These days, if your hiring process doesn’t move quickly, you’ll lose the candidate to someone else. Traditional interviewing is in the past. Candidates want to interview today and start the job tomorrow. If you wait a week before they start, they might find something else. That’s just the reality of today’s candidate-driven job markets. How can your company change its hiring process and capitalize on the new normal?
How to Revamp Your Hiring Process
Start with your job description. Most JD’s are pretty boring and stale. Consider writing the job description from the candidate’s perspective. Sell the job by sharing what’s in it for the candidate, including:
- What they’ll need to succeed in the position.
- What the company culture is like.
- What rewards exist to mark their successes.
Carefully consider all of the required elements of the job. Are they realistic? Will you deter perfectly good candidates with unrealistic requirements?
Make An Offer Faster
Did you know the data shows 36% of companies take four to eight weeks to make an offer? Another 27% say it can take up to 12-weeks. These days, that’s a recipe for a candidate to walk away. Consider your application process from the perspective of—would you like to go through all that? The longer you drag out the interview process the less likely you’ll be to actually get the candidate in the door. Consider a working interview, where the candidate experiences a day in the life as part of the process. This could even potentially be a paid day off of work, depending on your field.
While we know calendars can be difficult if you can keep your interview process to a week, that is the new highly recommended best practice for a job market that’s as tight as the one we are currently experiencing.
Find a System That Works
Ask strong behavioral questions to determine the candidate’s skill set by hearing about past behaviors. Be deliberate in your approach to develop these questions.
Also, work out a systematic way of scoring candidates to eliminate any unconscious bias that may crop up. This could be as simple as a one to five scoring mechanism to help with each evaluation. Set up a standard process and give your hiring teams the tools they need to ask fair but effective questions that measure the candidate’s worthiness for the job.
Your process should also be transparent and effective. Be clear with the candidates about how long the process is and what the steps are. At each stage in the process, let the candidate know exactly where they stand. This will make the candidate much more confident in the process and keep them engaged enough to get them to the offer stage.
Keep the Candidate in Mind
Above all, design your hiring process with the candidate in mind. You want to give the candidate a positive experience with your company. At the same time, you want to retool your approach so that the hiring process is faster and more responsive. If you can do this, you will stand a better chance of capturing great candidates, engaging them, and turning them into great employees.
Contact Lingo Staffing!
Lingo Staffing can help. We provide sourcing and screening of highly qualified candidates to speed up your hiring process. We can even handle candidate onboarding to take some of the heat off of your hiring team. Find out how we can help you restructure your hiring process to get more candidates—faster. Call on us.