I’m about to share my biggest hack for accelerating the final stage of recruitment with you–the offer phase (I might regret this later). It starts during the interview process with the question, “Why do you want to leave your current job?”
When the candidate gives an answer, you respond with “Anything else?” They’ll likely give another reason.
You might ask again, “What else?” and get yet another explanation. Eventually, you’ll have a laundry list of very specific reasons this candidate is looking for a better position–bad management, poor advancement opportunities, lack of recognition, and so on.
When it’s time to extend a job offer, pull out this handy list and make sure all of the items they ticked off are highlighted prominently in the offer: management that empowers employees, ample advancement opportunities, a recognition and reward system, etc. It’ll instantly make your offer more personal, compelling, and more likely to receive a ‘yes.’ Try it and let me know how it works for you!
I always love finding new and effective hiring hacks, but it’s especially important in the current market. Though hiring seems to be slowing down from the frenzied pace of the past few years, it’s still a hot market in which the top candidates are snapped up quickly.
We gathered the best hiring hacks to speed things along, helping you source candidates more easily and move them efficiently through your hiring funnel.
Why You Need to Move Quickly When Hiring
Win top talent
Right now, the number one reason to move quickly when hiring is that your top choice for the job will likely be off the market in just a few weeks. Just recently we had a local healthcare client that was on the fence and decided to wait through the weekend to make an offer on a manager role after a multi-step interview. By the time Monday rolled around, their top candidate had already accepted another position. I’ve seen this play out time and time again, which is why I always advise against starting the process if you aren’t willing to move fast when needed.
Even with an uncertain economy, hiring remains consistently strong, which means it doesn’t take long for anyone who’s looking for a job to find one. Being quick in your hiring process will help you increase acceptance rates and hire the best applicants more often, leading to a stronger overall workforce.
Control costs
Hiring is a costly endeavor. Each search eats up more money the longer it stretches on.
Accelerating your hiring process will help you reduce recruiting labor hours and recruitment marketing costs, which can significantly impact your budget over the course of the year.
Keep rising costs from getting you down with our ‘Reducing Labor Costs’ eBook.
Learn from our experts on how to streamline your hiring process.
Maintain candidate engagement
Candidates are more impatient than ever, and the quality of their experience drops with each additional day in the hiring process. More than half of candidates say they expect to hear back from companies in a week or less after submitting an application.
Even long applications are a turn-off. We advise our clients that their application shouldn’t take more than 15 minutes to complete (not counting the time it takes a candidate to update their resume and cover letter). Any longer than that and you’ll lose a significant portion of applicants who step away and never come back. So, it’s critical to examine the steps you require candidates to complete to enter your funnel honestly and ask “Is all of this necessary?”
Related: Candidate Experience Best Practices
16 Hiring Hacks to Speed Up Your Recruitment Process
1. Shorten your application
With the stat on applications we just mentioned fresh in your mind, it pays to take a closer look at your application process and cut out any steps that aren’t completely essential.
Make sure you don’t require candidates to do duplicate work, like filling out their basic personal details on the first page and then entering them again in the resume section. Whenever possible, allow document uploads (like a PDF resume and cover letter) instead of forcing candidates to copy and paste their application materials into a text-entry box.
2. Rethink paid ads
Unpopular opinion: Paid job ads on sites like LinkedIn can slow down your hiring process.
Do such ads have value? Absolutely, especially when you’re looking to reach candidates who are outside your typical talent pool. But they can also considerably increase the volume of applications you receive, many of which will come from candidates who are applying for anything and everything regardless of their qualifications. That adds work for your recruiting team.
No algorithm can replicate what a human recruiter can do. So, before you bump up your ad spend, we recommend zeroing in on your sourcing efforts to make sure you’re fully capitalizing on every opportunity to reach passive job seekers who aren’t necessarily responding to paid ads.
3. Go organic
If you want to accelerate the screening portion of the hiring process, concentrate on the quality of candidates versus the quantity you’re bringing in. Rather than blanketing broad audiences with paid advertisements, focus your organic sourcing efforts on more targeted groups where the right candidates are likely to be found.
Niche Facebook groups, subreddits, Slack channels, and even community message boards can be effective tools for getting in front of candidates with the right skills in your desired geographic location.
4. Get an assist from AI
You may already be using some form of AI in your hiring process, but did you know it can do more than screen resumes? You can use AI-powered tools to write job descriptions, source candidates, intelligently match people with positions, create interview questions, conduct behavioral assessments, and more.
If you use an ATS, you may already have many of these capabilities at your fingertips without realizing it. One company we work with uses one of the industry’s most popular pieces of hiring software, but they’d been relying on the same workflows within it for years. It was only after partnering with our team that they learned they could take advantage of new features to smooth out their onboarding process and make their recruiter’s lives easier.
By utilizing the latest updates, the company was able to add custom fields to its online application to gather information it’d been collecting manually. It also started sending AI-powered job alerts to candidates showcasing the openings that were most relevant to each recipient.
Advanced technology is an investment, but it can pay off in the long-term gains that result from faster hiring.
Staffing your team doesn’t have to be hard.
Reach out and see how we can help.
5. Bump up your referral bonus
Referrals reliably produce the best ROI of any hiring channel. Getting more of them can kick up the pace when hiring for key roles. One way to increase referrals is to make them more lucrative for your employees.
Even if you don’t have additional cash to devote to higher referral bonuses, simply reminding your employees to submit referrals regularly can make an impact and bring in new leads.
Related: How to Make Your Employee Referral Program a Powerful Recruitment Tool
6. Look inward
If there are already qualified candidates in your ranks, you might be able to eliminate the sourcing step of your hiring process entirely.
Don’t rely solely on employees to monitor and apply for open roles. Actively recruit from within the same way you would when targeting external candidates. Consider also the options to cross-train or upskill workers from different departments.
Prioritizing upward mobility aids in retention and increases employee engagement, so it’s a win-win for you and your staff.
Related: How to Conduct an Internal Interview
7. Refine your poaching technique
Poaching talent from the competition is hardly a new hack; recruiters have been doing it for ages. But the landscape has become crowded. Top professionals receive messages from recruiters regularly, most of which look nearly identical. If you want to stand out, you need to do it better.
Refine the message you’re using to reach out to employees of the competition. Your generic recruiter introduction message won’t do. It needs to address the question, why them? Why specifically would they benefit from breaking ranks to join your team instead?
Also, you might need to widen your definition of who the competition is. Talk with hiring managers for each individual role to learn about indirect competitors that might not be obvious to you. You might be surprised about other industries with similar skill sets in which you can grab great talent.
8. Leverage customer-facing materials
Your marketing and sales teams have already worked to build a customer base of loyal brand enthusiasts. This group should be on your radar as a viable candidate pool. Since they already know and trust the company, part of your job as a recruiter is done for you.
Incorporate recruiting messages into customer-facing materials like packaging inserts, social media posts, and branded emails to turn people who love your brand into part of your team.
9. Automate interview preparation
The back-and-forth involved in scheduling interviews can add days to your hiring timeline. Use technology to automate scheduling, including reminders to cut down on missed or incorrect time slots.
Streamline interview day by helping candidates prepare as much as possible ahead of time. Send detailed instructions on how to get to the interview location, parking details, enter the building, etc., so you won’t be left waiting for a candidate and watching the clock as the designated time slot slips by.
After the interview, use automation once more to prompt interviewers to submit timely feedback to keep the process moving along.
10. Consolidate interviews
Interviews are notoriously one of the most time-consuming parts of the hiring process. Shorten the duration of the interview phase by using group interviews to speak to multiple candidates at once. This interview format not only allows you to assess two or more candidates in a fraction of the time it would take with one-on-one interviews, but it’s also a good way to judge their interpersonal and collaborative skills.
Be aware, though, that group interviews are most effective for entry-level positions or scenarios where multiple people need to be hired for the same role.
11. Batch your hiring tasks
Use batching–the process of completing similar tasks all at once–to streamline your workflows and reduce tedious tasks that break up your day.
For example, to start the week, send candidates status updates all at once, like on Monday morning. This will reduce the number of emails from candidates following up during the rest of the week, giving you more time to allocate to screening or interviews.
12. Optimize your nurturing materials
You should already be leveraging tools like email drip sequences to nurture candidates. But are you getting the most out of your most effective messages?
Conduct frequent A/B testing to see which nurturing items deliver the best response/retention rate. Continuously refine these materials and test new messaging to achieve maximum ROI.
Related: Ways to Hire Faster By Nurturing Candidates
13. Reduce the number of hiring touchpoints
Breaking down your hiring process into individual touchpoints can be eye-opening and tell you a lot about why it takes you so long to hire.
Analyze how many steps a candidate takes to receive an offer letter from the start of your application process. Then, cut down those touchpoints as much as possible. For example, if you typically have two or three rounds of interviews, consider consolidating them into a single panel interview. This can dramatically impact how fast you’re able to make a selection and get to the offer phase.
14. Reduce the number of interviewers
More interviewers can be a good thing, as they lend diverse backgrounds and perspectives to the process. However, the more interviewers you have, the more people you have to wait on to review notes, complete score sheets, and weigh in on finalists. We recently onboarded a new client that had four interviewers on a panel for a non-executive position! In my humble opinion, that’s too many and was surely adding additional days, if not weeks, to their hiring timeline, not to mention the headache of scheduling interviews with that many parties. At a certain point, you will just have to call it good enough and trust that your managers did their due diligence so that you can take a risk on a candidate.
15. Make sourcing a team effort
When it comes to manually sourcing candidates, the more hands on deck, the better. Monthly or quarterly, block off an hour to source candidates with a few colleagues or even your entire team. Some call this a “sourcing jam,” and it’s a great way to tap into the collective network of your department while having fun as a team.
Before the designated meeting time, send out a list of skill sets or job titles you’ll be focusing on to get the ideas flowing. Have participants bring their laptops, stacks of business cards, lists of attendees from recent conferences they’ve attended, etc. Use a whiteboard to list the names of strong prospects for talent acquisition to follow up with. You can even have prizes on hand for achievements like submitting the most leads.
Related: How to Involve Employees in the Hiring Process
16. Work with a specialized recruiter
Building a talent pipeline from scratch takes a long time. However, working with a professional recruiter can significantly speed up the process–and hiring in general.
Look for a firm that specializes in your industry or the type of positions you’re trying to fill. Top recruiters can start filling your inbox with highly qualified candidates in as little as 24 hours.
Speaking of recruiters, if you’re looking for more than just a vendor and want a true partner who can help you get the hires you need, then please reach out. Our vast talent network allows us to quickly parse through large numbers of qualified candidates and filter out those that are a perfect fit for your needs. Instead of starting with a blank slate every time you need to hire, you’re several steps ahead with a timely, highly tailored shortlist of capable talent. In addition to our award-winning relationships and client feedback, it just makes sense to schedule a call today.
If you want to build a stronger workforce, reduce your hiring costs, and create a positive candidate experience, use the tips above to accelerate your hiring process and stay competitive no matter what the future of the market holds.
Related: Is Your Business Ready for Professional Staffing Services?
