Every recruiting team gets that sourcing the best candidates for their company is a labor-intensive process. Aside from deeply understanding the roles that need to be filled, recruiters need to do heavy research on finding the most qualified candidates, vetting the best applicants, and then scheduling interviews. The interview process can take a long time, and if your recruiting team doesn’t have a streamlined system, things can go haywire. With these five tips, your recruitment team can adopt best practices to ensure a streamlined, efficient workflow that brings in the best talent for your business.
Go digital.
Companies rarely find talent through job fairs or word of mouth. Research done by SHRM shows that the tools most frequently used to acquire candidates include company websites at 85% and social media at 67%. With streamlining as the goal, reaching candidates by utilizing these outlets can produce a higher volume of recruitment with less laborious, time-sucking searching. Sites like LinkedIn, Linkedin email finder, Indeed, and Zip Recruiter are great platforms to start, as they’re some of the most popular job-searching sites candidates use. Although many job sites require the poster to pay a daily fee, it’s well worth uploading your company’s openings on sites that get a lot of traffic.
Get scheduling software.
If there is one clear answer to streamlining the recruitment process, it’s using an interview scheduler software like GoodTime. An interview scheduler can reduce scheduling time by 90%. An interview scheduler will save time by automating many of the usual processes (this includes back-and-forth emails, rescheduling, and coordinating with other employees and their calendars). Especially when your recruitment process has multiple steps and requires the candidate meeting with multiple people (who most likely have very busy schedules themselves), you don’t want dates to fall through the cracks.
Eliminate any roadblocks.
If you’re a recruiter and you’re recruiting, say, a junior copywriter, it’s best not to hand your Creative Director a stack of resumes to look through. Sure, the help would be nice (and the Creator Director will have valuable insights as to who they want on their team and what skills they’re specifically looking for), but this is a task that may fall by the wayside, creating a bottleneck for you and your team. Fast Company says even top-performing employees and managers become roadblocks when it comes to bringing on new talent, since this may not be something they prioritize. A better solution is to send an email to the manager that sums up the candidate’s qualifications with clear and direct bullet points. If the manager is interested (or not), they’ll give you, the recruiter, the green light to bring that person in or screen them with a phone call.
Don’t make your application too complicated.
Too many hoops to jump through? If the position’s application process is ten pages long and requires paragraph-long responses, you’ll miss out on a lot of talent. And chances are, recruiters won’t want to actually read through all of that, either (nor will they have the time). According to the CEO of CareerBuilder, Irina Novoselsky, 1 in 5 employees “give less than 10 minutes to a job inquiry, or two to three pages on a mobile device, before dropping off,” per Fast Company. Novoselsky says, “This means that employers with long applications may lose great talent very early on.”
Screen Effectively.
By screening your potential hires with quick phone interviews before in-person interviews, you can weed out the candidates who do not logistically fit the bill. Be sure to ask candidates similar questions during this digital interview to help with efficiency and consistency when it comes to the final decision time. It’s important to ask basic questions like “Are you willing to relocate?” or “Do you have trustworthy transportation?” to make sure you’re not wasting your time with a candidate who may not even be able to physically be present for their job (if that’s what’s required). Get the basics down before you waste your time, or the hiring manager’s time during an in-person interview.
Finding talent that fits your company does not have to feel exhausting. With these small steps taken into account, you can create a hiring process that is manageable and yields results.