In a perfect world, you would be able to take the time you need to ensure that every new hire is a perfect fit. Sadly, this isn’t always possible. When you are faced with increased productivity demands, staff turnover, or organizational changes, you must often fill positions quickly.
How do you accomplish this while maintaining high standards and ensuring that each person you hire is going to thrive during the onboarding process and beyond? How do you hire quickly without cutting corners? The following techniques will shorten your time to hire while helping you maintain a quality hiring process.
Why Is It Important to Hire Quickly?
The need to hire quickly is often driven by organizational needs, but that’s not the only reason. When you can shorten the time between recruiting and hiring, you create a better candidate experience. Job prospects may become frustrated or lose interest if it takes too long to provide them with feedback or move them forward in the hiring process.
Identify Friction in Your Current Hiring Process
Before anything else happens, walk through your current hiring flow from beginning to end. Consider every step, including:
- Internal and external recruiting
- Applications and other forms
- Candidate touchpoints
- Interviewing
- Making the offer
- Onboarding
The chances are that you will identify issues that slow down the hiring process and make the candidate journey more difficult than it needs to be. For example, you may find that your online application forms are needlessly long and detailed. Some issues can be addressed with simple solutions that will greatly enhance your hiring process.
Tips for Connecting with Candidates Quickly
You may find that your hiring inefficiencies are due to the front end of the recruiting process. If you find that you aren’t getting enough interest in your job openings, this may be impacting your ability to fill positions quickly.
Maintain a Robust Talent Pipeline
The faster you can make contact with prequalified talent, the better. Your company should have a system in place for collecting information on potential candidates, keeping those prospects engaged, and reaching out to them when a suitable position opens up.
For example, you could store information from applicants in a CRM so that you can keep them engaged and contact them about future positions. Additionally, you could add a simple contact form to your careers page to collect contact data from interested people. Then, you can keep subscribers engaged with career-related emails and company news. This will allow you to keep prospects warm and your talent pipeline full when you need to hire quickly.
You may also want to take a closer look at your talent sourcing. Are you getting good results from the sources you are currently using? Have you missed out on any opportunities, such as talent databases? Have you maximized your use of social media to attract candidates?
Increase Diversity
Yes, diversity in recruiting and hiring can lead to a shorter time to hire. You will attract a wider range of candidates, which will increase your chances of finding the right person quickly. Additionally, when you create a culture of diversity, you boost your reputation in the eyes of job seekers. You can publish your company’s diversity and inclusion statistics on your careers page and social media to attract better candidates.
One way to improve diversity in your recruiting efforts is to use gender-neutral language in your job listings. You will attract significantly more applicants if you avoid using words and phrases that may indicate that there is a gender preference.
Tips for Shortening the Hiring Process
When you analyze your hiring and recruiting processes, you may find that slowdowns occur after candidates have shown interest. There are several areas in which you can streamline this process and get offers in front of applicants at a much faster rate.
Use Technology to Automate
Several steps in the hiring process can slow the time to hire if they are done manually. These include screening resumes, scheduling interviews, and assessing candidates. It can take hiring teams hours of time to handle these tasks.
Fortunately, AI and other technologies can be used to automate many of these processes. There’s ATS software that can be used to screen hundreds of resumes in mere seconds. AI technology can be deployed during this screening process to prequalify applicants and send the candidates with the highest scores to hiring teams.
Additionally, AI can be used to analyze existing talent databases for prospects that are a good fit. Moving further along the process, AI can be deployed to answer applicants’ questions via smart chatbots that are available at all times to assist potential hires.
There is also software available to automate pre-employment assessments and schedule interviews. Applicants can simply access these self-service options via your company career page, leaving your hiring team free to engage in other tasks.
Reconsider Your Offers
Any company that is struggling to fill positions in a timely manner needs to consider what they are offering potential hires. If your salary, benefits, and perks aren’t competitive, then job seekers are going to go elsewhere. Learn what other companies in your industry and location are offering, and make sure that your offers are in line with that.
Finally, you may be able to accelerate candidates through the hiring process if you are willing to disclose and discuss salary, benefits, and work conditions early. Candidates prefer to have this information as soon as possible so that they don’t waste their time pursuing jobs that aren’t worthwhile.
