by An organisation’s success depends on selecting the right person with the right attitude and personality. That said, the cost and time involved in the process make it necessary for HR Managers to hire quality candidates quickly for the required positions. Our research indicates that in India, the average time-to-fill a post is 40 days, and by speeding up the recruitment process, a company can reduce 32% of the total hiring cost.
Despite the advent of technology, unfortunately most companies still adopt orthodox and outdated methods of hiring, leading to never ending hiring cycles, heavy hiring costs, losing the right candidate often and overall low organizational productivity.
Hiring is not easy. It’s nothing short of a matchmaking exercise, and just like Indian weddings that involves multiple stakeholders, same happens in case of hiring. Headhunters, recruiters, candidates, hiring managers and everyone you can think of has a say in your hiring process.
This whole elaborate process creates huge scopes for inefficiencies in the hiring funnel. While there can be multiple solutions to speed up the hiring process, there are three effective ways you can start with that help you hire quality candidates faster are.
Let’s have a look at them.
- Smart Sourcing and Lead Generation:
- The Talent Acquisition team should create an irresistible job description that they can post on various social networks, online forums, communities, and internal job portals where your industry professionals gather in search of new job opportunities.
- The hiring managers can use these online platforms to network and build relationships with professionals to source a large pool of prospective candidates and create a database of potential professionals.
- For filling up any senior position, the recruitment team can also take help from Business Heads or Departmental Heads to decide whether to promote an existing employee or hire an external candidate.
2. Screening & Interviews
Extensive research has proven that an organisation with a structured hiring process can develop a faster recruitment process where the scope of identifying suitable candidates is high.
- Recognise the challenging roles/jobs to hire: First, you should identify the positions for which your organisation needs highly qualified, experience, and technical professionals. A database of those professionals should be prepared in advance so that you can contact them when they are required.
- Identify the essential tasks that the designation needs: Every role in an organisation has some vital functions to ensure a smooth work-flow. The hiring managers must identify these so that they can prepare interview questions related to the part. It will help in identifying suitable candidates for the position.
- Usage of Technology to aid bulk-hiring: So, the recruitment team can use Omni Channel Communicator as a medium of an interview process to reduce the manual efforts. Through this medium, recruiters can Email, WhatsApp, send messages to candidates.
- Arrange One-way Video Interviews– It has been observed that scheduling interview dates for experienced candidates are quite tricky as they have ongoing professional commitments. The recruitment team can prepare situation-based questions for the candidates to answer through a short video in their free time through this type of video resume format.
3. Minimize Internal Delays:
The recruitment team should consider every vacancy as a campaign and execute on a war footing mode. While they can always use a recruitment automation system to track and assess every candidate, it’s more important to build organisational buy-in to close positions faster. There should be a systematic and fast interview and on-boarding process to select a set of strong candidates. Delay in operations can lead to the loss of suitable candidates. For example, to hire sales candidates, hiring managers would look for a sales professional who would be aggressive, skilled, represent the brand image well and be ready to work at competitive compensation packages.
Such candidates are tough to find and high in demand. Often, interviews get delayed because of reasons as avoidable as Hiring Manager’s availability. It’s important for recruiters to get Hiring Managers’ buy-in and push them to finish interviews on high priority. Even decision communication often takes a long time and by the time the top candidate is made an offer, he/she has already accepted the offer made by your rival firm. Such practices and similar mistakes end up pushing recruitment teams back to square one.
Practices like the ones mentioned above can greatly help companies in reducing hiring cycles and bringing down hiring costs.
WRITTEN BYFlyvheel
