The goals of hiring vary from company to company, but there are some overlapping ideals. The point of a well-executed hiring process is to gain a quality new hire within a reasonable amount of time. If you take too long to hire, it is waste of resources, time, and possibly losing out on the right candidate as well.
Besides, it’s possible to keep the quality of your hires, while still boosting productivity along the way. Below are some tried and tested tips for making recruitment work in less time:
Evaluate the previous hiring processes and avoid issues or delays, or any repetitive mistakes from the past.
Applicant Tracking System (ATS) is arguably the most important hiring tool. It is where your hiring process gets streamlined, thus allowing recruiters to source, review/rate candidates and hire altogether at one go.
There are also often perks associated with using an ATS, such as being able to post on all job boards at once or edit a careers site easily. Rather than manually going through candidates and deleting duplicates or unwanted applications, the right ATS will be able to automatically detect them.
A sourcing extension is further a handy tool for your (and the whole team’s) web browsers as it auto inputs candidate’s data into the ATS. Team communication is imperative to working quickly and efficiently. Use of tools such as Slack allows the whole team to get on board and have all the necessary info communicated to a group as and when they need it.
Many hiring teams don’t think they have the time to engage with every candidate, whether they are applying, being rejected, or otherwise. However, this negatively affects the candidate experience. Automated emails with email templates and such can help save time and efforts invested.
A career site or a company website that showcases who you are as an employer (with testimonials, team photos, etc.) helps attract the best talent in the industry, to make them delve deeper and reach out to the recruitment desk.
See: Reasons for Hiring Process Delays: Glassdoor Analysis
The ATS mentioned above should come with an option to create talent pools, whether you are actively hiring or not. Sourcing all year ‘round and saving candidate info into the talent pools, increases your chances of reaching out to the right potential candidate at the right time, if you discover they are looking for better opportunities elsewhere on social networks.
Employees who have once worked for your company are important to keep track of, in the talent pools. They make for quicker hires and assimilation, because they are already familiar with the company and its culture/values/people/etc.
As long as you don’t burn bridges, former employees might be the asset you need for a new position, and it will encourage others to stay as well.
Simply sitting around and waiting for candidates to flood into your network and get added to your talent pool, just won’t work (unless you are Google or something similar). Job seekers normally apply to companies, they recognise. Top talent is also probably sitting and passive seeking opportunities to work for a better company brand.
To fetch such talents on board, you should build rapport with top talent in relevant fields, and, when the opportunity arises, post a job opening with great benefits they seek and would love. This makes for a quicker hire and acquiring best brains in the business is no longer difficult.
Employee networks can be invaluable. Using the sourcing extension mentioned above can create an easy way to have the whole team source talent. Set recruitment guidelines so that your employees aren’t recommending under qualified individuals.
Incentives for referrals work wonders; however a company with a great culture would ideally have employees helping the hiring process for the overall business good and maximised profits.
Candidates don’t want to enter information repeatedly, thus making the application process longer than it has to be. Hiring teams do not want to be overburdened with additional work of sifting through piles of resumes to come across the same candidate information, only to dig into parts that matter.
Using ATS can help create an application form that is easy to fill-in for applicants, thus allowing recruiters to target specific answers to the right talent and this will help filter candidates quickly.
Similarly, the survey should include “make-or-break” questions that will help you filter candidates in the ATS, simply by their responses. This is a great way to shortlist candidates, thus saving on time and resources being wasted on too many long interviews.
To better your recruitment process and enhance candidate experience during hiring, you need to ask for feedback from employees and candidates alike – to understand on areas of improvement that will help attract best talents, if the application and hiring process is more streamline, smooth and easy to manoeuvre.
Continuous optimisation will help your hiring strategy to become even more seamless, as you will have the opportunity to identify parts of the process that is time-consuming and proves to be a daunting experience for applicants (such as long application forms to fill-in online or multiple hiring rounds on different days of the interview). This simply doesn’t work.
Using the tips above, particularly focusing on the feedback from employees and candidates, will help tackle hiring delay issues for more clarity and streamlined recruitment process. As you work in unison with the team to shorten the time-to-hire, these efforts will be much appreciated by the senior management and so by the passive talent network, who will find this revamp in recruitment activity, attractive, easy to apply and would like to work for the company brand.
Author credit:
Perry Oostdam is the co-founder and CEO of Recruitee, a collaborative hiring platform for teams of all sizes. Recruitee helps optimize the entire hiring process, from candidate relationship management, employer branding, and job posting to candidate sourcing and applicant tracking. The company has offices and Amsterdam, The Netherlands, and Poznań, Poland and works with companies around the world.
Also read: Top 10 Indicators on Why Your Organization Needs ATS for Hiring
Image credit: clipartkid.com
