In today’s tight labor market, most job seekers are already employed and top applicants get hired quickly once they start looking for new roles. This means your team needs an efficient hiring process in place – or you’ll risk losing top talent to competing job offers.
A recent study from Gartner found that indecisive hiring managers are a key factor in slowing down the hiring process. According to the study, three in four hiring managers are indecisive, leading to a 33-day gap between the interview and the job offer.
Not only can hiring manager indecisiveness lead to a slower hiring process but it can also cause you to extend offers to candidates who aren’t necessarily the best fit for your open roles, simply because of a hiring manager’s opinion.
By leveraging hiring technology, your team can speed up the hiring process and ensure you’re making objective hiring decisions, ultimately extending offers to the most qualified candidates. Below, we’ve highlighted a few ways you can tap into HR technology for more objective hiring.
1. Screen Initial Applicants Automatically
Each time you have an open role, you likely receive dozens of applicants – if not more. And the process of manually reviewing each applicant can be time consuming. Your team might waste time on applicants who aren’t a fit for your open roles – or accidentally overlook quality applicants. And the process can take even longer – frustrating candidates – if one of your hiring managers cannot decide which applicants to move forward in the hiring process.
To help your team speed up your hiring process and be more objective with the initial candidate review stage, you can leverage prescreen surveys. These surveys are sent to job applicants automatically as soon as they apply to your open roles and consist of simple true/false question to determine each candidate’s initial fit and qualifications.
If the prescreen survey finds that certain candidates don’t have a certification required of the role or aren’t available the hours you need them, among other factors, they will automatically be eliminated from the hiring process, ensuring only the most qualified candidates move on for your hiring managers to review.
2. Run Objective Interviews
The Garner study highlighted above found a 33-day lag between job interviews and offers, and another recent study 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 efficient, objective interviews, one step you can take is asking all candidates the same interview questions, so it’s easier to gauge how each candidate might fit on your team. This can be made possible by partnering with an applicant tracking system and recruitment CRM platform that includes integrated, role-specific interview guides. Tapping into these guides can help ensure your team is asking all questions objective, compliant interview questions.
Post-interview, your team needs to compile and share interview feedback as soon as possible, and avoid letting indecisiveness hold up the hiring process. Some hiring managers and others involved in the hiring process might be indecisive because they simply take handwritten notes and don’t have a unified format to score all interviews.
Instead of relying on notes from each of your team members, which also might be more subjective than objective, you should score all candidate interviews on a set scale. For example, each question can be scored on a scale of one to five or using terms such as poor, adequate, good and excellent.
Using a scale like this enables a final interview score to be automatically calculated, helping your team share feedback with candidates quickly. And by getting back to candidates sooner rather than later, you can secure quality hires before they receive other offers.
3. Verify Candidates’ Backgrounds and Experience
Even if candidates score well on your prescreen surveys and excel during the interview stage, it’s important to verify each candidate before extending an offer – rather than letting personal opinion or preference for a certain candidate get in the way of making an objective hiring decision.
With the right technology in place, you can make background and reference checks seamless for candidates. Instead of playing phone tag with references, reference checks and be automated. All candidates need to do is submit their references’ contact information and a survey automatically gets sent to the contacts. And for automated background checks, all candidates have to do is submit their personal information and the rest of the process is taken care of automatically.
Once reference and background check results are received, you can rest assured knowing candidates are who they claim to be on their resumes and during the interview process and, as a result, make an informed, objective hiring decision.
By leveraging HR technology to eliminate some of the guesswork and manual decision making throughout the hiring process, your team can speed up the hiring process and hire employees who are likely to excel on your team. Learn about how Hireology can empower your hiring process – schedule a demo today.
