5 Ways to Speed Up the Hiring Process Without Sacrificing Quality
Research shows that the length of hiring processes vary wildly across organizations and even cities and countries. According to Glassdoor, interviews can range between 19.2 days in Romania all the way up to more than twice that in Brazil, and 10.2 days within the U.S. hospitality and dining sector (restaurants and bars) compared to 28.8 days within the country’s energy and utilities industry.
Landing on either extreme can cause issues for your organization. Conduct too long of a hiring process and risk losing valuable candidates, especially within fast-paced IT and telecommunications. Rush through the hiring process and end up with unfit candidates and expensive turnover.
The goal is to fall somewhere in the middle: a somewhat rapid hiring process that also ensures quality. The following five strategies—analyzed by Link Consulting Services’ experienced Consultant teams—are designed to help your technology organization or project do just that. In this article, you will learn how to implement cutting-edge hiring methods that attract the world’s top talent while meeting competitive deadlines.
Spend too long on hiring and risk losing valuable candidates; rush through and end up with unfit candidates and expensive turnover.
1. Identify Common Recruiting Snags Affecting Top Global Organizations
In our more than 12 years of experience working with Fortune 500 organizations and the biggest names within IT and telecommunications, Link Consulting Services has identified several obstacles that commonly slow hiring processes—costing companies like yours potentially thousands of dollars and increasing the risk of losing expert candidates.
For instance, when assessing recruiting processes, most companies focus on interviewing techniques, responsiveness, and skills assessments. However, they often overlook an essential (and early) step in the process: job descriptions. As the first thing your IT or telecommunications candidates see, job descriptions play an integral role in attracting candidates—the right or wrong ones.
If a job description is confusing or too broad, you may end up attracting hordes of unfit candidates and need to spend hours wading through to find the qualified handful. On the other hand, if your job description is too specific or demanding, you may turn off expert candidates from applying.
When assessing hiring processes for areas of weakness, organizations overlook an early but essential part of the hiring process: job descriptions.
Therefore, be sure to assess your current job descriptions based on hiring performance and adjust them as necessary using our strategies for creating better IT and telecommunications descriptions.
2. Automate Essential Processes
Manually processing CVs, emailing applicants, scheduling interviews… this can easily add days to the hiring process—extra time you don’t have when your competitors are also trying to recruit the expert talent you have your eye on. (Some fields, such as software development, have an unemployment rate of less than 2%, making talent acquisition particularly competitive for even the most prestigious Fortune 500 organizations… and requiring talent managers to move even quicker during hiring.)
Automate as many steps as possible in order to streamline the process. For example, set up an automated email response for all applicants. This could be a basic message confirming that you’ve received their application and explaining next steps, such as whether applicants should expect to hear back should they not move forward in the process, how and when you will reach out, and where they can find more information (by connecting with your organization on social media, for instance). This simple, standardized approach ensures that your hiring process doesn’t get bogged down with applicants checking in on their applications.
Also, keep in mind that one of the fastest ways to alienate applicants, especially world-class talent, is to go silent. One CareerBuilder study determined that more than 50% of candidates wish that employers would provide information about the interview process from the start.
In addition to saving your recruiting team’s time and keeping candidates engaged, improving communication through automated processes can also ensure that the talent you ultimately choose are more dedicated on the job. 15% of candidates will put more effort into their position after undergoing a positive hiring experience. Therefore, be sure to make a good first impression upon every candidate, whether they seem promising from the get-go or not.
More than half of candidates wish that employers would provide information about the hiring and interview process from the start.
3. Leverage Technological Recruiting Tools and Big Data
In-person interviews are essential but can be incredibly time-consuming. As such, they should only be utilized when assessing the most promising candidates. When conducting second or third round assessments, where your organization needs to quickly cut down the candidate pool, leverage technological tools like video interviewing software to power through a dozen remote interviews in the time it would take to conduct just a few in-person meetings.
Another strategy for streamlining your hiring process: utilizing big data.
• Crunching job market data in order to estimate time-to-fill
• Assessing salary information for open positions (such as the average pay for the position in your local area, taking into account experience and market unemployment rates) to make competitive offers that candidates will snatch up—rather than prolonging the hiring process with counteroffers
• Identifying top performers within departments or organization as a whole to analyze what makes them successful, and to replicate this with new hires
For example, our internal Consultants assess each placement made within our Fortune 500 client organizations in order to discover performance indicators and determine which types of IT and telecommunications candidates perform best (in terms of experience, skill set, culture fit, etc.). This enables us to consistently improve and proactively source talent that enables clients to achieve their competitive technology objectives, on time and on budget.
4. Rethink Sourcing Locations When Necessary
When you need talent and you need it now, it is common sense to look in your backyard, e.g., local talent pools, recommendations from employees, and possibly even emerging talent from a nearby university. This is a great place to start but may not always deliver the rapid results you’d like, particularly with hard-to-fill positions.
Speed up your hiring process while maintaining quality by expanding your search to additional talent pools when necessary. For example, at Link Consulting Services, we leverage a global network of the world’s best talent—managing all travel needs as necessary to ensure that our IT and telecommunications experts arrive at project sites on time and prepared to contribute.
For many of our clients, leveraging our network of candidates outside of their local area has led to faster hiring while cutting costs. Take one of our large clients in Latin America, for instance. When Client A relocated their main Latin American project sites, many of their employees chose not to move with them. The company faced significant labor cost increases.
Link Consulting Services provided cost-effective international labor on a challenging timeline in order to get Client A back on track, and then established local staffing relationships to source sustainable regional talent. This combination of global and local talent is often key to quickly building the most highly skilled teams of IT and telecommunications experts.
Local talent can be a great starting point, but expanding your search to additional talent pools—such as global markets—may be necessary in order to speed up your hiring process, particularly with hard-to-fill positions.
5. Reach Out to a Specialized IT and Telecommunications Recruitment Partner
One of the most effective strategies for assessing pitfalls within your hiring process is to bring in an expert who specializes in IT and telecommunications recruiting. In our experience, we have found that an external assessment can more quickly and easily identify problem areas and stimulate more cost-effective, efficient solutions.
In fact, this is Link Consulting Services’ mission: to act as an integrated recruitment consulting partner, not just a staffing company. We work with clients to assess their staffing spend and business processes, and then streamline processes and cut out unnecessary expenses in order to minimize labor costs. This can result in a savings of 30% while reducing time-to-fill, as is the case with one of our global clients.
Take advantage of our specialized IT and telecommunications
recruiting knowledge to enhance your hiring process.
