7 Ways To Make Your Hiring Process More Efficient
Every business wants to find efficiencies, especially in times of economic uncertainty. It’s ideal to be able to do more with less. When it comes to recruitment, there are lots of ways to use technology to save time – while getting higher quality candidates into your organization.
1. Keep Passive Talent Engaged
It is clearly not efficient to start from scratch with every new requisition: so why not create a pool of warm ‘leads’, people who seem like a good fit for your organization, and particularly the roles you hire for most frequently?
This is the central premise of a Talent CRM, which forms part of a Talent Lifecycle Management platform. The idea is that you don’t have to do this (inefficiently) on a spreadsheet or piece of paper: you can quickly add potential candidates to a database, and from there the technology does most of the work. Indeed, some tools let you do this with the click of a button or automatically based on rules around skills, location and job titles.
Skills and preferences are gathered, contact details are parsed from (for example) LinkedIn, and the system keeps the information up to date. You can also let people sign up to your ‘talent community’ to build out that rich database.
Passive candidates may not always be ready for a new job right now, but if you can keep in touch with them over the months and years they stay in your database, they will be primed for joining the organization when a suitable role comes up, at the right time.
2. Automate Emails & Nurture Campaigns
And that’s where automated messaging comes in! Another feature of a good Talent Lifecycle Management platform is the ability to contact people in your talent pool with content tailored to their preferences, at scale.
We know that one email might not be enough to capture someone’s attention – but sending every potential applicant 3 to 5 emails each would be incredibly time consuming. When your communications platform is connected to your talent database, you can use logic to ensure the right message goes to the right person at the right time.
3. Look Within
You shouldn’t have to look externally for every open role. As Talent Marketplaces become more popular in (especially large) businesses looking to retain and engage their talent, recruitment teams can make the right ‘hire’ by starting with an internal perspective. If you think of your existing employees as potential candidates, you expand your talent pool, get more insights on their skills and qualities… and shorten time between finding and employing the right person for the job.
4. Match Candidates to Roles With AI
As part of your overall candidate experience (for those who form part of your talent community), it is going to be much more efficient to show people roles they are actually suitable for, and might actually want.
AI can help you make recommendations based on the skills you know people have – speeding up the candidate journey, but also providing higher quality candidates, and potentially giving you more diversity as the AI uncovers hidden gems you might otherwise have missed.
5. Engage with the Engaged
Sending tailored job alerts, recommending suitable vacancies, and emailing interesting content is all very well – but it’s a bit of a waste of time if someone simply isn’t interested.
Technology can be applied to help you make reasonable, educated assumptions about who is most likely to say yes to a role at your company. Focus your efforts (automatically) on people who are clicking emails, visiting your careers site, and spending time on careers-based content.
6. Automate Interview Scheduling
Another smart application of technology to improve recruiter efficiency is interview scheduling. Going back and forth with candidates to find a good time to speak to them is certainly not the best use of time – and it may even make the candidate lose interest. Plenty of tools exist to let a potential candidate put time in your diary, and keep your other systems updated with that information too.
7. Use The Right Talent Lifecycle Management platform
Overall, technology should be able to make life easier for your TA and wider HR teams – but not every solution is created equal, and they can slow things down if they don’t have up-to-date data, they are hard to navigate, they are very slow to implement, or they don’t integrate with your other HR tech (it’s crucial your CRM integrates with your ATS, for example). Ensure you choose a vendor who can deliver on your key recruitment challenges so you see the most efficiency savings overall.