All recruiters, no matter the company size or industry, have one thing in common: it never stops.
Between scheduling (and rescheduling) interviews, reminding your hiring managers to provide feedback, cleaning up your ATS and booking locations for upcoming recruiting events, the workload never eases up. Working at the recruiting speed of light, it’s easy for your recruiting strategy to confuse “busy” with “effective”. Next time you come up for air, take a moment to evaluate just how far all of this sprinting is getting you.
Here are three signs your recruiting strategy is inefficient:
1. You can’t remember the last time you updated your job titles.
You’ve made this hire before. Why not rinse and repeat and post the job description that worked for the last eight months? It worked last time, right? Wrong.
If you aren’t benchmarking your job titles against the market before each posting, you may be quickly slipping behind.
Dina Rulli, Talent Acquisition Manager at Glassdoor, recently shared tips from her team’s success in doubling Glassdoor’s company size in 12 months. “We posted two job descriptions for one open requisition,” she said. “The first was for a ‘recruiter,’ the second for ‘Talent Acquisition Partner.’ The candidates we saw from the second job description were much stronger. It attracted people that wanted to take ownership of the business, not orders.”
Check to see what your competitors’ titles are. Benchmark title trends by testing what titles have the highest results in a job search on Glassdoor and follow the leader!
2. Your hiring manager is doing her own screening.
“Don’t worry, I’ll take care of the screening…” can sound like a dream to a swamped recruiter, but take a second look. Why would your hiring manager offer to take on more work? Typically, this stems from a lack of trust, an “if I want it done right…” mentality. It may save you time in the short term, but is likely reflecting poorly on your reputation and your time-to-hire.
Until you and your hiring manager are in sync, you may be on a wild goose chase to find your candidate. Before diving into your next open req, work with your manager to define the hiring manager vs. recruiter relationship. A strong partnership is built on communication. The better aligned you are with your partner in recruiting, the more efficient and effective the process will be.
3. Your interview process has more steps than you have fingers.
Our bad hires haunt us. We are so afraid of getting it wrong that we want to ensure everyone has the opportunity to weigh in before making the offer, which can extend the hiring process. Meanwhile, your best candidates are accepting other offers and you’re not filling seats in time for your next hire class.
“We recently reevaluated our hiring process and it was clear that our six-step hiring process was too long to keep us competitive in this market,” said Rulli. “We shortened our process to four days, and within 45 days our time-to-fill went from 60 days to 42 days.”
Action Plan: Examine your interview process. Measure your time to hire. Challenge your recruiters to keep your process under five steps.
