HR leaders spend an average of 40 percent of their time on administrative, manual HR tasks, such as answering phone calls and emails, and re-entering data from one system to another. The more time HR team members spend on administrative tasks, the less time they have to focus on strategic work to keep employees engaged and help the company grow.
Your team can reduce time spent on manual tasks by partnering with an integrated recruitment, hiring and onboarding platform. Below, we’ve outlined a few ways tapping into the right technology can help your streamline day-to-day responsibilities and instead dedicate time to what matters most – your people.
Automate key hiring steps
Employees are any organization’s top differentiator, so it’s critical to follow an effective hiring process and only extend offers to the most qualified candidates. But certain steps in the hiring process can be time consuming – such as reviewing every applicant received and playing phone tag with candidates’ contacts for references. By partnering an integrated hiring platform, you can easily automate many hiring steps – saving time without sacrificing candidate quality.
One way to jump start the hiring process is by leveraging prescreen surveys to speed up initial candidate review. With prescreen surveys, as soon as applications are submitted, emails are sent to candidates with a link to the survey. Candidates who score well on the survey are moved to the next step in the hiring process, while those who are not a fit automatically get eliminated from the hiring process. This ultimately saves your team from spending time reviewing each and every applicant.
To keep candidates engaged and move the hiring process forward, your team can leverage interview guides with automated scoring. These guides can be customized to each role and your team can ask all candidates the same, objective questions. Post-interview, instead of relying on your team’s handwritten notes for interview feedback, your team can benefit from integrated, automotive interview scoring.
Even if candidates excel on the prescreen survey and during the interview stage, you’ll want to verify any top candidates before extending a final job offer. But many hiring managers skip final verification steps – such as reference and background checks – because they are time consuming. With hiring technology that automates reference and background checks, you can streamline this final hiring step – and avoid playing phone tag with references or chasing down candidates for background check information.
Kick off onboarding before the first day
Each time you have an open role at your organization, productivity is lost – and even once you have new hires on board, it takes some time for them to become fully productive. To boost employee productivity sooner rather than later, you can embrace digital onboarding, which enables employees to fill out onboarding paperwork before the first day and helps your team avoid completing the same redundant tasks with each new hire.
A survey found that 70 percent of managers find employee onboarding to be frustrating, while more than half said that it takes 10 or more interactions across several departments to prepare for each new employee’s first day. Not only does this cause productivity to decline, but it can also cause new employees’ engagement to take a hit. If a new employee is filling out paperwork for most of his or her first day, they’re likely to lose some of their initial enthusiasm about the role.
Digital onboarding enables new employees to start contributing to the company on the first day, rather than spending hours filling out paperwork. Once an employee accepts a job offer, your HR platform can facilitate paperless onboarding during pre-boarding in the weeks leading up to the employee’s start date. Onboarding tasks that can be completed ahead of time include: signing the employee handbook, filling out direct deposit information for automated payroll, completing tax forms, and filling out benefits paperwork.
Embrace data to improve your hiring efforts
When your hiring process drags on for too long, not only does this lead to lost productivity and more administrative tasks for your HR team, but it also poses a risk for losing top candidates to other job opportunities. In addition to automating hiring steps, as outlined above, your team can also turn to actionable hiring data to speed up your total time to hire.
To speed up your time to hire, (hiring velocity), your team can use data to understand where there might be hold ups in the hiring process. For example, it might take days or weeks for your hiring managers to review applicants, but if you’re not measuring this data, you’ll have no way of knowing why you’re losing candidates during the hiring process.
Once you recognize that the initial candidate review is slowing down the hiring process, you can outline steps for improvement – such as implementing prescreen surveys or holding managers accountable for setting aside time each day to review candidates.
All Hireology customers have access to our Insights solution, which provides actionable, Q&A analytics to measure hiring health. By tapping into Insights, your team can have clear visibility into hiring performance across locations and managers, and compare results to peers using industry-specific benchmarks.
Hireology’s Velocity Insight helps measure and improve time to hire by providing a clear understanding of applicants reviewed, time to review, and average time spent in each hiring step. The Insight flags bottlenecks in the hiring process and helps employers decrease time to hire – saving money by filling open roles sooner.
Your employees can make or break the success of your business – especially as key industries like hospitality and healthcare continue to face an ongoing labor crisis. By empowering your HR team to save time on hiring and onboarding steps that would otherwise be manual and tedious, they can focus more on driving employee engagement, growth and productivity. To see what a streamlined and efficient hiring process could look like at your organization, connect with our team today!
