Speeding up your hiring process is one of the single most advantageous things you can do for your hiring. Internally, filling roles quickly has many advantages but it’ll also ensure that, even in competitive markets, you can keep candidates interested in your role. Speeding up your hiring process is so important that we decided we’ll need to do a whole separate blog just on that. Here are five practical and simple tips to speed up your hiring process.
Start With a Clear Picture
This is probably the most important step when it comes to speeding up your hiring process. Before you start hiring for a position, make completely sure that you know what type of candidate you’re really looking for. Consider the hard, technical skills as well as the soft skills that you need, what type of candidate would work well within the established team and what profile would suit your company culture. Map all of these aspects out and make sure it’s been documented properly. Unfortunately getting this step wrong often leads to needing to restart processes and wasting a lot of time, but getting it right means that you will get the right candidates to interview, you’ll know when you’ve found who you’re looking for and everyone involved will have an enjoyable experience.
Communicate Effectively
Now that you have a clear picture of who you’re looking for, it’s time to make sure that everyone involved in the hiring process knows what this picture is. Interviewers need to know what they’re assessing for, recruiters need to know what they’re sourcing for and candidates need to know what they’re signing up for. Every person brings their own ideas, and unfortunately biases, to the table and it’s up to you to ensure that you’ve cleared that table. It’s easy to assume that others have a similar idea of what the right candidate would look like but you need to make sure that this is actually the case. When it comes to candidates you need to ensure that your job description creates a similarly accurate idea and that you communicate the role, the culture and the day to day that the candidate can expect. This ensures that candidates can decide, upfront, whether it’s the right role for them and they don’t go through an unnecessary hiring process.
Use the Right Technology
Recruitment technology has come a long way since simple job boards. Today you have so much more at your fingerprints. Technology allows you to simplify your process, keep all your information in one place, attract candidates, find candidates, portray your story and even locate the best recruiter partners. You have many different options for each of these factors however, to really speed up your process, finding a solution that unifies all of these factors is your best shot. HirePort for example identifies and vets experienced freelance recruiters to partner with, helps you receive the qualified and screened candidates, keeps all your information in one place, arranges your interviews and many more. On the other hand, you have options like LinkedIn that also allows you to identify candidates and portray your story but you’ll need to try to communicate and establish candidate interest yourself, as well as all the other steps. Find a solution that unifies as many aspects as you can to keep things efficient.
Find the Right People to Partner With
Your choice of recruiters and interviewers is key. Experienced recruiters, who know your industry, can save you an enormous amount of time – especially when you’re in a competitive environment like tech. Not only do they coordinate your process but they also already have a network of candidates who you’ll want to speak to about your role. And when they don’t already have the right person, they know where to find the right person. The right choice in interviewers is also key. You need to make sure that people in the team this candidate will be joining are a part of the process but you also need to ensure that they can assess the candidates properly. This often comes down to putting some effort into training your interviewers.
Be Decisive and Realistic
Besides saving time, another advantages of having created that clear picture and communicating that to everyone involved in the process is that it allows you to be decisive about candidates. Being decisive can however be quite tough. It’s easy to see potential in candidates but you need to remember what you specifically documented needing when you started. You’ll meet great people in hiring processes but being a great person does not necessarily mean that person is great for the specific role you’re hiring for. Stick to assessing what you know you need. The flip side of this, is being unrealistic. Assessing candidates is a balancing act between sticking to your requirements and knowing that your hire is likely not to tick every single box. So although you have a clear picture, you also have to know which requirements in that picture are non-negotiable and which requirements are nice-to-haves.
Speeding up your hiring process can be quite simple: focus on planning, make sure everyone’s on the same page, find the right tech and partners and be sure to assess for what you planned. Having a fast, efficient hiring process has a plethora of advantages – too many to simply add in in this conclusion. This is why we decided to do an entire blog just focusing on why you should be focusing on speeding up your hiring process in the first place – this will be released soon, keep an eye out.
