Chelsea Verstegen
A drawn-out hiring process will take your hiring team away from their typical day-to-day work, costing you time and money, and you’ll likely lose the best candidates to your competition.
Guest blog written by Chelsea Verstegen, Content Strategist at Hireology.
A lengthy hiring process may seem like a good way to vet each candidate and make the most informed decision on who to hire. In reality, a drawn-out process will take your hiring team away from their typical day-to-day work, costing you time and money, and you’ll likely lose the best candidates to your competition.
Your hiring process doesn’t have to be time-consuming to be effective, but your team shouldn’t be so pressed to fill a role that they rush the process. There should be care and consideration put into every new hire while still ensuring that no one’s time is wasted. Consider the following tips to make your hiring more efficient while still focusing on quality applicants.
Automate Applicant Prescreening
Hireology data shows that the average employer takes ten days to review and respond to job applicants. It’s likely that during those ten days, other interviews are being scheduled or job offers are being extended. Many hiring managers manually review and respond to each and every applicant, which of course takes up a lot of time. Because manual processes don’t allow hiring managers to automatically weed out unqualified applicants, those that would be a good fit are left waiting for a response. Prescreen surveys can help mitigate this issue.
With Hireology, as soon as applications are submitted, automated emails are sent to candidates with a link to a survey that contains a series of true/false questions. These surveys take just minutes for candidates to complete but can save your HR team a tremendous amount of time.
With prescreen surveys, you can also include knock out questions to weed out candidates who don’t meet the necessary requirements for your open positions. For example, you can ask if an applicant is 18 years or older. If the role requires the applicant to be 18 years or older and the applicant answers this question as “false,” he or she will be removed from the hiring process and sent an automated rejection email. Applicants who pass their prescreen surveys will immediately move forward with the next hiring steps.
Hold Structured Interviews
Running structured interviews allows your team to be organized, unbiased, and well-prepared because it ensures that each candidate receives the same interview. This also allows your team to remain on time and gives you the ability to make quicker decisions around who would be the best fit, resulting in quicker applicant communication.
Post-interview, your team should collect and share feedback in a timely manner, which can be streamlined using centralized interview feedback. Use your recruitment CRM platform to score all interviews on an objective, uniform scale, rather than swapping scribbled notes. Once each member of your interview team has scored the candidate, a final interview score is automatically calculated, so you have the potential to share feedback with your candidates on the same day as their interview if you wish.
Issue Skills Tests
To ensure that an applicant is able to perform the work required for the job, you can issue skills tests. Whether you’re testing for technical skills like caregiver requirements, or soft skills like customer service capabilities, Hireology has different skills test options integrated into its platform.
Hard and soft skills tests are available for specific roles, such as accounting, office administration, certified nursing, auto technicians expertise, and more. Each assessment can be completed by candidates in about 15 minutes, and tests are automatically scored with the results sent directly to the hiring manager.
Request Candidate Verification
Automating reference and background checks will save your team time, as well as the potential misstep of a poor hire or potential liability. Verifying each candidate before extending a job offer gives you peace of mind that you’ve chosen the best person for the job.
Hireology helps automate hiring steps related to candidate verification. When a reference check is requested, candidates simply fill in their references’ contact information, and surveys are automatically sent out to each individual listed. This saves your team from playing phone tag with potential references and slowing down the process, and the process results in an 85% response rate.
For background checks, your company can select from over ten different screening packages that ask candidates to submit the required personal information and the rest of the process is taken care of automatically. Your team will no longer have to manually keep track of results, either. Everything is stored in the hiring platform.
Ready, Aim, Hire!
Streamlining your hiring process greatly benefits your company. Most healthcare roles are urgently needed, so wasting time on manual processes or considering candidates that aren’t a good match shouldn’t be part of your hiring process. If you’re ready to pull the trigger and automate your recruiting efforts, you can request a demo of Hireology here.
