Make Time for More Active Recruiting

An employer has an open position with 250 applicants.  Of those, 5 or 6 candidates will be invited to an interview based on an average 6 second resume review.  One or two will be invited to an in-person interview before an offer is made.  20% of the offers will be rejected, and another 20% will be bad hires…  Uh oh.

Traditional sourcing definitely can work for some positions and experience levels.  You post your job to various job boards and perhaps to your favorite social media outlets, then sit back, relax, and wait for applicants.  Most likely you’re not relaxing in the Caribbean, you’re wading through the 250 resumes you received for another position because that’s all you have time to do.

Of course, you have little say over who applies to your passive recruiting postings.  The Career Network found 75% of recruiters cited unqualified candidates as the biggest challenge in their recruiting efforts.  A survey from Robert Half and CareerBuilder estimated 44% of job applicants were unqualified, making it easy to see why as few as 2% of applicants make it to the interview phase of the process.  It takes serious time and effort to effectively determine which half of the applicants aren’t suitable for the position.  This has led to a host of automated means of weeding out applicants (the effectiveness of which is dubious at best – see the first paragraph).

For positions requiring specific skills or experience, this process only works through sheer brute force, luck, and a willingness to live with less than great results.  86% of the most qualified candidates for your open positions are already employed and not actively seeking a change.  Passive candidates and traditional recruiters are like the proverbial ships in the night.  You need to go find them.

Setting up a more active recruiting and sourcing program requires time, and that requires rethinking traditional processes to find opportunities for efficiency that don’t sacrifice quality for speed.  Most often, the bottleneck is the interviewing process.  A report from Glassdoor estimates that hiring times are lengthened 7.5 days by telephone interviews, 6.4 days for group panel interviews, and 4.6 days for one-on-one interviews.  If you layer these into your hiring process, you’re adding a significant amount of time to the process.  And much of this time consists of herding multiple calendars and repeating the same screening questions numerous times – avoidable activities that can be automated without sacrificing quality results.

If you’d like to improve your hiring results by switching to a more active recruiting program, but can’t find the time to make it work, schedule a 30 minute demo to see how video interviewing can cut days out of your hiring process.