Why Is Speed Of Hiring So Important?

Slow speed of hiring or a delayed hiring process can result in revenue loss, rising costs, missed opportunities, increased operational expenses, delayed goal achievement, and broader impacts on the industry and economy. therefore it is an important concern for recruiting managers and also highly talented candidates are in and out of the job market quickly. Delayed hiring also severely damages recruitment results. The time it takes employers to hire people has nearly doubled over the past few years i.e. about an average of 42 days to screen and hire new employees. It costs a company to leave that position unfilled and this can be calculated by finding the turnover cost of the position every time the employee leaves.

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For a recruiter, it is a candidate-driven market and the jobseekers rule the hiring process. Businesses need skilled talent to grow and advance forward with time, but talent is hard to come by. This is due to the high demand for talent and a lesser supply of actual skilled talent. Further, the demand is insane when it comes to “future critical” jobs like cyber security, and quantum computing.

Such skilled talent is mostly employed, making the hiring landscape even harder. When the hiring process is slow they will choose to stay with their current employer. With a faster hiring process, one also increases the likelihood of hiring much better candidates.

If you are slow, in-demand candidates will be the first to drop out and you will be left with lower-performing ones. It also reduces candidate bidding and the salary cost will be lower.

Let us now take a look at some sure-shot methods for speeding up hiring.

Filling Vacancies Faster: Proven Tips

Now that you know a speedy hiring process is so important, it’s time to discuss how to fill the vacancies faster.

#1. Optimize Your Job Webpage and Job Description

A career site is probably a candidate’s first interaction with the company. In 2023 hiring is going to continue at volume, so, it is critical to optimize your career site and job description.

• Ensure that the candidates can find the website easily and that it is appealing and easy to use.
• Write core skills that a person needs for this job.
• The candidates must be able to set up their profiles easily here.
• Write clear expectations.
• They must be able to look at jobs for search effortlessly and apply.
• Make it attractive and representative of your company culture.
• Set up surveys to get candidate feedback on their experience.
• Use videos and infographics to make the site more attractive. Use content showing aspects of working at the company.
• For many people, their smartphone is their only method to reach your career site so the key features and content of the site should work well on mobile devices.
• Freshen up your career site periodically, so that the returning candidates see new content on their visits.

#2. Set up An Applicant Tracking System (ATS)

Use an applicant tracking system (ATS). It is more than simply just a candidate-tracking application. It makes the difference by letting you hire top talent before your competition does.

• It also helps thorough management of candidates, applications and job postings faster.
• It can manage a searchable database of candidates according to job descriptions.
• It helps schedule interviews and sends automated emails to keep candidates, and hiring managers notified.
• Filtered candidates can be viewed, identified, compared and ranked against job openings on ATS.
• A good ATS can improve your reach and mark a wider range of candidates.
• It can streamline the creation of job postings and has AI capabilities that add significant value to your recruiting processes.

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#3. Your Best Source Of Talent Should Be Identified

Improve candidate sourcing by identifying where the best candidates are coming from. Source of hire (SoH) will tell you the metrics for different types of candidates like unsuccessful candidates, successful hires, passive candidates, and for different geographies and jobs etc.

It gives you an insight into where to focus to acquire talent. It helps to improve your approach to the various sources that you use.

#4. Expand remote hiring capabilities

For remote hiring, have a fully digital hiring process. Make the jobs available online, interview the candidates on video conferencing software, and get the documentation done digitally.

If you have a career site/page, an ATS, or mobile-enabled app/software you can run recruitments digitally. Couple them with video conferencing software like Cisco Webex, Microsoft Teams or Zoom, which will give you a lot of capabilities online, saving you a lot more time.

Remote interviews are an important part of the hiring process for today. Pick reliable and reputable platforms for virtual interviews. Candidates might not want to download any app for a video conferencing service.

#5. Skills-Based Hiring

Skilled-based is much more prevalent these days. Since the use of AI, technology has improved and the accuracy of skill identification and matching has become accurate. Academic degrees are no longer a way of measuring the skills of candidates.

In skill-based hiring, skills are identified for a position and candidates with similar skills are selected for further rounds. Skills like communication, problem-solving critical thinking etc. are important skills to many roles. So the candidate profile section should allow candidates to select verifiable skills

#6. Use Recruiting Platforms

Considering that the talented candidates are already employed, filling a vacancy in your company would probably need headhunting. Headhunting on a professional networking platform like LinkedIn lets you find a suitable candidate faster. Filter your search and specifications to match your vacancy and reach your prospect. So, the best way you can connect with people is through social platforms.

#7. Internal Hiring

Recognising talent from within is the best way to assess your valuable employees and recognise their efforts. Talented and hard-working employees are always present within your own company who are also looking for growth. Promoting them gets you more committed and trustworthy candidates at a faster pace.

#8. Employee Referrals

Employee referrals not only do the incentives drive current employees to do the best for their own company but they even do it with a sense of responsibility. Since they have greater and relevant access to industry contacts the HR’s job gets easier and speedier.

Despite of best intentions, there is always room for improvement. Collecting feedback is the best possible method to address this. An employee listening platform or any survey tool like Qualtrics can be used to collect and aggregate feedback from candidates. This feedback can point to the issues to improve the candidate experience.

#10. The Recruitment Process Outsource

Companies have an in-house HR team but outsourcing the hiring definitely does streamline your recruitment process. A specialist staffing service provider has a much larger talent pool making recruitment process outsourcing more time-efficient and cost-efficient.

You can also hire a recruitment specialist. Consider working with the one who can do this specialized task for you. Recruitment specialists know efficient strategies and have an array of contacts that can help you accelerate recruitment.

Bonus Tip : These agencies are specialized in candidate selection and filling vacant job opportunities. Read How recruitment agencies help candidates in the job search?

The Bottom Line

Hiring speed is one of the top five recruiting problems faced by HR Managers. Manual and time-intensive talent acquisition systems, land you up in less-than-satisfactory hires and prolonged hiring timelines. The quality of the candidate pool is affected in such scenarios and also there is a negative impact on communication and visibility for all stakeholders involved.

Finally, make use of available technologies and leverage strategies to accelerate your recruitment process.