The #1 Way to Speed Up the Recruitment Process

How can you speed up your recruitment process? In this blog post, we shed light on things that slow you down and tell how you can reduce your time-to-hire!

Jan Söderström

The average time to hire is 39 days, while the best candidates are out of the job market in only 10 days. The recruitment process is getting longer as there are more high-skilled jobs available, and those positions typically require a longer and more intense screening process.

Considering the increasing demand for highly skilled workers along with the decreasing supply, the war for talent is only getting fiercer. That’s why it’s more important than ever for recruiters and companies to act fast. Otherwise, they risk losing their ideal employees. Faced with this new challenge it’s inevitable that we ask ourselves the question: How can we speed up the recruitment process? 

What’s slowing us down?

First, let’s talk about what could be preventing us from a fast recruitment process. We understand that the decision to hire a new person is not one to be taken lightly. Good hiring decisions take time. However, there might be specific factors in your hiring process that are currently slowing you down, such as:

1. The old concept of “hire slow, fire fast”

As a recruiter, you must have heard this phrase many times in your career. It might sound logical to some: hiring slow = taking time to learn about your candidates + sifting out unmotivated candidates to hire the best fit, right? But in reality, it does more harm than good. Slow recruitment ticks people off, and most candidates won’t stick around as they have other opportunities.

This is especially the case for in-demand candidates. Taking too long results in a high candidate drop-off rate, weak candidate pool, and bad candidate experience. So if you haven’t already, it’s time to ditch the “hire slow” thinking and change the way you look at recruitment.

2. Repetitive tasks

You might be all too familiar with mundane, repetitive tasks like scheduling interviews or manually answering repeat questions from candidates. Automating these tasks can save you a lot of time that you can spend on more important activities, such as actually interviewing applicants or creating your employer branding strategy. Chatbots can help you out here.

3. Complicated screening processes

When looking for the right employee, it’s extremely important to test if the candidate fits your company culture and has the right personality. Sometimes it’s even more important than their skills and qualifications. That’s why recruiters around the world are employing screening methods like group presentations, IQ tests, and personality tests. Using one of these methods only once in the recruitment process can give you an insight into how the candidate fits the team and the position. However, using these methods several times in the process along with other more common screening methods like phone interviews and reference checks will likely slow you down, annoy your candidates, and even make it harder for you to make a decision because you’ll be drowning in too much information about each candidate.

If you go to Glassdoor or virtually any social media platform, you’ll come across candidates expressing their frustration with hiring processes that involve several screening stages. Besides the length of time, the amount of stress that comes with waiting and going through test after test is an excruciating experience for many candidates.

4. Having too much on your plate

When you’re overloaded with work, the hiring process naturally slows down. Too often recruiters are forced to handle multiple openings beyond their capacity and end up multi-tasking, which can result in poor decision making.

What’s the solution? Pre-recorded video interviews

Yes, you heard me right, pre-recorded video interviews are the best way to accelerate your hiring process. Here’s how:

1. No more coordinating schedules

Scheduling can be a logistics nightmare, but in recorded video interviews there’s no need for it—that’s the main reason why video interviews beat phone interviews. Record your video interview questions, set a deadline for the candidates, and candidates are free to choose when and where to record their responses.

2. Meet the real person behind the resume

A picture’s truly worth a thousand words. A video can tell you so much about a person than a written resume can. By asking the right questions, you can identify and evaluate the candidate’s hard and soft skills and assess their personality. Instead of conducting several pre-employment tests, all you need is one good video interview! As a result, you save about 50% of the time in the screening process and the face-to-face interviewing process.

3. Save time on reporting and communication

The hiring process involves several key people—candidates, recruiters, and hiring managers—   and i’s important that they communicate with each other about the process. Such communication can quickly become chaotic and time consuming, but it doesn’t have to be. Instead of emailing or messaging each person involved in the process, video interviews allow you and your hiring team to watch candidate replies, revisit them, make notes, and leave comments that are visible to each other. They make the process much more organized and transparent.

Added benefits: Better candidate experience and employer branding

Video is a wonderful method to give your candidates a clear idea of who you are as an employer. You can use videos to show your corporate culture and build a strong employer brand, which will help you hire top talent. In our Candidate Survey, we found that candidates see companies that use modern recruitment methods like video interviews as innovative and attractive. We also learned that 82.4% of candidates are satisfied with their video interview experience. That’s important to highlight since 80 to 90% of talent can change their minds about a role or company depending on their candidate experience.

Video interviews can tremendously shorten your time-to-hire while keeping your applicant pool strong and helping you find the right people faster. Check out our References page and read how our clients benefited from video interviews. If you’re ready to supercharge your recruiting, get started with RecRight—ask for a demo to learn more!

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