Improve Your Speed of Hire with These 5 Tactics

Hiring candidates quickly helps your organization from many angles. It prevents top candidates from accepting another job offer, reduces money lost from leaving a position unfilled and it improves the candidate experience. Here are five tactics that will help your team improve speed of hire without sacrificing quality.

1. Maintain a talent pipeline

Every individual has the potential to be the right fit for an opening. While you may not have a requisition for a prospect’s specific skills or experience level, you may receive one in the future. Therefore, make sure to keep open lines of communication for prospects who aren’t the right fit but could be for another opening.

Another bolder approach is to practice “silver medal” hiring, where you keep in contact with a candidate who made the final round of interviews but was not offered a job. Invite candidates who were not offered a position to follow you on social media and stay connected with them. That candidate could be a perfect fit for a different position at a later time. This individual could also add relevant skills and experience to their resume and be ready for a similar position after some more time.

2. Understand your hiring manager’s ideal candidate

Whether you work for a small recruitment agency or a large corporate firm, you likely have different team members who handle sourcing and qualifying before sending a candidate to the team that makes the final hiring decision. Make sure you know in advance what their team expects in order to send candidates that they are likely to accept.

Some hiring managers prefer to hire candidates with years of experience at a position. Others will prefer a good attitude and are willing to teach new hires the skills they will need to succeed. Whatever the case with the hiring manager whom you are sending candidates, tailor the search to the team’s ideal candidate. Work with the hiring manager before starting the search to determine what skills and traits are the best fit. Then, understand which screening and interview questions will best identify those qualities in the candidates. Determine the best strategy before you even advertise the position.

3. Limit ATS hassle

Most talent acquisition pros love to recruit passive candidates — those who already have a job but may be open to a change. These people likely are busy as it is and don’t want to have to fill out extra paperwork. Long and tedious job applications are a surefire way to frustrate busy candidates. Candidates in high demand may even avoid engaging with your company if a competing employer has a more candidate-friendly process.

Eliminate this challenge by approaching your job applications from the user’s perspective. You can even use integrations with social networks to import pertinent resume information to fill your ATS. But requiring lots of paperwork or information on the front-end slows everything down before you’re able to determine if a candidate is a good fit. You can fill out those extra fields in your ATS once you get a better sense of the candidate and how they might fit at your firm.

4. Cater to your candidate’s schedule

Nothing slows down the hiring process like delayed or rescheduled meetings with a candidate. It’s a serious inconvenience for a candidate to meet on-site to complete an interview during business hours, especially for a candidate who already has a job.

Tools like video interviewing can help you to reach out to candidates at their convenience and prevent missed connections from no-shows or time-zone difficulties. Plus, you can help a candidate take less time out of their day to complete an interview, making their experience more positive.

5. Build an employer brand that attracts talent

Companies like Google have succeeded in hiring the best and brightest by building a strong employer brand. Top talent wants to work for Google, so they get the pick of the best.

The idea is to go beyond posting a logo and telling candidates what they have to be in order to get the job. Give candidates an idea of why working for the company will be a rewarding career choice. This goes beyond what perks are offered or where the foosball tables are located; tell candidates what it’s like to work on the team and how their position will add value and make an impact. Video technology allows you to promote that message and corporate culture in almost limitless ways.

Just like modern marketers have sped up consumer’s buying cycles by inbound marketing and educating buyers, you can speed up your hiring cycle by generating inbound interest. The more people want to work at a firm, the more you can rely on inbound applicants to fill your talent pipeline. While not every company will be able to build an employer brand as well as Google, some simple changes can help give you an advantage over competitive firms.

At InterviewStream, our goal is to find the right fit of our solutions to help improve organizations make a better and more efficient hiring process. Pre-recorded video helps to promote consistency in the screening process and can also help to incorporate ongoing training into your organization.

Our Video Technology Consultants are well-qualified to help you implement video technology into your organization’s custom hiring workflow. If you would like to learn more about enhancing your hiring and recruiting with video interviewing, contact us or attend one of our free, no-pressure group product tours.