Perfection may be the ‘enemy of good’ — but that shouldn’t stop you from constantly improving your recruitment process and, in turn, your team’s hiring quality, speed, and effectiveness.
In fact, there are many talent acquisition tasks you should regularly put under the microscope:
- The sources (and source origins) you turn to most often to find potential candidates
- The copy (e.g., job description, brand messaging) used in your company’s job postings
- The way you review applicants (i.e., if you do so manually or in an automated fashion)
- The applicant tracking system (or other recruiting platform) your talent team utilizes
- The steps of your recruitment process (and if they’re followed accordingly/consistently)
In short, it should be a primary goal to continually elevate your output with these activities, both at the team and individual-recruiter level, to realize a stronger hiring process.
The good news? You can augment your recruitment process — and enhance your TA performance — by following a few helpful best practices embraced by leading talent orgs today.
3 recruitment-process changes that can help you hire smarter and improve operational efficiency
Here are three ways you can strengthen your recruitment process — and, thereby, better scale your hiring efforts and boost your team’s productivity, communication, and collaboration.
1) Invest in a unified, centralized recruiting solution your entire team can use.
Speaking with SHRM, PERKS VP of People and Culture Eileen Lee noted it’s now essential for talent teams to work from the same centralized recruiting database.
“That way, you can ensure that all of the information regarding your candidates lives in one place and is accessible during all stages of the pipeline,” Eileen explained.
The issue facing many hiring teams today is onboarding the optimal recruiting databases.
- Traditional ATS are the go-to choice for many talent orgs. But the tides are changing.
Countless talent acquisition leaders are now turning to more advanced TA solutions that don’t just act as a repository for basic candidate details and recruiters’ notes.
More specifically, they’re implementing ‘unified’ platforms with both powerful ATS features as well as robust candidate relationship management (CRM) functionality.
Consider Lever customer TUNE. Prior to investing in our ATS + CRM, the marketing-software and mobile-analytics provider had already experienced significant headcount growth. But its ability to make those hires in a streamlined, scalable manner was tough, largely due to its dated applicant tracker, which lacked critical collaboration capabilities.
- Fast-forward to when TUNE invested in LeverTRM.
Our platform now helps the enterprise scale more easily and efficiently while keeping all relevant stakeholders on the same page regarding short-term tasks and long-term needs.
As TUNE Director of Recruiting Sabrina Oldham stated, real-time notifications regarding candidate updates and feedback provided on prospects has helped the TUNE hiring team speed up their overall recruitment process and meet their lofty headcount goals.
“Lever is the most intuitive and real-time recruiting technology … especially for companies going through growth and looking to add structure to their hiring process,” according to Sabrina.
2) Understand the constantly evolving jobs market — and what workers want.
Aside from securing a single source of hiring truth to bolster your team’s recruitment process, you must also focus on external factors and forces that affect your headcount goals.
Notably, it’s worth paying attention to the ebbs and flows of the jobs market — in particular:
- What job seekers are looking for in prospective employers and new positions today (i.e., what job applicants and sourced candidates tell you about their wants and needs in the interview process)
- What recruiting agencies that work with you hear from candidates in their own outreach and interviews as it relates to things like salary demands, preferred perks/benefits, remote work, and DEI
- What the latest international, national, regional, and local hiring numbers indicate (e.g., if hiring is up or down in markets where you’re headquartered; what percentage of hires are fully remote)
Arguably the biggest employment trend today — and likely to remain the top trend, even as the pandemic wanes— is the desire to work remotely/from home all (or at least most) of the time.
“The freedom (often the imperative) to work remotely and to manage one’s own schedule has increased employees’ expectations that they can exert considerable control over the design of their jobs,” Gartner recently wrote for Harvard Business Review.
It’s certainly on your C-suite to determine if they want to embrace a remote/hybrid workforce.
- That said, keeping your ear to the ground as it pertains to ‘WFH’ demands/requests from candidates and learning how other companies — including competitors — adapt their businesses to accommodate the remote-work push is certainly worth the time and energy.
Doing so could ultimately impact your overarching recruitment process: where you source prospects, the messaging you share with them regarding open requisitions and your brand at large, and which archived candidates you should engage/reengage for roles.
3) Identify issues with your recruitment process and ‘funnel flow’ to ameliorate.
You get a complete talent acquisition suite to aid your team’s CRM strategy. You regularly assess employment figures and trends to keep up with changes in the hiring landscape.
- But what about the nitty-gritty details associated with your TA org’s recruitment process?
Examining your team and individual talent specialists’ performance at a high level certainly helps with long-term goal-setting and planning to meet hiring quotas.
However, ‘investigating’ your recruiting activities at a granular level can lead to sizable improvements with daily processes — and, in all likelihood, better-quality hires.
Some recruitment-process components to audit frequently (and address as needed) include:
- Liaising more closely with the human resources department and hiring managers: Your HR team and department leaders who will manage new hires both need to be kept in the loop regarding your recruitment process. If you pinpoint persistent (and costly) communication problems (e.g., lack of automated reminders and notifications being sent to those stakeholders), that’s worth remedying.
- Keeping candidate experience top of mind: Ensuring candidates move seamlessly through your funnel — from when you source them via job boards or social media (see: LinkedIn) to when they’re onboarded or archived — is essential to providing a best-in-class CX. If your candidate NPS is low, learn what the cause is by sending out candidate surveys after the recruiting process.
- Pinpointing ‘slow’ stages of your hiring efforts and rectifying them to move faster: For instance, perhaps it takes too long for your HR team to complete background checks on potential hires. Or, maybe the interview process could use some tinkering (e.g., have all panelists join a single video interview as opposed to conducting several individual video calls over one or two days).
There are plenty of other intricate areas to ‘hone in on’ to elevate your recruiting effectiveness.
The point is you can’t improve what you don’t routinely analyze and take action on. So, dig deep into your processes daily or weekly to make sure your talent team is as productive as possible.
Download our talent relationship management eBook to learn how you and your recruiting org can elevate your hiring efforts with a TRM mindset and a complete talent acquisition suite.