In today’s recruiting landscape, hiring companies have multiple approaches and delivery models at their fingertips. Many of them default to a decentralized approach that targets the best and brightest nearby candidates to quickly fill openings with highly qualified choices.
Sounds simple and effective enough, right? Unfortunately, the results don’t always pan out. For example, let’s say two different departments in the same company are hiring but go about it in two completely different ways. The lack of consistency between two groups that should be working toward the same kind of hire can produce wildly different outcomes that don’t bring the ideal candidate(s) aboard.
This is where a centralized hiring process can shine. It brings all recruitment efforts under one umbrella to manage vacancies, simplify processes, oversee potential risks, and use the best tools and strategies available to build a team. Rather than a decentralized and reactive hiring approach, centralized hiring can put your company back in the driver’s seat and give it the ability to build a great and sustainable team.
Developing a More Efficient Hiring Process with Centralized Teams
It’s no secret that the quicker a company can fill open spots, the less downtime it experiences. Employers with centralized hiring can manage labor orders across a variety of clients and locations and streamline their approach to filling open positions with potential hires. Whether applicants come from a job board, a career site, a referral program, or even social media, funneling candidates to a centralized hiring team can ensure you’re maximizing your talent pool.
How does all this work in practice? Consider this scenario: A centralized hiring team hosts regular planning meetings with organizational leaders as part of its ongoing recruitment approach. During the meetings, leaders review their current labor needs, identify potential staffing gaps, and make early requests to fill upcoming head counts. The centralized hiring team can then review and augment its talent pool to better meet forecasts.
It’s clearly a benefit to any company to be able to shorten those time-to-fill turnarounds from a financial standpoint, as well as an employee engagement perspective. Centralized recruitment teams are far more productive than decentralized recruitment teams because they work a standardized process toward a common goal. This creates efficiencies for lean recruiting teams and gives local team members more time to build relationships with new hires.
How to Streamline the Recruitment Process Through Centralized Hiring
If you’re considering a shift in traditional recruitment practices from decentralized to centralized hiring, consider the following steps for a smooth transition.
1. Create standardized processes.
Standardization is critical to the success of any centralized hiring strategy because it makes managing and delivering recruitment goals more effective and reliable. Start by defining roles and responsibilities within the team to ensure each member has a structured workflow. Your centralized hiring team should also set a timely and respectful interview process as the standard for onboarding in the current candidate market.
A standard onboarding process should be priority No. 1 for any employer. Why? Because going without one makes it less likely you’ll turn off qualified candidates who are disgruntled by a slow, disorganized process. For example, only 12% of candidates in a Gallup poll said their employer was great at onboarding (Source: Gallup, State of the American Workplace, 2017).
With centralized processes, the focus can shift to creating as positive an experience as possible. Strong candidate experiences are hard to forget once an employee is on the job; plus, it builds strong word-of-mouth brand awareness in your local communities.
2. Develop consistent reporting practices.
Your centralized hiring team should be ready to track activities impactful to your organization. By looking at time to fill, quality of hire, offer acceptance rate, and other metrics, your team will be able to create even more efficient hiring processes.
However, it’s important to ensure your team is reporting statistics that tell a story rather than just raw data. Establish specific areas and activities that correlate directly to the wins and losses (e.g., which candidate sources yield the most hires, most/least cost-effective sourcing strategies, etc.).
By actively tracking and monitoring key performance indicators (KPIs), your company will be able to see exactly where and how the recruitment process can be streamlined.
3. Adopt technologies to refine your work.
In our digital age, it is necessary to ensure your company’s onboarding process doesn’t fall behind the times. Your centralized hiring team will be able to accomplish more results and better outcomes by leveraging the use of technology to engage candidates early on.
Automated systems can lead candidates through the recruitment journey and connect them to the central team without the need for human intervention. Our team places QR codes and LEA links on each job post so candidates can apply and immediately connect with the central recruiting team. And once they’ve applied, we encourage them to download the OpEn app to follow the entire process from start to finish, including onboarding if they’re hired.
Effectively utilizing technology will only add to the benefits already present when using centralized hiring methods. Plus, an automated hiring process will further maintain the consistency you need to ensure all legal and compliance requirements are met throughout the recruiting process.
As companies continue to evolve, their hiring practices need to do the same. A centralized hiring process gets your entire company on the same page and focused on building a qualified and engaged team that’s ready to put its best foot forward each day.
Tony Martin is the senior vice president of operational excellence and innovation at Integrity Staffing Solutions, a full-service staffing agency that ranks in the top 2% of agencies across the country for quality service based on ClearlyRated’s “Best of Staffing” client survey. Integrity strives to generate opportunities for everyone to thrive by connecting great companies with great talent nationwide, helping those companies fill full-time, part-time, and temporary roles.