A recent study from LinkedIn found that 52 percent of recruiters believe a lengthy hiring process is the biggest obstacle to adding headcount. Not only does a lengthy hiring process pose a risk for losing top talent to other job opportunities in today’s tight labor market, but it also takes recruiters and HR leaders away from other day-to-day and more strategic tasks.
The hiring process doesn’t have to be time consuming and frustrating, but your team also shouldn’t skip steps and rush through the process to fill your open roles. It’s critical to run an effective hiring process to ensure you’re hiring quality employees – not simply filling seats.
To speed up hiring without missing key steps, Hireology offers several tools to help you automate hiring steps throughout the process. Consider the following steps to make your hiring more efficient while still focusing on quality.
1. Send Automated Prescreen Surveys
Hireology data found that the average employer waits 10 days to review and respond to job applicants. But during this time, applicants are likely to receive job offers from other organizations.
A top reason hiring managers often take some time to review and respond to job applicants is that they manually review each applicant comes through. But this leads to spending time on applicants who might not be a fit, while leaving the most qualified applicants waiting around for a response. One way to streamline initial applicant review is through integrated, automated prescreen surveys.
By tapping into Hireology prescreen surveys, as soon as applications are submitted, automated emails are sent to candidates with a link to the survey. These typical format for these surveys is a series of true/false questions, which only take candidates a few minutes to complete.
With prescreen surveys, you can also include knock out questions to weed out candidates who won’t work for your open roles. For example, you can ask if an applicant has a valid driver’s license. If a driver’s license is a requirement of the role and the applicant answers this question as “false,” he or she will be removed from the hiring process and sent an automated rejection email. And applicants who score well on prescreen surveys can immediately move forward with next hiring steps. This will save your team time that would have otherwise been spent reviewing applicants who aren’t a fit.
2. Run Impactful Interviews
Recent data found that 70 percent of job candidates lose interest in job opportunities if they don’t hear back within a week of an interview. To run more impactful interviews and get back to candidates as soon as possible, one step your team can take is asking all candidates the same interview questions, so it’s easier to gauge how each candidate would potentially fit in your open roles.
Post-interview, your team should collect and share feedback in a timely manner, which can be streamlined using centralized interview feedback. Rather than taking disorganized notes, leveraging technology like Hireology’s recruitment CRM platform enables your team to score all interviews on an objective, uniform scale. For example, each interview question can be scored on a scale of one to five or using terms such as poor, adequate, good and excellent. Using this scale, a final interview score is automatically calculated, empowering your team to share feedback with candidates quickly – even as soon as the same day as their interviews.
3. Distribute Skills Tests
Up to 85 percent of job applicants lie on their resumes – and in many cases, they stretch the truth when it comes to their overall skill sets. An applicant might say he or she has extensive customer service experience or is an expert in Photoshop, but skills tests can help you ensure this is truly the case before extending an offer.
One type of skills test can help you gauge a candidate’s hard skills – meaning the technical skills a candidate needs to succeed in your open role. Using this type of skills testing, you might test on basic math comprehension, caregiver requirements, sales expertise or Google Suite Skills among other areas depending on the role.
The other type of skills test it’s important for your team to run is a soft skills test. These skills tend to be less technical, but key to success in most jobs and might include social etiquette, compassion, business vocabulary or customer service capabilities.
Hireology has several skills test options integrated into its platform. Hard and soft skills tests are available for specific roles, such as accounting, office administration, certified nursing, auto technicians expertise, and many more. Each assessment can be completed by candidates in about 15 minutes, and tests are automatically scored with the results sent directly to the hiring manager.
4. Complete Reference and Background Checks
Candidates might ace your prescreen surveys, interviews and skills tests, but to save your team from a poor hire or potential liability down the road, you should verify each candidate before extending a job offer. This can be made possible through automated reference and background checks.
Hireology helps automate hiring steps related to candidate verification. For reference checks, candidates simply fill in their references’ contact information and surveys are automatically sent out. This saves your team from playing phone tag with potential references – which would ultimately slow down the hiring process. And for background checks candidates submit the required personal information and the rest of the process is taken care of automatically.
The more efficient your hiring process, the quicker you can get new hires in the door and contributing to your team’s productivity and profitability. But it’s important to avoid skipping key hiring steps simply to speed up the hiring process. Working with a partner like Hireology, you can automate hiring steps, decreasing overall time to hire and keeping top talent engaged without sacrificing candidate quality. For additional tips on keeping candidates engaged in today’s competitive hiring market, read our resource, “The Hireology Candidate Engagement Playbook.”
