Do not expect or wait to have a slate of three to five candidates before you make your move. In 2021, a “slate” is one or more good candidates. If you know who you need to get on your team, and that happens to be the first candidate, the best practice is to accept your good fortune and move forward.

Schedule your first phone interview as soon as possible. Be flexible if the candidate is working, which they probably will be. Tuesday at 10 a.m. might be open on your calendar but they might need to do it at 5 p.m. when they are out of the office.

If the phone interview goes well, let the candidate know. Many of us were trained to interview as if we were playing poker, but that does not work well anymore. You want to keep good candidates excited about the opportunity. To take that one more step, schedule the next interview before ending the call.

Keep the overall number of interviews, and interviewers, to the minimum and go as far into the process as you can with video calls. Bringing someone on-site can take a long time. One of our best clients now hires most of its technical staff without having them come on-site.

If possible, have a back-up for those doing the interviewing. If someone is traveling or on vacation and no one can cover for them, you can easily add a week or more.

Make your offers verbally and seek verbal acceptance, but then follow up with the written offer that same day. Why take three to five days to get the written offer out when you know what it is going to be? Unless your typewriter is broken this should not take more than a day.