Faster! Quicker! Swifter! More!
Does just reading those words stress you out? With the pace of hiring these days, recruiting can get overwhelming—but it doesn’t have to be. The key? Staying organized. Read on for how to hire faster without losing your mind along the way.
As recruiters know all too well, today’s job market is candidate-driven. Potential talent has the upper hand when deciding where they want to work. The pressure is on hiring teams to extend offers to the best candidates…and to do it fast.
Part of the need for speed is because you’re in a competition (whether you know it or not). Everyone wants the most qualified candidates, so the faster you can extend a compelling offer, the less competition you’ll face. You can save money and snag top talent if you can make hiring decisions with efficiency.
A faster hiring process also reduces the risk of candidate drop out. Many applicants feel that a good interview process reflects your company’s culture—does it value people’s time? Energy? Effort? If hiring takes too long, applicants could become less than impressed with your company. They could decide to take a job elsewhere or even remain at their current place of work.
Reduced time to hire is especially important to organizations that value hiring diverse people. This is important to applicants too—a 2020 survey showed that 76% of job seekers look for inclusive workplaces when deciding where to work. In other words, building a diverse team attracts a diversity of talent. It’s in everyone’s best interest to hire these candidates before another company beats yours to it.
Right now, the average time to fill is about 36 days—sometimes up to 62, depending on the industry. Thankfully, there are ways to hire faster without decreasing quality or increasing stress.
Some recruiters endorse a slow and steady interview process. To them, speed = filling open positions with the wrong people. And they know that bad hires contribute to employee turnover, lost money, and low morale. They want to make the right choice, the first time.
Some talent acquisition professionals also feel that increasing time to hire makes the hiring process more inclusive. With more time, they can get to know a wider range of people. They can build a more diverse network of talent and hire more inclusively.
Moving slower also benefits hiring teams that are prone to making snap decisions. Time is on their side when working to avoid unconscious bias and accurately assess each candidate. They want to get to know each applicant before they decide to hire them.
It’s important to point out, though, that these aren’t really arguments in favor of spending more time. They’re arguments in favor of hiring better candidates. There are ways, especially with the right technology, that people can make great hiring decisions quickly. Being comprehensive, unbiased, and smart doesn’t have to mean slow.
Increased time to hire has some significant drawbacks. The most desirable applicants get snatched up by other companies before slower hiring teams have the chance to make a decision. Going too slow also means that onboarding is delayed. When you have an open position, the sooner it’s filled, the better—both for the employees and employer.
Delayed hiring can also have a negative impact on talent acquisition professionals. Roles that don’t get filled with efficiency make them feel less effective. What recruiter doesn’t want to feel good about the work they do? Without the tools to do their job well, recruiters might find themselves struggling with low morale and lack of motivation.
Even when recruiters know reducing time to fill is important, they’re still sure to run up against challenges. Here are a few:
With these challenges, it’s easy to feel like reducing time to hire—while still ensuring quality—is next to impossible. But it’s not! There are ways to help busy hiring teams do their jobs effectively.
Video interviews are more than convenient—they’re effective. One survey found that HR professionals who rated their company’s talent as “top-notch” were 15% more likely to have used video interview technology.
So how do talent acquisition personnel hire better candidates with video interviews? Well, for starters, video interviews save them time. With on-demand interviews—where candidates submit recorded responses to questions—recruiters don’t need to be present. They can spend that time focusing on tasks that are most important to them.
With the added help of artificial intelligence (AI), keywords and phrases can be identified in video responses or resumes. A multitude of applicants can be screened for job fit with ease.
Video interviews are also simple to schedule. There’s no need to delay an interview for commuting issues, location problems, or travel costs.
Recorded interviews also make decision-making more effective. They’re easy to share with other members of the hiring team and allow for each person to independently assess each candidate. With thorough assessments, hiring managers are more likely to identify and hire top talent with consistency. And with the help of video interview software solutions, they can do so quickly.
There are several things you can do to stay organized as you keep pace with today’s hiring process. Here are our best tips:
Before you start scrounging through hundreds of applications, make sure you know what—or who—it is you’re looking for. Have a clear definition for the position you’re trying to fill. What will the primary responsibilities be? What skills are required to do the job well? Having a clear posting on job sites will ensure the most qualified people apply, and knowing exactly what you’re looking for will make the screening process much less complicated.
In a broader sense, have a handle on your company’s mission, objectives, and culture. Applicants are changing what they value in a workplace, and they might want to know your company’s position on diversity, flexibility, or work-life balance. If you know what’s important to your applicants, you’re more likely to keep them engaged with you and your organization.
Have the little details available to you too, to save time and leave a good impression during your interviews—what’s the timeline for your hiring process? What kind of benefits does your company offer? Who can they contact if they have questions? Don’t waste time looking for these answers on the back end. Hold your candidate’s attention and keep them as informed as possible from the start.
Don’t waste time and energy doing tasks that can easily be done by recruiting software. Handling a high volume of applications is much more manageable with the right HR technology—it can help you screen, sort, and keep track of the best candidates for each open position.
Using recruiting automation to connect with talent makes your job more straightforward too. For instance, AI chatbots can handle an applicant’s simple questions and even help manage scheduling. You don’t need to spend energy finding time for interviews or answering questions that pull you out of your workflow. With the help of automated recruiting software, you can save time and avoid getting sidetracked.
Taking advantage of automation software to recruit in the right places can also help keep you on track. Instead of picking through job boards and social media pages to share job openings, recruiting technology finds the right places to share information and engage the right candidates. You’ll then have the mental space and time to concentrate your efforts on the top talent.
Not only do video interviews help hiring teams assess job applicants, they’ll help keep you organized. Using on-demand interviews for initial candidate screening can serve as a digital file for each applicant—you won’t have to memorize every detail of every interview. All you’ll need to do is turn back to the video record when deciding who to advance through the hiring process.
Video interviews are also flexible. They remove potential travel delays and allow for you to conduct interviews at times that work for you. You can plan ahead and move through your day efficiently.
If you want to get even more organized, take advantage of interview solutions that offer both a platform for video conferencing as well as a place to store applicant information. Keeping data—like candidate resumes, video clips, interview notes, and scorecards—centralized keeps the hiring team organized. With so much detailed information in one space, your life gets easier, and so does hiring.
Smart interviewers have a standardized set of questions they ask in each interview. This helps them offer consistent, fair, and thorough interviews—and results in the most qualified new hires.
Using a question bank can also help keep you organized. A thorough set of questions will reduce your interview prep time, which frees up both mental space and time in your day. Instead of fishing for questions before or during an interview, using a bank can ensure you’ll deliver a smooth, rather than scattered, interview.
If you use standardized interview questions, you also won’t have to worry about which questions are compliant or what phrases will help you assess your applicants thoroughly. All you’ll have to do is reach for your pre-approved set of questions and focus on the interviewee in front of you.
Effective hiring teams have this in common: they know how to communicate. Collaboration—and staying organized along the way—is key when it comes to moving the interview process forward quickly.
Using a platform that is accessible to every decision-maker simplifies hiring. Interview software that lets everyone view video highlights makes sure everyone has access to the same information. You won’t have to forward feedback through a multitude of channels to handfuls of people. Everyone stays on the same page.
In the same way, it can be hard to keep track of conversations with your hiring team that exist on email, text, sticky note, phone or DM. Instead, streamline. Decide which forms of communication reduce confusion, then stick with that. For the same reason, consider using recruiting software to communicate with your applicants too.
When your hiring team is staying organized, they can devote time, energy, and mental space to what is really important: finding better hires, faster.
If you’re a recruiter looking to up your game—hiring smarter, faster, and better—consider using recruiting technology to get organized. Then stay on top with interview solutions like Clovers. Open a free trial account or reach out to request a demo. You’ll be glad you did.
Jackie brings over a decade of HR technology experience to Clovers. She’s passionate about helping companies build talented and diverse (dream) teams and delivering an incredible hiring experience to everyone involved.