10 Tips to Speed Up your Hiring Process – Without Reducing Quality (Part 2)

 In a recent article, I wrote about five tactics you can adopt to speed up your hiring process without reducing quality. In this article, I present the last five of ten tactics that you can use to help speed up your hiring process while maintaining quality.

1. Higher quality job descriptions

Research tells us that although compensation is of central importance to job seekers, the average job candidate is increasingly basing his/her decision to join a company on additional factors, such as company culture, career development opportunities and management style. Employer brand is king. So, if you want to attract more applicants to your roles (which should lead to faster recruitment), develop higher quality, more attractive job descriptions, which provide accurate and positive representations of your company culture, learning environment and management process/style.

2. Flexible interviewing

We live in an increasingly time-pressurized world, which means that top talent is usually pushed for time too; they tend to have a full diary and work and life commitments, which will effect their availability and flexibility for interviewing, no matter how committed they are. When firms try to engage with today’s applicants, it can result in extended recruitment times as you try to align diaries. So, to effectively engage with candidates, employers should offer more flexible interviewing options, as standard, which could include things like: the potential to request a first round video interview, evening interview options, and weekends interview options. High Street banks had to start opening later in the day and on Saturdays to engage with the modern customer base, and maybe the hiring process should do the same. This is a good way to reduce the time-to-hire without a reduction in quality.

3. Coach candidates on how to negotiate shorter notice periods with their employer

One of the problems that you may find once a candidate has accepted your offer is that he or she may have a long notice period, which delays the newcomer’s starting date, and the worker may not be comfortable or competent enough to negotiate an early exit. If this is the case, why not develop some professional guidance/documentation on how candidates can professionally negotiate a shorter notice and have a member or your HR team on hand to advise them how to do it. This is another good technique to potentially reduce the time-to-hire by reducing your chosen candidate’s potential notice period.

4. Create a long-term talent plan

This is not always possible, but for many companies it is. In as far as is possible, build a resource plan for the year, so you have a good idea of when you will need to hire new recruits. This does not necessarily speed up the rate-of-hire, but it at least means that you can start hiring early enough to ensure that employees are on board by the intended start date.

5. Create a bank of candidates

This is an oldie but goodie. Why not keep track of all the near misses and high potentials who you have interviewed and create a bank of potential future talent that you can call upon when you have a new vacancy? This will speed up your hiring process, because each time you have a vacancy you won’t have to go directly to the market place initially because you will have a primed bank of talent available that will make excellent candidates for your role. Keeping track of rejected candidates used to be an onerous process, but today it has been made easy by social technologies; so, there is no reason not to consider it.

Good luck with hiring and I’d be keen to hear any more tips you might have on reducing time-to-hire.