The hiring process is broken. It’s hard to blame the candidates; they’re just doing what they have to do.
Tens of thousands of talented people aren’t working at companies where they could be doing great things. And many of the ones that do get hired can’t make a real contribution, because, by the time they joined, their enthusiasm for the company had already been worn away.
Recently, one of our clients lost a candidate because they moved on to another offer. That’s because the hiring process simply took too long and the candidate found a better opportunity.
Here’s what Chantel Kane-Krebs, Founder & CEO of Resource Wranglers had to say about it:
The fundamental problem is that there is too much friction in the hiring process. There are often too many steps, and there’s too long of a lag between each one.
What does it take to hire someone? You need to find them, convince them that you’re worth talking to, convince them that your company is worth working for, convince them that you’re not going to fire them after six months, and wait for all their references to check out.
Then you’ve got to wait for all their paperwork to come through, wait for them to pass a background check; meanwhile, your other candidates have moved on and your job has filled itself.
The truth is the speed of your hiring process matters. Here’s how to make it work better for you and your candidates.
Ways to speed up your hiring process
Longer interviews instead of multiple shorter ones
One of the most important processes in recruiting is the interview. It’s a chance to find out whether a candidate will enjoy working with your team as much as they enjoy getting paid.
The interview process can take a while. You have to set up a time with your candidate, and then you have to schedule multiple phone or in-person interviews with all your team members.
You need to figure out how much time you want to spend on each interview session – if it’s too much time, you won’t be able to do many of them in a day; if it’s too little time, you might not be able to get a clear sense of the candidate after so few minutes with them.
And once you’re in an interview session, you’re at the mercy of where your candidate wants to take it – if they ask about things that are important to them but not important for the job, you might end up spending half your allotted time on that when you should be spending it on other topics.
The solution is longer sessions: give yourself 3-4 hours for each interview instead of scheduling multiple sessions.
At that point, most candidates will run out of things to say about what they’ve built or what they enjoy doing. And by asking more targeted questions about specific projects or challenges they’ve faced, you’ll get answers closer to what’s important for the job.
Use interview scorecards
The candidate evaluation process can often take more time than the interviews themselves. That’s because each team member involved in the interview has their own subjective take on whether or not a candidate would fit well within the company.
A good solution to speed up the evaluation process is to use scorecards to compare candidates.
The point of the scorecard is not to make it hard for applicants (you want them to get a good score!) but rather to help interviewers stay on topic and reach a consensus.
There are three things you should care about:
- Knowledge
- Skills
- Character
Knowledge is the total sum of what the employee knows. This includes both practical skills (how to use certain tools) and conceptual knowledge (the why behind their profession), as well as knowledge of your industry and its customers.
Treat this as a separate category from skills because you can acquire knowledge on your own time at home, but you can’t acquire skills without practicing what you’ve learned. If you’re hiring people in an existing field, they should already have most of the knowledge and skills you care about.
And last but not least, you should evaluate if your candidates would fit well with your company culture and whether or not they would integrate within your team.
You should evaluate their:
- Enthusiasm
- Desire to learn
- Desire for teamwork
- Work ethic
Be transparent with your hiring process
Here’s where things can get complicated – candidates in your pipeline. If you’ve got 3-5 candidates that you’re doing preliminary outreach calls with, how long do you wait to follow up with them?
It’s important to not let too much time go by as it makes you seem disorganized or unsure. On the other hand, if they haven’t heard from anyone in a few days, they may assume that there was no interest or they weren’t qualified.
Hiring managers can help by setting up an automated or scripted follow-up process that happens in X number of days so that everyone gets contacted at some point.
This doesn’t mean you have to follow up with everyone within 2 hours, but don’t let more than a week go by without contacting them.
You should also be transparent with them and make sure that they know:
- How long the interview/hiring process would take;
- When they should expect to hear back after each round;
- How long each step would take.
Have a talent pool you can tap into
There are several benefits to maintaining a talent pool of past candidates.
A candidate pool allows you to keep an eye on the market and understand where you can expand in the future. You can also use candidates from your talent pool as references or even offer them a new position should one open up in the future. The biggest benefit of all is that you can cut your time-to-hire way down on a future opening.
There are three parts to this process:
- Past candidates that you have screened, but did not hire.
- Qualified candidates that you didn’t even think of hiring.
- Future candidates that you haven’t even found yet.
Keep these three groups in mind when you are building your talent pool
Outsource your hiring
For many companies, the cost of finding and hiring new talent is one of their largest expenses. And if they are having trouble filling a position, they want to solve that problem as quickly as possible.
That’s where staffing agencies come into play. It’s a win-win for both parties; the staffing agency is paid a fee for each candidate they send you, and you can focus your attention on things that matter most instead of spending time sifting through resumes.
Here at Resource Wranglers, we wanted to make the staffing fee even more cost-effective. Instead of charging a 20% fee for each candidate hired like most agencies, we bill our clients by the hour. This approach helps our clients control the exact amount of effort we put into finding candidates for them.
There are many advantages to outsourcing the recruitment process. Once you’ve partnered with a qualified staffing agency, you’ll have access to a tremendous pool of candidates who meet your specific needs and can be screened for their skills and ability to perform the job well.
Recruiters can also help you find candidates even if your work location is remote. And because they are working on multiple projects simultaneously, they can often provide more options for you than you could find on your own in the time it would take you to do so yourself.
Conclusion
Hiring the right employees is the key to your company’s success. But without a streamlined hiring process, you risk losing qualified candidates before you even have a chance to interview them.
Part of our service is to offer advice on our client’s hiring process. If you are losing candidates, look at your process and find ways to move through it quickly and efficiently.