The process of hiring employees is tiresome and lengthy. It is a very important aspect of an industry or organization and thus by streamlining the hiring process, a lot can be achieved and improved in the working of your company.
Navigating through the employee hiring process can be quite tedious and challenging. From the application process to interviewing procedures, finding the right candidate, and time-consuming undertaking.
As a recruiting agency seeking to streamline your hiring processes, you should be considering the implementation of a few recognized best practices during your next application period.
Importance of Streamlining Hiring Process
For any recruitment agency, the hiring process is an important step and an investment like any other set of systems and investments that your business relies on to operate and it thus calls for good returns. Hiring being indirectly related to revenue makes it difficult to measure returns.
To assess if your hiring process is working and is a fruitful investment you must analyze aspects like the cost of hiring the candidate, the expected period of time till which they will stay, their efficiency, and whether it will offset the hiring cost by their contribution to the company revenue, the period of time for the offset and a survey of candidates and their review of the company.
A lot of recruitment agencies employ intricate procedures and protocols for recruiting and screening candidates, but a process that drags out for too long will drain many internal resources like management and time and end up costing you the candidate as they are lured away by the competitors who are quicker to act.
As a consequence of streamlining your hiring process, a number of benefits would be availed and it will ultimately guarantee a better return on the resources you invest in your hiring process.
5 Benefits of Streamlining Your Hiring Process
To help in establishing an agency or organizational standard for high-quality work, streamlining the work process is integral. An expected threshold is created for individuals to succeed in carrying out complex processes. It renders support to team members while maintaining a baseline for competency, skill, reliability, and efficiency.
Some benefits that your recruitment agency might enjoy from streamlining are:
- Identifying and filling in gaps of knowledge
- Streamlining processes for efficiency
- Developing better decision-making skills
- Fostering problem-solving skills
- Providing employees with guidance and resources
- Reducing loss of knowledge over time
- Increasing budget and time efficiency
- Creating a growth-oriented culture
In this article, we enlist 5 unique best practices to help you attract top talent and hire a candidate who can add value to your recruitment agency.
1. Target Your Job Descriptions
Job descriptions generally begin with the formal title of the position available. But if we look at it from the candidates’ perspective, mere information about the position’s title would not impress the applicant. For them, it is more important to understand the exact details and description of the job.
For writing a job description, take into consideration the personality and ambitions of the ideal candidate, and tailor your job description to fit the type of person you’re trying to attract.
Some employers gloss over these so as to not intimidate potential candidates. It’s more efficient, however, to deter unqualified candidates from applying in the first place.
While having as many candidates to choose from as possible has its allure, casting your net too wide will require you to invest extra time and resources to sort through more applications and screen out unqualified candidates. You may also be susceptible to the risk of hiring and training the wrong candidate only to have to replace them and undergo the entire process again in a few months.
It thus becomes very important for your job description to discretely convey the specific skills and experience needed to sustain in the given job position, as well as clearly mention the intangible soft skills that the applicant will need to fit with your company culture.
By creating a detailed job description, you will be able to filter your applicants more effectively and this will save you time and money cutting down the extra costs and time that you would otherwise be investing throughout the hiring process, from the moment they submit their application, to the moment they start their first day with your company.
2. Target Your Distribution
Today, agencies are fortunate enough to have many mediums at their disposal when distributing job postings. The online community of potential employees is vast online, and recruitment agencies have greater means to reach potential employees than ever before.
Given the easy access that most companies have to this broad community of candidates, it is important to disperse your job posting among myriad targeted platforms.
Instead of simply posting it on your agency website and Craiglist, think about where your ideal candidates are online and promote the opening there as well.
In order to execute an effective distribution of your job posting, working knowledge of the ideal applicant is required. Monster, Indeed, LinkedIn, and other such sites can give you access to an entirely different pool of candidates, and depending on the position, it can even be worth advertising it on more social platforms like Facebook or Twitter.
Distributing your job listings within certain online communities rather than being restricted to posting only through specialty job boards is certainly an effective way to increase your available talent pool.
Even though it cannot substitute and give the same touch as a personal referral, the concept of establishing an employee referral program that utilizes current employees as talent scouts is one of the most effective ways to tap into your employees’ personal social network and streamline your hiring process.
3. Use a Modern Recruitment System
Employment inquiries are still received by many companies primarily through a hiring manager’s email. However, many hiring experts are of the opinion that a modern recruitment system is needed rather than just being solely reliant on your inbox.
Having a SaaS platform that will help you to organize and search through candidates according to individual skillsets and select keywords is important.
The platform can facilitate many systems and allow you to categorize the resumes of candidates by helping in resume parsing and organization as they’re received, and search them on the basis of need.
Searching candidates by skillset or experience becomes quickly and easily accessible, once the resumes are stored in your database.
A recruitment software eliminates the tiresome process of manual sorting that often plagues traditional hiring processes.
Besides simplifying the process of screening potential candidates, a comprehensive database of candidates is also maintained that may fit other positions as they become available in the future.
4. Schedule & Manage Interviews
After utilizing the SaaS platform which allowed you to screen potential candidates and compile a list of the most qualified applicants, the next step in the hiring process is the interview phase.
The task of filling time slots with available applicants and moreover matching faces with resumes can become tricky and a complicated task, especially when you are performing multiple daily interviews throughout the course of a regular workweek.
In this case, a modern SaaS platform can come in handy once again by allowing you to manage interview slots with ease, and access pertinent information about a specific candidate during the interview itself. You will also be able to easily pull up the candidate’s resume for a closer review if and when necessary.
In the event that your company elects to have multiple interviewers meet with each potential candidate, your SaaS platform allows interviewers to record their thoughts and concerns relating to individual applicants. The next interviewer can then easily access these notes to help avoid overlap and facilitate comparative collaboration between interviewers.
5. Engage & Retain Candidates
Eventually, more candidates are rejected by the recruitment agencies than they accept after the interview but this collection of talented, interested candidates should not go to waste.
This can be done using your SaaS recruiting platform, which will enable you to email future relevant job alerts and openings to candidates that you might’ve passed over the first time around but could not make it through the interview by sending a meeting request email.
Many of these candidates are still qualified and may prove to be of interest to your organization in the future. Keeping these candidates engaged can prove advantageous as your business grows, and you develop a need for different kinds of talent.
There are companies that maintain a random stream of emails or calls in an attempt to keep qualified applicants engaged. Candidate relationship management systems are an integral way of helping your company design effective strategies for engaging current, and past, employment applicants.
