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Talent Acquisition

5 Steps to Simplifying Your Hiring Process

Saying spending hours on hours finding the right person for the right job can be a long and tedious process is an understatement. Dealing with thousands of applications and hundreds of candidates on a weekly basis can make your job difficult to cope with.

So just like many other recruiters out there, you try to simplify things in order to deal with everything. You need a routine in place, and practices and tools at the ready so you can improve your hiring process.

1. Sell the role

To start, don’t just list the basic necessities a candidate needs when posting job ads, such as interests, education, and experience. Be sure to include information on the job to ensure you are getting the right candidates for the right roles.

Mention the day-to-day activities of the job role, the team the candidate will be working with and possibly the type of projects people have worked on in the past. Be very detailed.

Furthermore, emphasize the growth and development the candidate will enjoy the company. Candidates want to know they can improve themselves with the company.

While you expect potential candidates to sell themselves, and their capabilities, for the role. You also need to sell the role to potential candidates, so that you are ensuring a higher quality of applications and more importantly, applications that are specific to the role so that you don’t waste time later on making sure the applicants actually have the capabilities to undertake the role on offer.

2. Build a talent pool

Build your own database of quality and qualified candidates. Use this to help you fill current and future roles you have available. By doing so you are reducing your time-to-hire when any roles open up.

It’s important that within this, you are building relationships and engaging with these candidates so that in the future you can tap into the database you have built up. Nowadays this is easy due to the wide plethora of social communication avenues available to us.

By building a talent pool, and talent pipeline, you will see higher offer acceptance rates among candidates because of the relationships you have built with them. You build trust with candidates, and many times this can translate into lower salary costs, lower dropout rates and, as mentioned before, reduced time to hire.

3. Try video interviews

Found a decent candidate? Get them on video asap for a quick interview. Within the first few minutes, you will know if he or she is a good fit for the job.

This has become a major staple of the modern pre-screen process, and it in many ways suits both parties. You are assessing the suitability of a candidate quickly in terms of their communication skills, personality and fit for the role, and in turn, the candidates don’t have to leave the comfort of their home for an interview.

4. Use smart screen tools

The idea of a ‘smart screen’ ties in well with the previous topic of video interviews because they both emphasize the importance of pre-screening candidates.

Smart screening, asking candidates specific and targeted questions, is a great way for recruiters to:

  • Cut down their workload.
  • Assess the suitability of a candidate.
  • Reduce their time to hire.

By smart screening candidates, you are distinguishing, to put it bluntly, the good from the bad. There are a multiplicity of smart screening tools out there you can use right now so that when you bring candidates to the face-to-face interview stage you know they are up to scratch,

5. Speed it up

Show hiring can be a huge disadvantage to all parties involved. It can cause you to miss out on quality candidates, damage your productivity and ruin your reputation as a recruiter.

The average time it takes to a fill a position is 42 days, a figure that used to be 25 days 3 years ago. Because of the ease in which you can now apply to positions, the volume of applications for roles has increased and naturally the time to fill has increased.

About a month to fill a position is the right pace, not too long and not too short that you’re making hasty decisions. Of course, the time to fill can depend on various factors such as the type of position on offer.

Just be prepared. Find out what works for you and learn to simplify the process so that at the end of the day you’re making the process easier for yourself, as the life of a recruiter can get crazy.