Wouldn’t it be great if you could just hire the best candidate without having spend days and hours interviewing lots of prospective employee? So when should you decide who would be up for the job – at application stage or during the interview?
A lot of time and money is spent on interviewing and if none of them are suitable then you have to start the process all over again. Luckily our expert panel are at hand to ensure that doesn’t happen. Here are their best tips.
Leela Srinivasan
In diagnosing opportunities to improve your interview to hire ratio, draw inspiration from your Sales and Marketing counterparts. We tend to look at conversion rates between each stage of the funnel to see where the most drop-off is occurring and why; you can do the same with your recruiting funnel. Look at the people being screened out at each stage of the funnel – are there any commonalities? Do you need to tighten up requirements earlier in the process? We just published new benchmarks to help small and midsize companies understand what recruiting conversion rates are typical.
Leela Srinivasan, Chief Marketing Officer at Lever.
Erin Wilson
Recruiters can increase their turn rates by learning more about the business, product, and teams they are working with, every day. Hiring is viewed as this static transaction. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Hiring is a dynamic alignment exercise. More like, changing the tires of a car while it’s driving. If recruiters begin understanding how specific roles function as part of an organization given the particular stage and size of a company, they can factor that into their candidate advocacy and improve throughput.
Erin Wilson is Founder and Talent Engineer at Hirepool.io
Amy Volas
Stop the spam for starters. I realize we all want to save time and working from templates that aren’t personalized make our lives easier, but is absolutely the wrong way to go about recruiting. Cut that out and you’ll see a remarkable difference.
Amy Volas is Chieftain of Avenue Talent Partners.
Lars Schmidt
This is an area where authentic employer branding can really help. It’s not about more candidates, it’s about the right candidates. Don’t be afraid to be radically transparent, warts and all. Turning off some candidates who can clearly see they don’t align with your culture, values, work style is a good thing. It enhances recruiting efficiency and ensures you’ll have more pre-qualified candidates in your interview pool – resulting in better ratios.
Lars Schmidt is the Founder of Amplify.
Chad MacRae
Adopt a strong sourcing strategy that heavily involves the hiring manager. If the hiring manager is invested with you, they’ll be invested in the hire. Understand right from the get-go what the hiring manager is looking for. Submit candidates to them within 48 hours, to confirm you’re on track. Make the manager share the post, and get involved in the actual sourcing. Ask them who they know, encourage them to work their network for referral. Get them invested.
Chad MacRae is the Founder of Recruiting Social.
Stacy Zapar
The key to having more candidates make it through the interview funnel is a great kickoff / intake meeting. Knowing exactly what the hiring manager wants and needs is essential. (Even if the hiring manager isn’t exactly sure what that is, it’s our job to get to the bottom of it.) We can’t find the right person if we’re looking in the wrong place or asking the wrong questions. Push back, dig deeper, be a strategic partner, not just a glorified order taker. Oh, and preclose your candidates at every step of the process, not just after the interview when it’s time to prepare the offer. Have this conversation throughout the entire process to ensure that more of your offers get accepted.
Stacy Zapar is the Founder of Tenfold & The Talent Agency.
John Feldmann
Recruiters can increase this ratio by ensuring underqualified candidates are eliminated prior to the interview. This can be done by spending more time optimizing job ads. Often, due to a recruiter’s busy schedule, he or she may feel pressured to post job descriptions ASAP in order to jump-start the recruiting process. However, a well-thought-out job ad (different from an HR-generated legal job description) that clearly outlines what is expected of the candidate, as well as the benefits of working at the company, will eliminate a number of unqualified candidates prior to the interview, thus saving the recruiter time in the long run.
John Feldmann is a writer for Insperity Recruiting Services.
Maren Hogan
I think we lose a lot of candidates when we lose our ability to engage with them. This is why I stay in touch with candidates throughout the entire process and notify them if they can expect to hear from me again or not. This not only helps weed out the less engaged candidates, but improves your employer brand. Even if you’re the best employer ever, you can mess up your chance at looking good to candidates. This will in turn spoil their perception of your company when your outreach with them during the recruitment process is lacklustre.
Maren Hogan is CEO and Founder of Red Branch Media.
Craig Fisher
Recruiters can increase their interview to hire ratio by removing fear from the equation. Most recruiters are afraid to ruffle feathers and ask tough questions of their hiring managers. The reality is hiring managers are usually not good at two things: managing, and hiring. They are in their current role because they were good at their former role. They are not usually taught anything helpful about interviewing and hiring. They need guidance. They need to be asked tough questions about their projects and teams.
Craig Fisher is Head of Employer Brand, CA Technologies, and Allegis Global Solutions.
Will Staney
There are several things that recruiters can do to increase their hire ratio. The first, taking a look at their recruiting funnel and make sure that the process is streamlined and efficient. This means, making sure your employer brand is on point, even if it means partnering with HR to help fix what needs to be fixed. It means understanding which sources of hire are the most effective, creating an excellent candidate experience, not waiting two weeks to let a candidate know about an interview or job offer, and creating insights behind what makes the perfect hire. Then, measuring these efforts to continually refine and improve as the business, technology, and hiring market fluctuates.
Will Staney is the Founder & Principal Consultant at Proactive Talent Strategies.
