April 21, 2022
A quick hiring process leads to open roles being filled faster, a decrease in cost-per-hire, and ultimately, happier candidates and recruiters. On the flip side, the more stalls you have throughout your pipeline, the more likely you’ll lose top candidates as they grow impatient. These issues can become more prevalent as organizations scale. The inefficiencies in systems become apparent when, for example, a company goes from hiring one salesperson a month to hiring ten. In today’s market, companies need to move quickly if they want to secure their choice candidates.
Last week, we broke down the recruiting tech stack and covered the types of tools available to help recruiters hire quickly and efficiently. This week, we’re diving deeper and discussing how tech can clear up common bottlenecks throughout your recruiting process.
As numerous surveys have established, there’s a discrepancy in how an employer feels they are managing recruitment versus how candidates feel about their experience. In the past few years, we’ve learned how important the candidate experience is to securing the best talent and improving employee retention. Monitoring how candidates are drawn to your career page and how they perceive their experience are important if you want to improve your process and thus improve your quality of candidates.
Website analytic tools like Google Analytics, allow recruiters to see how candidates are finding your career page, how many job seekers complete applications compared to how many start them, and which keywords included in external links drive the most talent to your site. They also help you determine which keywords are bringing in unqualified traffic. If your career page is seeing an increase in traffic, without a corresponding increase in applications, this could indicate a few things. Your career page might not be painting your company in an attractive light, your job descriptions might be unclear or unintentionally exclusive, or the application process needs streamlined.
Candidate feedback is absolutely necessary at every stage of the funnel for recruiters and hiring managers to pinpoint where exactly the recruiting process is falling short. You can use simple surveys, chatbots, and specific candidate feedback software to help you gather this information.
Sourcing candidates manually to find passive candidates can be extremely time consuming. On average, sourcing takes up a third of recruiters’ time. Recruiters can leverage a variety of different sourcing tools, so they don’t have to spend 10+ hours a week tracking down and reaching out to the right candidates. Check out our Funnel Forecasting Calculator see how many candidates you’d need to contact to reach your specific hiring goals. With less time sourcing, recruiters can focus on engaging with candidates and improving their experiences throughout the recruitment process.
Fetcher stands out amongst other sourcing platforms as it surfaces batches of qualified candidates from the web, based on recruiters’ specific criteria. Because Fetcher’s algorithm is guided and honed by humans-in-the-loop, recruiters can implement more detailed, nuanced searches than a database or straight AI-driven platform. Top talent lands in your inbox for you to review and provide feedback on, so Fetcher can continue to learn to source like you do.
Candidate databases pull candidates’ profiles from an established pool, based on a recruiter’s selected boolean search. While results are often immediate, these databases aren’t updated regularly which means you could be looking at old information, or you could be missing out on candidates that aren’t in the database yet. You may also find candidates experiencing burnout from being reached out to so frequently, since many companies now are looking for the same general qualifications. Databases can provide access to a wide range of candidates, but often require additional manual filtering on the recruiter’s part.
Referral tools allow you to crowdsource candidates from other team members, which is an easy way to add more good-fit candidates to your pipeline. Employees will be reminded and incentivized to make recommendations for open roles. Additionally, these platforms track employees’ referrals and distribute rewards based on your criteria.
What are your open roles actually costing you? Find out how to calculate your cost of vacancy, to help you build a strong case for implementing tech throughout the hiring process.
Exciting roles come with a flood of excited candidates. While this is great, weeding through candidates to find who will move on to the next stage slows down the entire process.
Resume keyword scanners help recruiters organize and prioritize candidates based on their resumes. They’re especially helpful when roles receive a large number of applications. Scanners look for keywords and phrases that indicate candidates will meet the role’s requirements. If you use an ATS, you may already have a keyword scanner available to you there.
Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) and Candidate Relationship Management software (CRM) are effective management tools that help recruiters work faster and more efficiently.
An ATS allows recruiters to centralize all applicants’ information. If you’re currently balancing multiple lists of candidates or trying to manually track where each person is in the recruiting process, an ATS will be a huge time saver! When researching the right system for your team, be sure to select an ATS that integrates with other tools in your tech stack.
CRMs organize candidates and all their relevant information in a searchable database, send automated emails, and measure the success rates of various recruitment strategies. If you are sending outreach and follow up emails manually right now, look into CRM platforms to speed up your candidate communications. In addition to sourcing, Fetcher also includes CRM features like automated personalized outreach campaigns and the ability to sync your calendar for seamless scheduling.
The dreaded candidate “no show”, back-and-forths with scheduling, and unconscious bias are all pain points that pop up during the interview phase. Pre-employment assessments and video interview platforms give recruiters standardized, streamlined ways to gauge a candidate’s skills and interest in your company. They also make the hiring experience more equitable for candidates.
Pre-employments assessments include skill-based tests, personality tests, and work samples. They help recruiters assess which candidates should move on to the interview stage (or on to the next interview) without having to analyze a candidate’s capabilities on their own. The time savings is important for recruiters, but more importantly, these tools help reduce bias in the hiring process as they allow recruiters to evaluate candidates uniformly and objectively.
Video interview platforms also save recruiters and hiring managers time. With video interviews, recruiters don’t have to worry about wasted time if a candidate no-shows. They allow for flexibility and accessibility to more candidates as they can be conducted anywhere and at any time.
Traditionally, hiring managers have had to email or cold call candidates’ past employers for reference checks. Emails get lost in inboxes and phone tags are played for days. While they can provide critical information about a candidate, many recruiters skip this crucial step because it’s time consuming.
There are many tools now that aim to speed up the process as well as add analytics to reference checks. Reference software enables references to provide a 360-degree review of the candidate which is more thorough than they could offer over the phone. Recruiters then receive a comprehensive report on the reference’s input. The process is seamless. Applicants are emailed a link which prompts them to enter their reference’s contact information. Then, an automated email goes out to their references with a link to the survey. Upon competition, recruiters receive a detailed summary of the reference’s answers.
While not technically part of the recruitment process, an effective onboarding process is the best way to set a new hire up for success and improve employee retention. Onboarding software saves your HR team time and energy on processes that can be automated. The best tools store valuable company information for new hires to review, handle contracts and signatures, training modules, and access to the company’s benefits.
The biggest bottleneck for employers that will affect every stage of your hiring process is being unprepared. Without proper communication and planning, no amount of software will be able to unblock hiring bottlenecks.
Before trying to fix any of the challenges addressed above, make sure you’ve confirmed and communicated your recruitment strategy and process with your TA team and hiring managers. A TA team that is aligned across all steps in the hiring process is the best way to avoid future slow downs. With a solid plan and great tech, you can build a successful and efficient recruiting process.
Check out our other blog posts for more talent acquisition tips and insights into recruiting trends.
At Fetcher, our mission is to introduce companies to the people who will help them change the world. Our full-service, recruiting automation platform automates those repetitive, top-of-funnel tasks, so you can focus more on candidate engagement & team collaboration. Simplify Sourcing. Optimize Outreach. Hire Top Talent. Learn more at fetcher.ai.
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