encourages the consideration of an individual external to the company to fill a given position. Employee referral initiatives may sound a little far-fetched on their own. 

Conditional Rewards for Quality Hires

Many companies incentivize current employees to refer qualified candidates to the company. The most popular (and motivating) incentive is to provide monetary compensation to those who refer a successful candidate who:

• Accepts an offer

• Remains in the said role for a determined period (Ex. at least 90 days)

Both referral and the referring employee are in good standing. It’s easy to initiate referral programs into most automation and applicant tracking systems as well. This takes the weight off your shoulders that would otherwise require you to keep track of referral bonuses.

3. Pay Attention to Passive Candidates

Targeting passive talent can help you fill roles with better talent more quickly. It’s easiest to engage with people who are actively applying to positions, but these individuals may not be the best candidates for the role you’re hoping to fill. 

Expanding Your Search to the Entire Talent Pool

According to LinkedIn, 70% of job candidates are passive talent. Meaning, they aren’t actively searching for a new role. That’s the vast majority of job seekers. When you announce job openings, you should be considering passive candidates just as much as the active job seekers who will apply to the job post on your site. 

How to Cater to Passive Job Seekers?

• Post job openings on social media and promote them.

• Encourage and incentivize employee referrals.

• Maintain positive employee reviews on third-party websites like Glassdoor.

• Develop engaging and shareable job opening content for LinkedIn and social media.

• Write accurate job descriptions that engage and align with industry standards.

• Taking the time to extend yourself to passive candidates will be worth your while. They may be more challenging to engage, but they account for a massive majority of the market and offer skillsets that other candidates might not have.

4. Build an Employer Brand (Even if You’re Not Actively Hiring)

A strong employer brand will serve as the first impression of your company culture to potential candidates. Further, your demonstration of culture through employer branding activities can dictate the candidate experience as they move through the hiring process. Employer branding is your company's identity from an internal perspective, which attracts new employees to join. 

Core Elements of Employer Branding

Employer branding assets include:

• Company mission

• Core values

• Information on company culture

• Branding that invokes company's personality

SHRM says it best: “Employer brand affects recruitment of new employees, retention and engagement of current employees, and the overall perception of the organization in the market.” 

One in three people has turned down a job offer due to negative employer reviews, which indicates how much employer reputation plays a role in the onboarding process and with new hires. 

The Benefits of Investing in Your Employer Brand

Candidates are searching for information about your company. Even if you’re not actively hiring, investing in your brand as an employer will make you more appealing to potential and current employees. Employers with good employer brands also showcase lower employee turnover rates.

5. Develop and Share a Clear Hiring Process

One central pain point of job candidates is the long and arduous recruitment process. It’s part of a recruiter’s job to ensure that employers and potential new employees are on the same page regarding the application and interview process. One easy way to address this is to lay out the pathway to an offer at the end of screening calls. 

Does the recruitment process have a skills assessment? Will there be a panel interview that the candidate should be prepared for? The application process is complex as it is—applicants will appreciate any insight into the hiring manager's decision-making process.

The Importance of Pay and Benefits Transparency

Additionally, 44% of applicants actively look for details on pay and benefits during the hiring process. As an HR professional, you’re in the best position to share this information. Be transparent about what your company offers—candidates want to know they’re joining a business that values and supports its people. 

You can make this information available either through employer branding content hubs or through compelling careers pages and employee testimonials. Just make sure this vital information is accessible to candidates.

6. Always Align with the Hiring Manager

Talent shortages were a pervasive trend in 2023, and experts predicted that 2024 would look similar. The number of new job openings and resignations remained low as employees were more reluctant to leave their current roles, meaning there were (generally) fewer great candidates on the market. This will continue throughout 2025. 

The "Purple Squirrel" Fallacy

Hiring managers often make matters even worse by looking for a “purple squirrel” — the mythical candidate who ticks all the skills and cultural fit boxes and is ready to settle for below-average compensation. None of those candidates is on the market (sometimes leading us to postulate to some hiring managers, “Is the purple squirrel in the room with us right now? ").

Honing in on Ideal Candidates

To correctly manage expectations and still attract several great candidates, do the essential grunt work: Conduct a job task analysis to hone in on key tasks for each role and the respective competencies of an ideal hire. Keep a looser list of minimal job requirements and list more items as preferred to attract a wider candidate pool.

Communicate what the job entails on a daily or quarterly basis, rather than only listing examples of candidate requirements and preferred qualifications (i.e., let candidates know what their life at your company might look like). 

Streamlining Candidate Evaluation

Create skills tests to quickly evaluate each candidate’s job-specific skills to eliminate the bulk of the under-qualified candidates— and not let the right candidates slip through the cracks. Present the final results to the decision-makers and tweak the job opening assets (job listings, ads, etc.) based on their feedback. 

By doing the prep work in advance, you reduce the odds of “missing the mark” on the role requirements and presenting candidates who are amazing in general but are ultimately a mismatch for your company culture.

7. Make Job Postings Accurate and Easy to Find

All job descriptions should embody two main characteristics: Accurate to the position and accessible to candidates. It’s the HR department’s job to ensure that job postings successfully encompass both requirements. In terms of accuracy, candidates must understand what they’re applying for. 

Expanding Your Job Search Reach

By doing competitive research and developing industry knowledge for target positions, you should be able to craft job descriptions and titles that align with the market and the position you’re hoping to fill. Accessibility for job postings can be a whole different animal. Your options for expanding your job search are to post to various job boards or to create job ads. 

Job board is a website or platform dedicated to connecting candidates with active role vacancies. Platforms include:

• Indeed

• Glassdoor

• Otta

• Wellfound

A job ad is a description posted to a platform outside of the company website that characterizes the nature of the role and entices candidates to apply. Job ads live on job boards and company websites.

8. Use Talent Gap Analyses to Inform Your Recruiting Process

AI adoption, sustainability-related transformation, and labor productivity increases—every company has ambitious goals for 2025. While they might all be necessary to stay ahead of the curve, many of these growth initiatives also require a new caliber of talent. 

Conducting a Talent Gap Analysis

To figure out which skillsets and capabilities you should prioritize for hiring in 2025, conduct a talent gap analysis. Start with a general workforce assessment to get a snapshot of the employees’:

• Talents

• Skill levels

• Capabilities

A good assessment should include a mix of quantifiable methods, such as skills assessments, job simulation tests, and competency models. You can use these talent gap assessments to help you build better candidate profiles. 

Hiring to Fill a Skill Gap

Let’s say you’re hiring a sales development representative for a team with strong prospecting practices and negotiation skills but somewhat lacking sales analytics capabilities. The top candidate for this position would be someone with stronger analytical skills and, for example, good knowledge of data analytics software like Power BI, rather than just strong interpersonal skills.

9. Lean into Automation with Applicant Tracking Systems

Automation is about to make your life so much easier. Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) are a must for modern recruiters. An ATS is a digital system that automates some aspects of the recruitment process. It intends to streamline staffing and human resources activities to enhance competitive efficiency.

Of course, introducing an ATS means getting comfortable with recruiting software. Here are some of our best-in-class recommendations:

• Noxx

• Greenhouse

• BambooHR

• Workable

• BreezyHR

• JazzHR

What Do Applicant Tracking Systems Do?

Applicant Tracking Systems are essential to businesses because they allow companies to quickly track the status of individual candidates in the recruitment process. 

What Can an ATS Do for You?

• Manage interview scheduling.

• Manage the dissemination of job offers.

• Handle aspects of onboarding procedures.

• Move candidate information and resumes through the interview process.

• Post job descriptions to multiple platforms automatically.

• Automate communication regarding applications and next steps.

• Maintain your talent pool.

There are tons of ways an applicant tracking system aids your recruitment team’s ability to bring in new talent on accelerated timelines.

10. Learn About the Talent Pool (Including Past Candidates)

One of the many challenges that recruiters must face is upkeeping a steady stream of candidates for positions that might not even currently be open. This means that recruiters are going to need to research and understand the talent pools in which they are (or will be) hiring for.

Building a Talent Pool

In the past, recruitment professionals may have rejected qualified candidates and dismissed their applications even if their skill sets met the needs of the organization. Keeping up with a talent pool encourages staffing pros to keep talented job candidates in the conversation, even if they’re not chosen for the initial position they applied and interviewed for.

Think about it, the job market is tough, and you may have interviewed two or three excellent candidates for an open position. Only one person can end up with the job, but why discard the other two impressive applicants? 

Engaging Your Full Talent Pool

Understanding your talent pool includes intriguing new candidates just as much as it means engaging promising past applicants. Think about how you can best leverage your employer brand to sustain interest with those you’ve already vetted.

11. Hire Recruitment Agencies

Looking for a way to rapidly scale recruitment processes up and down without overspending on internal recruiters? Recruitment agencies are one resource you can use to access expert recruiters who are specialized in your industry without having to commit to the permanence of adding new internal teammates.

How to Hire and Utilize a Recruitment Agency?

In a nutshell, here’s what leveraging a professional staffing and recruitment agency will look like: 

• Send out RFPs or reach out to qualified staffing services firms.

• Interview recruitment firms and evaluate your options based on your industry, budget, timeline, location and other priorities.

• Sign a contract with your selected agency.

• Identify attributes of quality candidates for open positions

• Let your recruiting agency search for the best talent that matches your requirements.

• Consider having your recruiting agency screen potential candidates before sending them to hiring managers.

• Evaluate the recruitment agency’s work against your goals for time-to-hire, quality candidates, and overall costs.

Note: Recruiting agencies will all work differently. If you want additional services from your provider, make sure to discuss your needs in the interview and RFP stage.

The more communication you do in this stage, the more successful your collaboration will be. It’s also important to note that the expertise level that recruiting companies possess might make them the best choice for companies. 

Because these companies dedicate themselves to recruiting activities exclusively, they will understand recruiting trends better than internal teammates with cross-functional responsibilities outside of recruiting.

12. Make Candidate Experience a Priority

Hundreds of candidates are likely to apply for your open roles, especially if you’re offering remote work. While a good chunk of them may not be a good fit, you want to make sure that everyone still has an A+ experience. Companies that treat candidates with respect and dignity improve the quality of hires by 70% on average. A great candidate experience also helps: 

• Strengthen your employer brand.

• Populate your talent pool.

• Increase the number of employee referrals.

That said, optimizing every touchpoint in your hiring process is no small task. Start with the lowest-hanging fruit—common complaints from unsuccessful applicants. Common candidate experience problems:

• No updates on the application status

• Delayed or generic feedback after interview rounds

• Impersonal, automatic communication from the hiring managers

• Unrealistic or misleading job descriptions

• Low transparency about the next steps in the hiring process

• Extended hiring timelines

• Disorganized interview logistics

• Insensitive rejection process or ghosting

All of the above grievances have a common theme: Poor, impersonal communication on the company’s behalf.

Navigating High-Volume Applications

Having a large volume of candidates isn’t an excuse to keep them waiting to hear back from you. And yet, if 1,000 candidates apply for an open role and 980 are a bad fit, you can’t send that many rejection letters in such a short time frame. You can resort to using an applicant tracking system (ATS), but these platforms have faults.

Skills-Based Hiring to Improve Experience

There have been numerous debates about recruitment tools rejecting applications based on keywords or degree requirements. Candidates are not loving it, to say the least. A better approach to elevating candidate experience in 2025 is to introduce a skills-based hiring process. 

Instead of scrolling through endless resumes and scheduling multiple interview rounds, you can automatically pre-qualify candidates via skills assessments.

13. Designate Recruiting Metrics to Highlight Areas for Improvement

Recruiting metrics are essential for the recruiting and staffing process because they allow companies to evaluate the performance of the team. Whether you’re hiring a recruiting company or dealing with staffing in-house, you will need KPIs and metrics to determine how successful your team is in its efforts.

Key Recruitment Metrics and KPIs

Every team has different needs and priorities. Still, a few recruitment metrics account for the majority of staffing priorities. Here are our top picks for staffing metrics to track: 

• Time to fill/Time to hire: This metric indicates the average amount of time it takes your hiring team to fill an open position assigned to them.

• Interview-to-hire rate: This metric examines the number of candidates it takes a recruiter to interview before an offer is made. Strong interview-to-hire rates are 3:1 or better.

• Quality of hire: This metric can be tracked with a hiring manager survey or any sort of qualitative feedback from hiring managers themselves. The goal is to determine the quality of candidates sent from the screening phase to the hiring managers.

• Employee retention rate: This metric tracks the rate at which employees continue working at your company after a given period. Typically, retention is calculated on an annual basis. In these cases, retention is equal to the number of employees with a year of service divided by the total number of employees who held the same positions a year ago.

• Offer acceptance rate (OAR): This metric tracks the percentage of candidates who receive job offers and accept them within your company. To calculate this, the number of offers is divided by the number of hires made. These metrics are essential, both when determining the success of internal teams and external agencies. 

Making Data-Driven Hiring Decisions

Regardless of how companies choose to hire for new roles, KPIs should be set to determine where improvements can be made. By introducing metrics to your current recruiting processes, you’re enabling data-driven decisions to be made regarding the performance of your hiring teams.

14. Streamline Repetitive Tasks with Generative AI

Generative AI was one of the hottest recruiting trends in 2024. Although only 5% of HR teams incorporated gen AI in their hiring processes as of mid-2023, many more ran pilots in 2024, and that looks to increase well into 2025 with tools like DeepSeek hitting the market. 

So how can gen AI help savvy recruiters stay ahead in today’s hiring landscape?

In several ways:

• Job description generation: Guided by your job task analysis and some prompts on tone of voice, ChatGPT can generate new job posts at a faster rate.

• Remove biased language: Pop your copy into the app and ask it to flag or edit non-inclusive phrases to make your ads appeal to the broadest cross-section of talent.

• Email templates: Ask ChatGPT to create a set of standard email templates for targeting candidates or giving feedback at different interview stages. Although slightly generic, such templates prevent the “blank page” syndrome.

• Summarize survey response: You can task generative AI apps to find common themes in free-text survey responses or analyze feedback from unsuccessful candidates to get more insights about your candidates’ experiences. Gen AI may not be ready to communicate directly with candidates (and we’re honestly okay with that; we believe in the power of human connection), but it can handle many ancillary tasks piling up on your to-do list.

15. Build an Internal Mobility Program

Most organizations already run successful employee referral programs. Take this a notch further by building an internal mobility program as another channel for talent acquisition and management. An internal mobility program helps you track the right candidates for:

• Promotion

• Job rotations

• Opportunities to split time between roles

Data-Driven Planning for Internal Mobility

An internal mobility program also helps prevent talent attrition. According to the 2023 Pulse of Talent survey, 88% of flight-risk employees would consider staying with the company if offered internal career opportunities. To launch an internal mobility program in 2025, use data from your talent gap analysis to identify required capabilities and roles.

Create a new set of job descriptions to market internally. Streamline the application process by using skills assessments to identify talent with the highest potential (and avoid anchoring your decisions to current titles).

16. Create New Opportunities for Upskilling 

The mismatch between the supply of skills and demand will remain strong in this decade. According to the World Economic Forum, 40% of core skills will change in the next five years, and 50% of all employees will need to retrain. The global workforce is divided into two: those with valuable skills who are well set to keep learning, and those without.

The Financial Barrier to Upskilling

We found that often, those without the skills are less financially secure and less able to access training in the skills of the future. PwC Workers who struggle or can’t pay their bills are 12 percentage points less likely to seek out opportunities for new skills development compared to those who can. 

Using Unsuccessful Candidate Data

As an employer, you can change this negative dynamic and propel your people for better career success. To nurture the best talent, we recommend implementing these recruitment practices: Evaluate test scores from unsuccessful job seekers to better understand the overall talent competency levels on the market. 

Data-Informed Hiring and Onboarding

This data can help you understand whether it’s best to hire externally or invest in preparing internal candidates for more senior roles. Use data from candidate scorecards to create personalized onboarding paths for new hires. This way, you can avoid administering redundant training and focus more on their weaker skill sets.

Assessing Internal Skills Gaps

Conduct internal skill assessments to identify skills gaps among your workforce. Use the insights to determine training needs and inform the future upskilling/re-skilling programs. By determining upskilling needs early in the hiring process, you can increase new employees’ time to productivity.

The Business Value of Upskilling

Ongoing investment in workforce training also helps with talent management and leads to higher employee retention. Over 90% of CEOs who launch upskilling programs report higher employee productivity, improvements in talent acquisition and retention, and a more resilient workforce.

17. Follow Up Promptly

Maintaining regular and transparent communication with prospective workers is both respectful of their time and interest and helpful in keeping the efficiency and effectiveness of your hiring process. Successful communication has three critical components:

• Prompt responses to inquiries: Following up after interviews with a realistic anticipated timeline on when candidates can expect to hear back

• Constructive feedback: This approach improves the candidate's experience, fosters positive relationships, and maintains your organization's reputation. 

• Consider using an online application system, like Workday, or make your ATS timeline visible to candidates, so they always have up-to-date timing information. Failing to communicate promptly with potential hires can diminish your company's image, and you'll risk losing out on talented candidates who may move on to other opportunities.

Suppose you find it challenging to maintain follow-up systems as your team grows. In that case, a freelance recruiter or HR virtual assistant can help manage candidate communications and build templates that keep things consistent and professional.

18. Leverage Data and Analytics

Almost everything we do generates data. And if you’re smart, you’re leveraging that data to optimise your hiring pipeline and gain a comprehensive view of the recruiting process. Are you measuring the efficiency of your efforts with these metrics?

• Time to hire – how long does it take you to fill positions?

• Cost per applicant – how cost-effective is your recruitment process?

• Sourcing effectiveness – which hiring channels are delivering the best ROI?

• Application completion rate – how many candidates abandon the recruitment process?

• First-year attrition rate – how many hires remain with the company beyond the first year?

• Time to promotion – how long does it take for recruits to advance in the organisation?

• Diversity of candidates – how diverse a candidate pool are you attracting?

Related Reading

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• How to Attract Top Talent
• Hire Latin American Developers
• Best AI Recruiting Tools
• Best Recruitment Agencies for Startups
• Nearshore Software Development
• Where to Hire Developers
• How to Hire for a Startup

Upload a Job and Get 10 Candidates within 7 Days with Noxx (No Risk, No Upfront Fees)

Finding the right talent is essential for any business looking to grow and succeed. The longer a position stays open, the more money it costs the company. Beyond the financial impact, prolonged hiring processes can hurt team morale and slow productivity, ultimately affecting the bottom line. AI recruitment tools can help you alleviate these issues to improve hiring outcomes. 

How Noxx Works

Noxx uses artificial intelligence to help you recruit the right talent faster and more affordably. Upload your job description to our platform, and our AI will automatically screen over 1,000 applicants to find you the top 10 candidates in just seven days. You only pay $300 if you hire someone, which is a fraction of what traditional recruiters charge. 

You also get upfront access to salary expectations, so there are no surprises. Noxx helps you find quality engineers, marketers, and salespeople at up to 70% less than US rates, so you can build a strong team without breaking the bank.  

How AI Can Improve Your Hiring Outcomes

AI recruitment tools can help you improve your hiring outcomes in several ways. First, these platforms help reduce the time it takes to hire. They do this by automatically screening applicants for hard and soft skills so you can quickly identify the candidates that are the best fit for your role. The longer a role stays open, the more money it costs the company.

Beyond the financial impact, prolonged hiring processes can hurt team morale and slow productivity, ultimately affecting the bottom line. AI recruitment tools can help you alleviate these issues to improve hiring outcomes.  

Why Noxx is Better Than Traditional Recruiting

Noxx is better than traditional recruiting for many reasons. First, we use AI to find candidates, which eliminates human bias and promotes diversity. Second, our platform is affordable and doesn’t require any upfront fees or expensive commissions. Finally, Noxx gives you complete control of the hiring process and allows you to make objective decisions backed by data.

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