Written by Jaclyn Menendez, Ph.D., Project Consultant
No matter how profitable your business is, no organisation can afford to waste time – especially during a time of high-volume recruitment. This is particularly true during the recruitment process: not only does inefficiency mean that you’ll lose out on candidates, it also spells disaster for your own productivity. Many teams think that they’ve mastered the art of recruitment, but in our experience, almost every organisation has room to improve. Take a glance through our checklist of best practices and compare it to your own process. Where do you see overlap with your own systems, and where do you see an opportunity to become more efficient?
You have a specific and targeted recruitment process.
Every efficient selection system starts with an informed recruitment process. Before you even consider opening your position and looking for candidates, you should be fairly confident in what type of turnout you can expect to see. This way you don’t over-advertise and find yourself flooded with candidates when you only have a few positions to fill, or, more commonly, find yourself with many open positions and not enough interested applicants.
You have a reasonable number of hurdles, and you know how long each hurdle takes.
From the basic application to the final interview, you should know exactly what the candidate experience will be like. Make sure that you’ve outlined the candidate flow as detailed as possible, at least for internal reference. This way, you can be up front with applicants about timelines at each step and can ensure that you haven’t built in any conflicting or overly burdensome steps. Focus the most attention on your earliest hurdles, because at that stage, applicants are less invested and may be more likely to abandon the process.
You offer online options whenever possible.
If you’re trying to recruit without offering any online presence, then you definitely have room to increase efficiency. While not everyone has a computer, most people have mobile phones, and everyone has access to a local library. These tools mean that you don’t have to require candidates to apply in person until you want to give them a tour or conduct an interview. If there is any step in your recruitment process that doesn’t have an online option, think seriously about updating it.
The sequence in your recruitment process minimises human resources.
The number of hurdles in a recruitment process may vary, but the appropriate ordering of those hurdles should generally stay the same. To free up time for the interview, it’s always a good idea to involve your own people as little as possible: this means automating the CV screening, setting up assessments early on to filter out the least qualified applicants, and possibly including another assessment after that to narrow the pool down even further. By the time that phone screens or interviews occur, only your top candidates should be involved.
Your assessment is screening out the right percentage of candidates.
A well-placed assessment can be invaluable during the selection process. However, if the assessment is screening out too many or too few applicants, then it’s not a useful piece of your process and your recruitment efficiency will suffer. Invest in a quality job analysis in order to make sure that you’re evaluating the right competencies and scoring them appropriately.
Your interview process doesn’t involve unnecessary people.
At the last stage of the recruitment process, it’s common to have the applicant meet with at least one recruitment manager. While interviews are a great way to follow up on any assessment or resume questions you may have, don’t let it become a bloated or time-consuming tool. Instead of dragging in every manager at the plant, only include the recruitment manager that is most relevant or qualified to conduct the interview. Additionally, use a structured interview process so that you aren’t reinventing the wheel with each applicant. Not only does this save time, it ensures that you’re asking job-relevant and consistent questions across all candidates.
So, how did you fare against our recommended checklist? If you noticed that there are some areas in which you could improve, don’t worry. PSI can provide guidance if you have developmental opportunities in any of the above areas. Contact us for more information.
