Job seekers in today’s competitive hiring market get taken off the market quickly. So it’s critical for your team to have an effective hiring process in place that enables you to secure top applicants before other employers.
Think about how long it takes you to fill open roles on average – it might take a few weeks or even longer. But while your hiring process is dragging along, your best applicants are likely accepting other opportunities. So how can you speed up your hiring process? Leveraging core components of Hireology’s recruitment CRM and applicant tracking system (ATS), customers have reduced their time to hire and gone from applicant to hire in one day leveraging automation tools
Below, we’ve outlined several ways you can decrease your time to hire using Hireology – and in some cases, even hire top applicants within one day.
Send Each Applicant an Automated Prescreen Survey
Employers wait an average of 10 days to review and respond to job applicants. But during this time, applicants might lose interest in your open role. One way to quickly get back to applicants and move the hiring process forward is by sending automated prescreen surveys.
With Hireology prescreen surveys, once applications are submitted, your team can automatically send follow-up emails to each applicant thanking them for their interest and providing a link to the survey. Prescreen surveys consist of a series of true/false questions and only take candidates a few minutes to complete. You can also include knock out questions in your prescreen surveys. For example, you can ask if an applicant is available to work nights and weekends. If the applicant answers this question as “false,” he or she will be removed from the hiring process and sent an automated rejection email. This will save your team time that would have otherwise been spent reviewing applicants who aren’t a fit.
Hireology data found that 40 percent of applicants don’t even bother to complete the survey – meaning only the most engaged candidates who truly want to join your team take the time to fill out the survey. Applicant prescreen surveys are automatically scored if qualified candidates complete their prescreen surveys the same day they apply, you can immediately move forward with next hiring steps.
Reach Out to Qualified Talent via Text Messaging
As soon as you receive applicant prescreen survey results, the next step is to reach out to qualified candidates and schedule interviews. Rather than playing phone tag or risk an email getting overlooked, 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.
Quickly Complete Interviews
By efficiently communicating via text messaging, if your team and an applicant’s schedules line up, you might even be able to schedule interviews the same day – or if it’s later in the day, schedule an interview as soon as the following business day.
When it comes to interview scheduling, your team should do your best to keep all in-person interviews to one day. Consider scheduling a few interviews back to back, rather than asking candidates to return for several rounds of interviews. Given the low unemployment rate, most job seekers are already employed, so it might be challenging for them to step away from their current jobs several times. And in the time it takes you to schedule several rounds of interviews, your top candidates might receive other job offers.
Recent data found that 70 percent of candidates lose interest in job opportunities if they don’t hear back within a week of an interview. Post-interview, your team should collect and share feedback as soon as possible. And this can be made easier by streamlining interview feedback. If your team takes personal notes and compares handwritten feedback across several team members, this can delay your timeline for getting back to candidates.
Rather than taking disorganized notes, your team should ask all candidates the same questions and 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 Hireology, all interview feedback can be centralized in one platform. This enables you to easily determine an average interview score and share feedback with candidates quickly – even as soon as the same day as the interview.
Host a Hiring Fair
Another option to turn applicant leads into hires within one day is by hosting a hiring fair. Some hiring fairs might simply consist of collecting resumes and handing out business cards, then planning to reach out to qualified candidates a few days later. But you can streamline your hiring process by completing interviews on the spot.
Whether a job seeker applies to your open roles ahead of time or once they arrive at the hiring fair, make sure you have hiring managers and anyone else who might be involved in the hiring process available to speak with prospective employees. Consider asking interested applicants to complete prescreen surveys while they’re at the hiring fair and once they’ve taken the surveys, set up interviews with your hiring managers.
For job seekers who stand out at the hiring fair and look like a great fit for your team, you have the option of extending an offer right away. Not only will this help you hire top talent before the competition, but the quick and efficient process will keep these applicants excited about joining your team.
Extend Conditional Job Offers Pending Reference and Background Check Results
After the interview stage of the hiring process, if certain candidates seem like a great fit for your team, you’ll want to extend an offer sooner rather than later. While reference and background checks are critical to verifying each candidate’s background and experience, consider extending a conditional offer while you’re awaiting the results. Doing so can help keep candidates engaged and excited about joining your team.
Whether or not you extend an offer before receiving background and reference check results, Hireology makes verification easy on your team and candidates by automating the whole process. For reference checks, candidates simply fill in their references’ contact information and surveys are automatically sent out. And for background checks candidates submit the required personal information and the rest of the process is taken care of automatically.
A streamlined hiring process that includes prescreen surveys, effective candidate communication, centralized interview scoring and automated verification steps can help you speed up the hiring process significantly – and in some cases, you might even have the opportunity to hire top candidates within one day. For additional tips on keeping candidates engaged in today’s applicant-driven economy, read our resource, “The Hireology Candidate Engagement Playbook.”
