How to Streamline Your Recruiting Process

Finding and securing new talent with the right skill set can be a challenging process, which can cost businesses time and money. Research from Robert Half found that, on average, HR directors are spending just under 28 days (27.59) on finding staff to fill positions in their organization.

According to Robert Half, the recruiting of new employees can be broken down into six stages, which all take more than four days for in-house to complete. The study found that looking at resumes took 5.19 days, and companies spent 4.77 days interviewing applicants, while testing skills took the least amount of time with just 4.18 days being spent on this aspect of the process.

How can you streamline your recruiting process and reduce the amount of time and money you are spending?

Make the most of tech

The internet has expanded the talent pool, which means you have more potential candidates to recruit from. It can also make identifying the right candidate a more difficult task. Luckily, there are software programs and tools that let you filter large databases of candidates. This could make it easier to identify people based on their previous experience, education level, and other factors that may be important when it comes to hiring a new employee.

This not only helps you to find candidates with the right skills, it may also make it easier to identify those that will fit well in your company culture. Of course, it can take a little while to figure out what tech will help your recruiting process the most, but this initial time investment will pay dividends in the long run.

Take a look at our how-to guide for recruiting in the digital age.

Create an interview form

Interviews are an incredibly important part of the process. It’s your chance to determine whether their personality will mesh with your company culture, while also learning more about their skills and experience.

With interviews often taking over an hour, candidates can become fatigued, which can skew the process or lead to it becoming much longer. By creating a standardized form, you ensure that each interview follows a template, and you have the ability to use a simple grading system to rate employees on various criteria. If you create the form online, it can be easily shared with any relevant stakeholders who need to provide candidate feedback.

Improve skill testing

Many companies require a certain element of skill testing at some point in the recruiting process. Instead of onsite skills assessments, send applicants a test to complete online by a specified date and time. This allows you to go through the results on your own schedule. You could also rank each section, giving them a mark at the end, and filter candidates out that don't hit a certain benchmark.

If you are in a more practical industry, you might opt to use augmented reality software to test their experience, or survey them to assess their basic knowledge level on various topics.

Use your network

When it comes to finding the right candidate, your network can be worth its weight in gold.

Having a candidate that someone in your network can personally recommend significantly boosts their chance of success. It’s important to interview a variety of candidates, but direct recommendations can be an impactful way to reduce the amount of time you spend on hiring.

Focus your efforts

Whether you are advertising on social media or online recruiting pages, it's wise to limit your options.

It’s common to use online job boards to find talent, because it’s a great way to find individuals with the exact skills you’re looking for. You can use keywords to filter through candidates and identify those you’d like to interview.

Pass it on

Once you have a hiring process that works for your company, make sure you train others in the basic principles and best practices. This means that you don't have to rely on only 1-2 team members to interview new candidates.

Instead, you'll have a team of people who can interview and recommend people for open roles. For large companies, it's a good idea to have representatives from each department who have experience in the company and know what your core values are. This gives you a better chance of finding someone that has the skills you really need who will also be a great culture fit.