This post is sponsored by TeamHire for JIRA, the collaborative recruitment tool making it easier to source and secure new employees.
If you’re struggling to secure fresh talent to your business, it’s time to find out what’s wrong. You’re the common denominator every time a candidate drops out, not them. If you don’t take time to fix a faulty recruitment process, you’ll forever be understaffed, lamenting about ‘the ones that got away’.
It’s not them, it’s you
Great talent will make or break your business. Behind every successful company is a cohort of cutting-edge candidates coming up with concepts and delivering results. Good people are hard to find and the best ones will have dozens of headhunters swarming around them at any given time. In order to secure top talent, you’ve got to act quickly. A recruitment process which is frustrating and drawn-out will lose you good candidates, regardless of how amazing the role is. If your business is making these 4 recruiting mistakes, be prepared to lose candidates:
1. A lack of communication
Disconnect between hiring managers, HR and SMEs causes major delays throughout the recruitment process. When decision makers are on different pages, candidates are given mixed messages and time is wasted going over old ground to match up expectations. Information about a candidate’s profile and application should be updated regularly, and kept in one central location that is accessible by everyone involved in the hiring process.
2. A frustrating interview process
Interviewing can be a stressful process for candidates, and one which requires a lot of time and effort. When interviews are poorly organised, conducted by inexperienced staff members and repetitive, candidates become disengaged. Bringing a candidate back in for round after round, only to be asked the same questions is incredibly time-wasting and unnecessarily lengthens the hiring cycle time. When multiple interviewers are involved, it’s important they communicate with one another to discuss the objectives and outcomes of each interview. Scheduling interviews is time-consuming, so using a panel approach or consecutive shorter meetings in one day will minimises delay to the hiring process, and the chances of a candidate to getting bored and accepting another offer.
3. No meaningful / timely feedback
Making candidates wait a long time for vague feedback is extremely frustrating for them. Most hires take between 1-2 months to finalise, from application to offer. For a candidate, that’s a long time to be kept in limbo, and dragging out this process will kill momentum. Providing personalised feedback as soon as possible will help keep top-performing candidates interested in the opportunity. It will also encourage interviewers to consolidate their reviews quicker, which will dramatically reduce cycle time (to ideally between 1 and 3 weeks).
4. Failure to measure, report and improve
Regardless of how good your recruitment process is, sooner or later you will need to improve things. Without trackable metrics, it is nearly impossible to adjust the process accordingly and spot problem areas. If you’re not working towards a leaner and more agile recruitment operation, your inhibiting the chance of streamlining recruitment. Without KPIs in place, your company’s recruitment process will continue to be drawn out and flawed. Monitoring candidate cycle times, the quality of your talent pipeline and effectiveness of various lead sources will help you redesign a more effective process.
The answer starts with a great ATS
Candidate profiles and all related recruitment activity should be kept in one central location, accessible by everyone who plays a part in the process, not just HR. Applicant tracking systems are supposed to make talent attraction more manageable, and facilitate the sharing of information. Is yours only used by HR? The great ones will automate time-consuming tasks for you and offer established feedback communication channels. A great ATS will also encourage collaboration between interviewers and decision makers.
About the author: Wojciech Seliga is the CEO & Founder of Spartez, which powers TeamHire for JIRA.
