According to a study published by CareerBuilder, nearly a third of all workers (32%) were looking to change jobs this year. As a process, this is a fairly easy thing to do. There are dozens of online portals that let jobseekers create résumés on the fly and apply for multiple positions with just a few clicks.
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While this does make it easy to apply for jobs, inefficiencies have crept into the system from recruiters’ perspectives. The number of applicants applying to any position is dramatically higher than what it used to be. Consolidating job applications, screening candidates with the right parameters, and ensuring a quality interview process with each of the shortlisted applicants can now take a lot longer.
Streamlining your recruitment process is thus important from an efficiency perspective.
Assess Your Recruitment Strategy
The inefficiency in your hiring process is often brought about by the recruitment strategy that you establish upfront. Recruiters typically publish job openings on their “Careers” portal, as well as distribute them across popular job boards. Although this does help spread the word about new openings, it is also the reason you receive hundreds, or even thousands, of applications for every vacancy.
Depending on the role you are seeking to fill, it may be a good idea to not publicize your opening across mainstream job portals. Instead, consider partnering with recruitment agencies to do the outreach on your behalf. This enables you to reach a smaller pool of highly targeted candidates who are more likely to fit your job description.
You may also set up a system to source workers from within your organization. Several studies have established that it is more cost-effective to train an employee for a new role instead of hiring candidates from outside. Upskilling and reskilling your existing employees to take on new roles are therefore high priorities.
Invest in Innovation
For the most part, technological adoption can ease your recruiting efficiency and streamline the process. Applicant tracking software (ATS) is an inescapable component of any HR department or organization. While ATS helps consolidate and filter candidates based on information provided in their application, it is also helpful to invest in other innovative tools that can improve hiring success rates.
For instance, thousands of organizations make use of online psychometric tests. These include personality profiling, whereby an employer can use assessments to predict future performance and whether the candidate will be able to cope with the job long term. Experience tells us that some types of personalities will cope better than others in a given work environment. A personality profile can help both candidates and employers make better decisions.
Automate
Some of the aforementioned tips may not be practically feasible when you are hiring workers with mainstream skills. In such cases, you may have to go through popular job boards, which increases the number of applications you’ll receive (and, consequently, what you have to process).
Scaling up an automation system may be the solution to quickly and efficiently process applications in these cases. When it comes to recruitment, a lot of it can be seamlessly automated.
This includes candidate sourcing through programmatic recruitment ads, prescreening with the help of automated résumé scrapers, screening with video-analyzing tools that look for body cues and word choices in videotaped interviews, and communicating with candidates regarding their application. Automation may also be extended to other aspects of Human Resources, like onboarding.
Create Checklists through the Entire Process
Recruitment procedures can be ineffective because the process can change with every candidate, and there is a lot of overlap in the hiring process. For instance, your assessment metrics change depending on whether you are hiring a person from within your organization or from outside. Also, while some candidates may need to be interviewed several times across various stakeholders, a decision is made regarding others with just one or two rounds of discussions.
In order to streamline these various scenarios, it is recommended that your organization build a workflow chart that lists every step in the interview process and how to proceed with the workflow depending on the applicant or the role in question. This ensures that recruiters can execute a streamlined interview process despite applicant differences.
Streamlining the hiring process can improve the productivity of your recruitment team dramatically and thus save your organization thousands of dollars annually. Understanding the existing inefficiencies and identifying solutions will go a long way toward making your hiring process efficient.
Anand Srinivasan is the founder of Hubbion, a suite of free business apps and resources.