Hiring the best team starts with a solid hiring process, and having powerful recruiting software in place to support a seamless candidate experience benefits everyone from hiring managers to job seekers.
The hiring process offers your organization the chance to get the best talent pool excited about joining your team, but if this excitement wears off due to hold ups during certain hiring steps, you’ll risk losing quality job seekers to competing offers. Below, we’ve outlined several common hiring pain points, along with ways your team can develop a smart recruitment process to address these issues.
Problem #1: Job applications are lengthly and complicated
Over the last few years, there’s been a dramatic shift in how job seekers apply to roles: it’s likely that many are applying to multiple companies in hopes of landing on their feet. Long, drawn out applications make their search more tedious and may deter job seekers from submitting their applications. Your job postings should be direct, include the job description and role requirements, and the application itself should be short and to the point so that you get the information you need to make informed decisions, and the applicant doesn’t spend hours weeding through unnecessary fluff.
Some employers have job applications that are either pages long or require a seemingly endless scroll to complete, both of which can cause job seekers to abandon their application. And in many cases, sections of the job application are redundant, further frustrating prospective applicants. To ensure job seekers who begin your applications actually complete them, your team should make applications as concise as possible.
Keep your job applications simple by only requiring job seekers to include their name, email address, telephone number and resume, with an option to add a cover letter expanding on their interest. By leveraging recruitment technology such as an applicant tracking system, you can easily centralize all this applicant information to keep the hiring process organized.
Beyond keeping job applications short and sweet, your team should also ensure your applications are mobile-friendly. Over half of job seekers use either a smartphone or tablet during the job search process – and many would opt for applying to jobs directly via mobile. Your team doesn’t want to lose out on qualified talent simply because you don’t have an option to apply via mobile.
Problem #2: It takes days or weeks to hear back after applying
Hireology data found that the average hiring manager takes 10 days to review and respond to job applicants. As the economy normalizes, top applicants will likely be well into the interview process elsewhere. This means your team needs to speed up the time it takes to review and respond to job applicants.
If your team takes too long to review and respond to job seekers, they’ll quickly get frustrated, and either think your team is disorganized or you’re not interested in considering them for your open roles. One of the reasons your team might take a long time to review initial applicants is because you likely manually review each and every applicant — even those who will never be a fit for your team. But with the right recruitment technology in place, you can streamline this first step in the recruitment process.
Prescreen surveys are one example of how to speed up your recruitment strategy. These surveys can help you avoid manually reviewing each job applicant and instead automatically send those who are qualified to the next step in the hiring process. With prescreen surveys, as soon as an application is submitted, an email is sent to the candidate with a link to the survey. The typical format for these surveys is a series of true/false questions, which only take candidates a few minutes to complete.
Applicants who score well on the surveys can quickly move forward with next hiring steps, while those who are not a fit will be automatically removed from the hiring process and sent a rejection email. This type of recruitment technology saves your team time that would have otherwise been spent reviewing applicants who aren’t a fit, and saves applicants from the frustration of prolonged wait times to hear back after applying.
Problem #3: Communication with hiring managers leads to phone tag
To make communication easier between your hiring team and job seekers, consider tapping into recruitment technology such as candidate text messaging, rather than relying on email or phone calls, which can easily go unanswered.
Recent data found that 90 percent of job seekers would be willing to communicate with recruiters via text messages. Your team can tap into text messaging to schedule interviews, answer quick questions, follow up with feedback post-interview, and remind candidates of actions they need to take — such as completing prescreen surveys.
Text messaging can help you keep job seekers engaged and excited about joining your team. And Hireology data found that candidate text messaging can help you hire up to eight days sooner, boosting productivity and profitability.
Problem #4: Reference checks are a manual process
Similar to your candidates and hiring team playing phone tag during the hiring process, another step that often gets held up is reference checks. With traditional reference checks, HR leaders or hiring managers might go back and forth with a reference via email to find a time that works for a call on both ends. And during this time, top talent might receive job offers from competing employers.
By tapping into recruitment technology, you can automate the entire reference check process – saving your team and candidates’ references time and helping you speed up the hiring process. Candidates simply fill in their references’ contact information and reference check surveys are automatically sent out. 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.
Your hiring managers and today’s job seekers have a lot on their plate, so anything that can make the hiring process smoother will be greatly appreciated. By leveraging recruitment technology, you can avoid common issues that prolong the process and hire qualified employers sooner.
Hireology’s applicant tracking system and recruitment CRM platform offers all the technology outlined above, and more to help you attract, hire, and onboard top talent. To learn more about what you can do to connect with the youngest generation in the workforce, download your copy of Understanding Gen Z at Work.
