From current employees covering for open roles to missed revenue opportunities – such as when you’re short a sales person – productivity is disrupted each time a business has an open position. To get business back on track, HR managers and business owners often want to fill open positions as soon as possible. But while quick and efficient hiring is ideal it’s also important to avoid missing steps in the hiring process. By skipping steps, not only do you risk making a bad hire, but you could also overlook strong candidates.
Following are several steps you should take each time you make a new hire – even if you’re in a hurry to get your next employee on board:
Regularly Review Applicants
Whether you’re a business owner, HR leader or hiring manager, you likely have a busy schedule – so you might find it easier to set aside time once or twice a week to review applicants. However, Hireology research has shown that applicants reviewed and acted upon quickly are more likely to be hired. Across Hireology customers using our integrated process, 70 percent of new hires are reviewed within 12 hours of submitting an application. Responding to applicants daily can help ensure strong candidates stay excited about the the possibility of working for your business. If you leave applicants waiting around for a response, you risk losing qualified candidates to other job opportunities – and even your competitors.
Review All Applicants
In an effort to speed up hiring, you might be tempted to interview and hire one of the first strong applicants that stands out. But if you don’t review all applicants, top candidates can slip through the cracks. Using an efficient, consistent hiring process can help you track the percentage of applicants each location or manager reviews – and hold them accountable for improving. In the long run, this will ensure you don’t overlook any top candidates and, ultimately, hire your best team.
Schedule Multiple Interviews
Even if a candidate aces an interview, it’s still important to schedule multiple rounds of interviews – and do so with several candidates. The best approach is typically to start with a phone screen before inviting candidates for an in-person interview. This can save time on both ends and help you weed out candidates who either don’t seem like a fit or don’t actually seem interested in working for your company – and learn more about strong candidates. When scheduling in-person interviews, move the process along as quickly as possible, as a delay in this step poses another risk for losing strong candidates to competing jobs.
Administer Skills Assessments
Not all positions require skills that can easily be tested, but for some roles, skills assessments are critical to ensuring you don’t make a bad hire. Data shows up to 56 percent of job applicants lie on their resumes, so skills assessments can confirm whether or not candidates have the skills to be successful at your company. For example, a candidate might say he or she is an expert in Excel and a skills assessment can verify this claim – or prove otherwise. If it turns out a candidate doesn’t have the skills he or she claims, you can move forward with a more qualified candidate you might have otherwise missed.
Complete Background And Reference Checks
Beyond skills assessments, background and reference checks confirm each candidate is who they say they claim to be on paper. Reference checks in particular can help serve as a final step to ensure you’re making a great hire. If a reference says something along the lines of not wanting to work with the candidate again, it’s a red flag that means you should move forward with another candidate as you finalize your hiring.
Hireology’s proven hiring process helps retail automotive and franchise businesses, among others, complete every step of the hiring process and hire their best teams. Interested in learning more about your time to hire and whether or not you locations and managers are completing your hiring process? This data will soon be available with Hireology’s new Insights capabilities, set to be released in a few weeks. Insights will enable our customers to compare their performance in various steps of the hiring process against industry benchmarks, and identify key areas for improvement.
Interested in learning more about how to improve your hiring?
Download our eBook, “The 9 Elements Of A Well-Oiled Hiring Process.”
