Finding the right new employee can be a challenge, especially when you are under a time crunch. You need to find someone with the right skills and expertise, someone who fits within your team, and someone who will stay long enough to outweigh the costs of a new hire. Moreover, your team must know how to hire quickly under pressure without making a big mistake.
How do you do all this without spending enormous amounts of time and resources? It all boils down to using the most effective tools and techniques to find, screen, interview and decide on your new hire.
Here are four steps on how to hire better in less time.
First, you need to narrow down your search. You already have one of your greatest employee sourcing assets at your fingertips: your current employees. Research shows that proportionally, employee referrals yield better quality recruits than other sourcing strategies. Employee referrals come from trusted sources, they are more likely to accept a job offer, and they have a better retention rate than other types of hires. For more details, see our Employee Referral Infographic.
Set up an employee referral program that offers incentives such as bonuses or additional leave. Not only will this save you time in finding quality recruits; employee referral programs that reward referrers also increase the satisfaction and engagement of your current employees. Use a modern applicant tracking system that allows your employees to submit their referrals and then follow their progress through the hiring process.
Once you have sourced possible recruits and need to figure out how to hire the best fit, you need to quickly determine who makes the cut and is worth further consideration. The speed with which screen your applicants is important because it saves you time down the road and time means money. Also, if your job process takes too long, you’ll miss out on talented candidates and give candidates a poor impression of your company.
To be efficient at separating the wheat from the chaff, you need a modern applicant tracking system. This allows you to quickly make your way through the many resumés that pour in through online job boards, social media and other advertising efforts. A modern applicant tracking system will automatically analyze and tag all incoming applications so that your hiring team has the information it needs to quickly decide if a new applicant is a “go” or a “no-go”. By quickly screening out those who don’t fit the position, you team can then focus on the most promising candidates.
The more you plan ahead and are clear about the who, when and how to hire, the smoother and more effective your recruitment process will be. A modern applicant tracking system will keep your interviews moving forward at a brisk pace by setting out an organized workflow and alerting you whenever you fall behind schedule or if a candidate is spending too long at one stage in the hiring process.
Identify the major milestones for before, during and after your interviews. Then create a workflow to help you streamline the process to fit the job and keep your recruitment process on track. A modern applicant tracking system makes it easy for your hiring team to schedule, plan and prepare for interviews by integrating tools like Google calendar and Microsoft Outlook. The system can also keep your hiring team organized, ensuring that all interviewers receive a complete interview package to prepare them to meet, question and evaluate each candidate.
The last step to hiring better in less time is to make your decisions based on concrete data. The right applicant tracking system takes guesswork out of the equation. You don’t have to spend time wondering where and how to source new employees — you will know which tools have consistently given you good results. The entire hiring process is data-driven, providing the insight your team needs to make the best decisions.
Choose a modern applicant tracking system that supports data-driven recommendations for hiring, learning, retention and leadership development. “Your HR software should ‘recommend’ people, experts, programs and management changes, rather than just give you lots of reports to run.” (HR Magazine)
Contact us to find out how Simplicant can help you hire better in less time.
Photo by Aron Visuals on Unsplash