Employees are the backbone of every company. This makes hiring one of the most important aspects of running a business. But recruitment is much more complicated today than sifting through job applications, shortlisting candidates, conducting interviews, and hiring the best candidate.

In today’s labor market, you must meet the candidates where they are. You need to find your audience and speak their language, advertise your vacancy in places where your target candidates are, incorporate skill-based as well as culture-fit assessments in the interview process, ensure constant communication with them, and if you find the right candidate, hire them before someone else does.

Multiple studies suggest that nearly 60% of job seekers quit online job applications mid-way due to their length and complexity. Poorly or loosely written job descriptions, complicated or lengthy job applications, misleading job ads, multiple interviews over the course of several days or weeks, and lack of communication throughout the hiring process can deter a qualified candidate from seeking employment with you.

70% of the global workforce is made up of passive talent who are not actively looking for a job. Passive job seekers won’t continue with an interview process if they feel your hiring process is slow, repetitive, or not streamlined.

That’s why it is imperative to dedicate time and resources to make your hiring process as efficient as possible. You don’t want to let the best candidate slip through your fingers and possibly go to one of your competitors. With the proper hiring and onboarding process, you can attract, hire, and retain the best candidates.

Top 5 Tips to Increase Hiring Efficiency

Here are our top five most effective methods to enhance your recruitment efforts and increase employee quality and retention.

1. Write a Clear and Accurate Job Description

A job description is one of an applicant’s first interactions with your organization. Make sure that your descriptions are concise, accurate, and clear about the duties and responsibilities of the position. The job’s description must be written in the language of your brand and reflect your company culture so you attract suitable applicants. This will help weed out those that may not be a fit.

Writing a job description is more than just under the purview of the recruiter or the hiring manager. A recruiter may not understand the entirety of what the job entails. Hence, the team lead or the manager must help the recruiter understand precisely what they are looking for in their new team member. They must clearly state the technical skills required to fulfill the role and the soft skills needed to fit in the team for an overall understanding of the position.

Also, be as transparent with the expectations of the role as possible. The more things you keep out of the job description, the harder it will be for you to find the right individual and the longer it will take to fill the position.

2. Build Talent Pipeline by Utilizing Employee Referrals

On average, talent acquisition professionals spend nearly 1/3rd of their time sourcing candidates for a single role. That’s a lot of productive time wasted that could have been utilized for other recruitment-related tasks like reference checks, onboarding, etc.

One of the best ways to tackle this problem is through referrals. These referrals could be through your current employees or your trusted network. Studies show that referred candidates are 55% faster to hire than employees sourced through career sites. Additionally, 82% of employers surveyed by CareerBuilder also rated employee referrals as generating the best ROI, above all other sources.

When you hire someone through referrals, it eliminates a layer of screening from the hiring process. That’s because the employee who refers someone already knows your company’s culture, values, and what the role demands. Hence, when they refer someone, they would do that with a level of certainty that the candidate will not only fit in the company’s culture but also perform well in their role. As a result, there is a higher chance of them being hired than someone who does not know of your organization.

A popular way to encourage referral hiring is through referral bonus programs. Giving monetary compensation of even a couple of hundred dollars can eventually help you save time and money in the long run.

Other ways of boosting your talent pipeline are lateral or internal hiring, investing in employer branding, building your brand on social media websites, creating a recruitment strategy for attracting passive candidates, and having a careers page.

3. Automate Repetitive Hiring Tasks

Let’s be honest – if you have been a recruiter for a while, you know that hiring can be a tedious and repetitive process. Manually going through every résumé/CV or application, looking for relevant skills, reaching out to the candidates, coordinating and constant back and forth with individuals to find a suitable interview time, scheduling and rescheduling interviews, and so on. This process can be time-consuming and frustrating for the recruiter as well as the applicant. This can make a candidate lose interest, making you start the process all over again.

Tasks like these can easily be automated with the help of talent acquisition software. With so many options for recruitment automation available today in the market, you can choose an applicant tracking system (ATS) to keep track of all the applications you receive and manage the process each goes through. Having smart recruitment software can help your hiring team screen candidates more efficiently, reduce time-to-hire, and increase the quality of hire. It can do so by syncing your calendar with the candidates to find a suitable time for an interview, sending automated reminders to the candidate, hiring manager, and recruiter, hosting online pre-hire assessments, and sorting out the results, among other things.

This can save you so much time to focus on other productive tasks.

4. Streamline Your Interview Process by Using Recruitment Software

We covered above why you would invest in recruitment software to automate mundane tasks and maximize your hiring efforts. But another challenge with manual recruitment is consistency. For example, you may find yourself asking certain questions in one interview for a role but forgetting to ask the same question in another interview for the same position. Or sometimes, you might overlook certain interview guidelines or best practices simply because you were impressed by a candidate’s initial impression. While this is natural human behavior, in a formal interview situation, it can have undesirable repercussions.

Leveraging recruitment software is one of the best ways to manage your entire hiring process. You can use pre-hire online assessments to standardize your initial screening and assessment. Once you’ve shortlisted your candidates, you can host a real-time video interview or an asynchronous video interview. Several AI-led recruitment tools today can help you assess candidates’ culture fit, behavior, and relevant skills through natural language processing during the interview.

With the help of the software, you can keep qualifying candidates moving through the hiring process seamlessly and ensure each goes through the required steps. In addition, automating tracking increases your hiring efficiency and allows recruiters to focus on what matters the most – engaging and vetting candidates.

5. Engage with Your Candidates

Last but not least, you must keep your candidates engaged throughout the hiring process. Whether your process is short or not, it is imperative that you keep your candidates in the loop. It can be as simple as sending an acknowledgment email when they apply for the position, informing them about the next step, sending them reminders for assessments or interview rounds, letting them know how much time it would take you to get back to them with the results, and advising them if they didn’t make it the cut, and so on.

This will show them that you value their time and give them a good impression of your organization and its values.

Conclusion

Today, the global workforce has more power than employers. This is why the recruitment process can be tiring, complicated, and hard to maintain. But if you standardize your recruitment process, build a strong talent pipeline, utilize recruitment technology, and keep your candidates engaged, you can make the process easier, simpler, and even fun.