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As you outline key business goals for 2024, a top focus for your team should be assessing whether or not your current hiring platform is helping you reach your business goals. Your people are your top source of competitive advantage and if your current hiring platform isn’t helping you staff qualified employees, it’s time to reevaluate the system you have in place and consider working with a new partner.
Below, we’ve outlined several signs it’s time for your team to consider tapping into a new hiring platform in 2024 – along with what to look for in the right partner.
You’re spending too much money on recruitment efforts
One challenge many employers face when it comes to hiring qualified employees is overspending on recruitment marketing. For example, some employers might spend a significant amount of recruitment budget on a single job board posting with limited visibility into whether or not the posting is driving results.
To ensure your team isn’t overspending on recruitment marketing, you should have a diverse strategy in place and continuously measure the success of each applicant channel. Hireology data found that a multichannel recruitment marketing strategy that includes job boards, a strong career site and targeted ads drives 10 times more quality applicants than investing in a single recruitment marketing channel.
Rather than managing your recruitment marketing budget on your own, an effective hiring partner will help manage your budget and only invest in recruitment marketing channels that lead to quality candidates and eventual hires.
The right hiring platform will also help you better understand which recruitment marketing channels are driving results for your business. Hireology’s recruitment marketing Insight, for example, offers centralized visibility into sponsored job board performance, including total sponsored posts purchased, dollars spent, quality applicants sourced, and average cost per quality applicant.
You’re losing applicants to a slow hiring process
Hireology data found that hiring managers take an average of 10 days to initially review and respond to job applicants. And another recent study found that in today’s competitive hiring market, 27% of candidates are off the job market within just two weeks. If your hiring process is slow, this will cause your team to lose top applicants to competing job offers.
If your team is missing out on qualified applicants because your hiring process is slow, this is likely because you currently complete many hiring steps manually or don’t have a hiring partner that helps streamline key hiring steps. The right applicant tracking system (ATS) and recruitment CRM platform can help speed up the hiring process by automating several steps along the way – saving your team time and helping you secure top applicants while they’re still available.
With an effective ATS and recruitment CRM platform, you can speed up initial candidate review with prescreen surveys. Prescreen surveys are automatically sent to candidates as soon as they apply, only take a few minutes to complete, and are automatically scored. This enables you to eliminate any applicants who aren’t a fit for your open roles and move forward quickly with qualified candidates.
Other steps that can be streamlined with the right hiring partner include the interview stage, reference checks and background checks. An ATS and recruitment CRM platform enables you to tap into role-specific interview guides, which empower you to ask each candidate the same compliant, impactful interview questions. These guides are also automatically scored on an objective scale post-interview, helping you quickly make decisions about which candidates are the best fit.
With automated reference checks, candidates can simply have the option to fill in their references’ contact information and surveys are automatically distributed to references. References can fill out the survey on their own time and automated reference checks take less than two days to complete, with an average response rate of 85 percent. For background checks, candidates submit the required personal information and the rest of the process is taken care of automatically.
If you’ve missed out on qualified applicants because your hiring process is too slow, now is a better time than ever to consider a new hiring partner and set your team up for success in 2024 and beyond.
Candidate engagement is lacking
In today’s competitive hiring market, you need to keep candidates engaged from the moment they come across your open roles – or risk losing top talent to competitors with a more engaging hiring process.
Candidate engagement should begin with a simplified hiring process. Hireology data found that adding additional questions to a job application decreases apply rates by 20 percent – so it’s important to keep job applications as streamlined as possible. While some hiring platform providers might require job seekers to input a significant amount of information, a simple application can just include an applicant’s name, contact information, and options to attach a resume and cover letter (depending on the role). As you add more fields to the application, your best prospective applicants might lose interest in your open roles.
Once job seekers apply to your open roles, the right hiring partner will help you keep them engaged throughout each step of the hiring process. Since most of today’s job seekers are already employed, they might overlook emails or miss your calls while they’re on the job. A more efficient way to communicate with candidates is via text messaging. While 82 percent of text messages are read within five minutes, the average person only reads one in four emails they receive.
Using Hireology’s text messaging solution, you can reach out to candidates thanking them for their interest, let them know they passed the prescreen survey and ask for their interview availability. If a candidate sees and responds to your message within five minutes, you can keep the hiring process moving and either schedule a phone or in-person interview sooner rather than later. Not only will text messaging help you move the hiring process along quickly, but it will also boost candidate engagement and excitement about joining your team.
Managers aren’t held accountable to improving hiring
If your hiring process isn’t working, one way to continuously improve is by holding managers accountable to following a standardized process. However, many organizations don’t have the right hiring partner or technology in place to measure hiring success and drive accountability.
With a hiring partner like Hireology, you can proactively and continuously improve your hiring efforts. Hireology’s analytics solution, Insights, empowers customers to continuously measure hiring performance and hold team members accountable to improving.
Some of the key questions Insights answers include: “How fast am I hiring?” And “Is everyone following my hiring process?” Armed with this data, your team can identify next steps to make the hiring process more efficient – saving your time and money, and helping you prevent lost applicants.
If Insights show candidates keep getting held up in a certain hiring step, for example, you can identify ways to speed up this step. Or if a specific manager tends to miss a step in the hiring process with each candidate, you can better set expectations and hold this manager accountable to completing all hiring steps.
Your hiring platform doesn’t connect with your other HR systems
To boost hiring efficiency and get new hires up to speed as soon as possible, it’s critical for your hiring platform to seamlessly connect with your other HR systems – including your onboarding and payroll platforms, to name a few.
Rather than having new hires spend hours of their first day filling out paperwork, connection between your hiring and onboarding platforms makes the whole process easier for both your HR team and employees. It enables you to automatically transition candidate data to your onboarding platform, kicking off the process. Digital onboarding enables you to send automated onboarding documents before the first day, keeping new hires engaged and excited to get started, and saves your HR team a significant amount of time during the employee’s first day and week.
Beyond onboarding, your team needs to have the right technology and processes in place to make HR-related tasks as user-friendly as possible. If employees can’t find their pay stubs, or lose track of how many systems they need to log into – such as payroll, benefits, time and attendance and countless other systems – they might get frustrated with your organization and seek other job opportunities. By connecting your hiring data to your payroll and employee benefits provider, you can simplify HR processes, keeping employees engaged and saving time that can be spent on their day-to-day responsibilities.
The right hiring platform should set you up for success on the people side of your business in 2024 and beyond. Not sure whether or not your current hiring platform is driving the results you need? Schedule a 1:1 for a free consultation today!
