Hiring is both an exciting and a laborious process. It can be great to add some fresh blood to your lineup of employees who can bring a welcome burst of fresh air and hope in the new employee’s potential. Whether you’re replacing an employee who left or creating a new position, finding just the right person can be fulfilling.
But at the end of the day, hiring someone can also be incredibly time-consuming. A third of recruiters spend over 20 hours a week on sourcing new job candidates—half of an average workweek. Employee turnover leads to hours spent in drafting job descriptions, posting your available openings, seeking out candidates, reviewing applications, and interviewing potential new hires.
And that’s before you’ve decided who you’re bringing on. After you make a hire, you then need to train the person in all aspects of the position and potentially your company and industry. Recruitment takes a lot of company resources. Therefore, any way you can save time should be embraced. While you don’t want to rush the process, there are ways to reduce your hiring time and make sure no days are wasted.
Here are four hacks to reduce your hiring time so you can spend less time on LinkedIn and more time serving your customer base.
Nurture Talent Leads Before You Need Them
When it’s time to bring in new hires, it’s helpful not to have to start from scratch. Sure, you’ll do the usuals—posting openings on your company website, reaching out to potential talent on LinkedIn, making sure word gets out about your opening, etc. But imagine having a pool you can turn to so you can personally extend invitations to someone to apply. For that to become a reality, you need to have a “talent pipeline” into which you can put leads. You shouldn’t only be thinking about recruitment when you have an open position. How can you keep an eye on talent you’d like to potentially recruit in the future?
In-person networking events, LinkedIn, recommendations from people in your industry, or other online resources can help you start building your talent pipeline. By keeping a pipeline for potential new recruits, you’ll have ample time to get them familiar with your company, excited about your culture, and interested in working for you.
Set Firm Interview Requirements
Any good recruiter or HR representative knows an application can only tell you so much. Bringing someone in for an interview is the best way to get to know his or her personality and learn more details about his or her experience. But interviews take up quite a bit of time. It’s not just the hour or so spent chatting with the candidate; it’s also the schedule coordination, the pre-interview prep, and the post-interview breakdown. Therefore, you should consider being semi-choosy about who is invited in for an interview. The mindset of well, we’ll just bring them in and see may sound like a good idea on its surface, but once it translates into hours and hours of conversation that don’t go anywhere, you’ll regret not being more selective.
One of the best ways to do this is to set up firm requirements of who you’re going to invite to interview. Is there a minimum amount of experience you want to see? A certain software you want a person to be proficient in? A willingness to relocate? A certain level of education? The specifics will depend on your company and industry, but by deciding beforehand what the requirements are going to be for an interview, it will prevent you from wasting time on interviews that you’re already fairly confident won’t lead to anything. It can also help you feel more assured walking into interviews—you already know this person has some terrific qualifications, and you know your time is being used well!
Utilize an Applicant Tracking System
It’s amazing how much time can be spent just tracking your applicants. In order to keep things neat and organized, make sure you have a system in place. Just searching your inbox for “job interview” doesn’t count! An organized spreadsheet, a well-structured Trello board, or some other application can help you keep track of who has applied, whom you’ve responded to, and where they are in the process.
Tracking your applicants well will allow you to cut back on hours spent figuring out who’s being interviewed, whom you need to reach out to, and who isn’t going to make it to the next step of the process. Make sure you have your system set up before you start looking for job candidates—otherwise, it’ll feel like changing the tires on a car that’s already rolling.
Focus on Company Culture
The best way to limit time spent on recruiting and hiring? By having a company culture so beneficial to your employees that they don’t want to leave for greener pastures! The longer employees happily stick around, the less time you’ll have to spend recruiting new ones. That seems obvious, but company culture can be emphasized in the recruitment process to lower turnaround time. Once you find the employee you want to hire, you don’t want the person waiting around thinking about the opportunity or clicking through LinkedIn again to see if anything better came along.
As soon as you reach out to a potential job candidate, the clock starts ticking. Waiting a week to hear back from a potential employee can really mess up your hiring timeline. You want the person to be fired up about the potential of joining your business. Stay connected to applicants throughout the entire process. Also, by highlighting your company’s compensation, benefits package, and innovative work experiences, you’ll ensure that potential employees are quick to respond to your e-mails and are eager to commit.