How to Find the Right HR Candidate to Help Your Company Succeed

A great HR professional can have an enormous impact on your company. Depending on their role, they might make all the difference in building up a talented workforce, retaining employees in a competitive industry, and keeping you out of avoidable legal trouble. You need the right candidate to help your company move forward.

Hiring an HR manager or specialist should follow the same general process as hiring any other employee. However, you will want to fine-tune much of the process for the specific role you’re looking to fill.

1. Decide What Kind of HR Candidate You Need

If this person will be the only HR person on staff, or if you’re a startup planning to grow quickly, you need someone with experience. A senior HR professional will be able to help you design an effective hiring process for all roles, build a great team quickly, and set up your company for success. 

Plan to pay a higher salary for an experienced candidate. As of May 2023, the median annual salary for a human resources manager in the U.S. was $136,350, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), and the highest 10 percent earned more than $239,200.

Working with a tight budget? Plan to recruit an HR specialist at an earlier stage of their career to save on some of your hiring costs. According to BLS data, the median annual salary for a human resources specialist was $67,650 in May 2023. A solid lower-level HR candidate will be able to handle your daily procedures. If you have higher-level HR concerns, you can work with an independent consultant on an as-needed basis.

2. Create a Job Description

Not all HR positions have the same duties, so don’t post a generic HR job description written by ChatGPT without at least taking the time to closely edit it. Think about what your company needs:

• If your company uses a specific HR information system (HRIS), you might prefer a candidate who is already familiar with that system.
• If you need someone to design a company-specific recruiting process that helps you find candidates with special qualities, you might want a candidate who has done that type of work for other companies in the past.
• If the HR professional will need to help you meet legal obligations, ask for a candidate with knowledge of labor legislation and compliance.
• If the HR employee will help manage payroll or benefits, mention that in the job description.
• If your company is struggling with employee conflicts or complaints, ask for a candidate with employee relations skills.
• If you’re hoping to grow quickly and anticipate having a larger HR team in the near future, look for candidates with leadership skills and experience guiding HR initiatives.

You can use an online template to ensure you include all of the most important information in the job description.

3. Make the Job Attractive

Top HR candidates, especially senior professionals with a lot of experience, often have a lot of job opportunities to choose from. Think about how you can encourage them to apply for your role.

Can you offer competitive pay? Does your company have a great mission that would attract employees who want to make a difference in the world? Is your company an unusually good place to work for a specific reason? Mention all of those things in your job description. 

Keep in mind that HR roles tend to be direct-hire roles, not temp-to-hire ones. Like employees in most roles, HR professionals tend to prefer the stability of a guaranteed long-term job. Even if you’ve recruited on a temp-to-hire basis in the past, you might want to use a direct-hire approach to attract more skilled HR candidates who likely have other job opportunities.

4. Spread the Word

Now it’s time to promote your HR job opening and seek out candidates. There are many ways to do this, but some tactics tend to be more effective than others:

• Working with a staffing and recruiting agency helps you find more qualified candidates quickly. The agency will have a large pool of candidates, and they can help with the screening and candidate selection processes. This is an especially good choice if you don’t already have an HR specialist on staff who specializes in recruiting.
• Ask for referrals. Someone on your current team may already know a great candidate for your HR role, which helps you to save on recruiting and improve the chance of hiring someone who is a good culture fit.
• Post to a job board. People with HR skills are more likely to use professional sites like LinkedIn, SHRM, and HR-specific job boards to find opportunities rather than general social media sites. 

5. Screen Job Applicants

Job postings on large, easily accessible sites like LinkedIn may attract some great candidates, but they also tend to attract a lot of unqualified ones. You may have thousands of resumes to sort through, with only a few that are a good fit.

You can ask a recruiting agency to help with the candidate screening process. There are also tools that sort resumes by whether they include job-related keywords, but you can easily miss out on great candidates who use different terminology, have an unusual but relevant background, or simply format their resume in a way the tool doesn’t process well.

6. Interview Your Top Candidates

The job description you put together is a good starting point for coming up with job-relevant interview questions. For instance:

• If you mentioned certain soft skills, you can ask candidates to tell you about a time they demonstrated those skills.
• If you asked for technical skills (such as familiarity with a specific HRIS), ask candidates how they’ve used that software or those skills in the past.
• For an HR job that covers legal and policy matters, you can ask which company policies the candidates would draft first.
• For a job that involves dealing with employee conflicts, ask candidates to tell you about a time they dealt with an employee conflict in the past.
• For leadership roles, you can ask candidates to tell you about their past experience leading HR teams.
• If you are hiring someone to help you build out your HR department or lay the groundwork for growth, ask how they would choose HR technology for your company.
• If the role involves hiring, ask the candidate to describe their hiring approach. You can also ask what they would do to improve on the recruiting or interviewing process you used with them — their answer will show their knowledge and ability to respond diplomatically.

It’s also a good idea to ask candidates to describe a time they made a mistake. A candidate’s answer can give you an idea about whether they are accountable, responsible for rectifying errors, and able to learn from unpleasant situations.

Need Help Recruiting an HR Professional?

LG Resources can help you find high-caliber candidates for HR roles throughout the lower 48 states. We are an experienced recruiting and staffing firm that has helped thousands of companies in a wide range of industries. Our highly efficient processes allow us to charge 35-50% less than the typical headhunter and complete your search faster.