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Recruiting the right candidates for a job is a lengthy and challenging process. In addition to skills and job competency, companies need to think about several other factors, such as how specific personalities will fit into the team and company culture.
Many HR teams put themselves at a disadvantage through inefficient hiring processes, which ultimately prolongs the effort and impedes their ability to make a decision. Tasks of little value waste time and outdated systems also take their toll.
To improve upon hiring the best employees, efficiency is key. In this article, you’ll discover ways to streamline and optimize your hiring process.
When it comes to the hiring process, gaps in efficiency can mean the difference between attracting the best candidates—or losing out. Here are three of the most common issues that make the process cumbersome and ineffective.
When hiring new employees, you’re only one part of the puzzle. Candidates also have to do their part—if they’re not getting back to you and keeping up with steps in the hiring process, it can result in lengthy delays.
Present your business in the best possible way. Keep in mind, top candidates are likely to be interviewing with other companies and weighing many factors. So, go the extra mile to ensure your hiring process is efficient and well-communicated.
You have more control than you think, as a survey we conducted on LinkedIn revealed:
You might not be able to control someone receiving a better offer, but communication and the strategy of your hiring process are well within your sphere of influence. Are your processes effective and representative of your business, or are they causing your candidates to hesitate, or even bail out?
In any industry, many employees have similar complaints about their job. One that you’ll often hear is that they spend too much time on meaningless tasks.
For HR teams, administrative work is time-consuming and processes are often in need of updating. For example, Adobe discovered in 2019 that the average person in the US spends over 200 minutes every weekday checking their inbox.
It’s not only emails that eat up teams’ time, though. Unnecessary meetings are another significant drain. Research by Korn Ferry showed that employees waste between two and five hours every week on calls and meetings deemed “unproductive.”
Other time-consuming tasks that eat up too much time for HR teams include:
Most admin tasks can be outsourced or automated, and the majority of those that require human attention—such as calls and meetings—can either be reduced or eliminated altogether. If you’re able to do this, your HR team will have more time on their hands to focus on meaningful tasks.
These days, businesses aren’t solely constricted to their local area for candidates. The rise in remote and hybrid work has opened the pool to talented individuals around the world. While great, this has added a significant increase in the workload for HR teams.
In many offices, the vetting process for candidates is still done manually. Needless to say, this can result in a lot of wasted time and a poor hiring experience. Even worse, unconscious biases can come into play and cause a company to miss out on a candidate that would have been an excellent fit.
HR teams must automate their vetting processes to avoid getting bogged down by large volumes of candidates (which can cause them to sometimes miss out on the best candidates). By automating repetitive tasks, they will gain more time to focus on interviewing and communicating the job value to the best candidates.
Now that we’ve identified some of the biggest pitfalls that HR teams face during the hiring process, we can look at how you can become more efficient in this area. Here are some tips for speeding up the initial phases.
Artificial intelligence (AI) has become a crucial part of many companies hiring processes, and this will only continue in the future. According to Gartner, 47% of organizations’ HR teams will use this form of technology in some sense by the end of 2022.
Using AI in the hiring process has several efficiency-related benefits. You can sift through candidates that meet your needs, identify strengths and weaknesses and quickly sort and rank prospects for the interview process. As a result, the interviewing stage can focus on important questions and topics—and you can avoid interviewing inappropriate applicants and reduce the amount of time needed for each session.
HR teams can spend far too long on processes that could have been automated, which wastes time and shows potential hires that your company is not utilising current technology.
Examples of tasks that can be automated include:
Automating your processes will help HR teams to create better job postings, lead to better hiring decisions, and form better connections with top prospects.
Don’t get sidetracked during the hiring process—there are many potential candidates, but not all of them can be a great fit for your company. HR teams must identify and understand the qualities they are looking for in each candidate. So, make sure you have the necessary hiring processes and systems in place to keep everyone on track, and your objectives are achieved.
Hiring the right candidate has become complex in the modern workplace, and refusing to adapt to the evolving hiring landscape will lead to your company getting left behind, and without top talent.
By automating your processes and becoming more efficient in your hiring process, you’ll be able to attract high-performing employees without needing to exert much energy. Moreover, you can hire at scale quicker.
Sense's automation is designed to help you hire staff faster, along with lowering the amount you spend on job boards and more. Schedule a demo to see how our solutions can help you hire more efficiently.
Dean Mathews is the founder and CEO of OnTheClock, an employee time tracking app that helps over 15,000 companies all around the world track time.
Dean has over 20 years of experience designing and developing business apps. He views software development as a form of art. If the artist creates a masterpiece, many people’s lives are touched and changed for the better. When he is not perfecting time tracking, Dean enjoys expanding his faith, spending time with family and friends, and finding ways to make the world just a little better.
