It’s no secret that the job market is becoming more and more competitive for organizations seeking new talent. More positions are opening than there are qualified applicants to fill, and stellar candidates often have multiple offers to consider.
If you drag your feet during the hiring process, your organization will lose out on the best and brightest employees. The swifter competition will have already scooped them up. In fact, 35 percent of CEOs identified an inefficient recruiting and interview process as one of the top concerns for their organizations.
On the other hand, you don’t want to race through the recruiting process without fully screening candidates or managing their expectations. It’s important to move quickly, but speed will do you no good if a bad hire ends up costing your company more time and money than the hiring process itself.
It’s all about finding that sweet spot between agility and quality. Here’s how:
#1. Write Better Job Descriptions
The best way to change your process is to start at the beginning: how you’re talking about the open position. The purpose of a job description isn’t just to tell people about the job you have available; its true purpose is to attract the right candidates and set the right expectations about the position and your company.
When a position needs filling, hiring managers are often too stressed about finding a candidate to slow down and think about what kind of candidate they really want and need. In the interest of time, they may not spend enough time developing an effective job description, and the result is either a flood of unqualified candidates or a trickle of candidates who can meet super-specific demands. As an HR professional, you can help improve the quality of applicants by having a candid conversation with the hiring manager about what the job description should say.
Write a job description that does the screening for you.
Here’s what you should consider as you generate a job description with the hiring manager:
- What are the 5 core skills that a person needs for this job?
- What will this person spend most of their time doing?
- What tasks can they learn after being hired?
- How will the company measure success for this position?
- How much experience does this person need?
By creating a job description that gives an accurate reflection of the position along with preferred and critical qualifications, you cut out a massive amount of time you might otherwise spend screening (and you avoid hunting for a purple squirrel). The description does the screening for you so your funnel of candidates is narrowed right from the start.
#2. Eliminate Unnecessary Steps in Your Hiring Process Timeline
The more unnecessary steps you can cut out of the process, the more time you’ll save and the more likely you’ll be to beat the competition for the best candidates. A quick, easy hiring process is as important to candidates as it is to those doing the hiring.
According to a 2016 Talent Board research report, 17 percent of all candidates who reported having a negative experience with an organization’s recruiting process withdrew their applications because the process took too long.