Recruiters spend an enormous amount of time on manual tasks. Often these tasks require significant effort with little return to provide better recruiting outcomes.
Many realize the recruitment industry is changing quickly as the candidate market expects more from recruiters and companies. However, while recruiters may recognize the cost of manual tasks and the risk of failing to adapt to a changing hiring environment, only some feel empowered to optimize their recruitment processes.
Recruiting can be one of the most critical strategic focuses for an organization. The activities involved in the recruiting process show up in a variety of ways across every area of the business. A poor recruiting process impacts productivity for recruiters and new hires, and without a proper plan for recruiting, there is a positive impact on the bottom line. But as we all know, recruiting is only sometimes a straightforward activity that goes from point A to point B. Recruiting has a way of becoming a winding, lengthy, complicated process for many companies. Even with the best of intentions, when you start adding people and processes, recruiting can get convoluted.
At Aspirant RPO, we work with clients who need a more efficient and effective recruiting process, here are five tips on optimizing your recruiting process.
The starting point for any improvement is understanding the current state, which is why doing analysis and diagnosing is essential. An in-depth audit of all your recruiting functions — from sourcing to interviews to your candidate experience — will help you identify what's working and where things are breaking down. Knowing your talent acquisition goals and staying true to those goals is extremely helpful, but even if you still need to track those goals by setting up metrics, you need to gather the metrics you have today.
Begin by:
Analyzing the workflow from requisition initiation to onboarding
Detailing who is responsible for each activity and time stamping how long each step takes from beginning to end
Identifying and setting up KPIs for each process that impacts recruiting outcomes
Taking advantage of real-time analysis and walking backward in the hiring process as soon as the hire is made. Where were the bottlenecks:
Were there too many employees in the interview process?
Were communications sent by a recruiter delayed for any reason?
This analysis is also a good time to solicit feedback from hiring managers, candidates, and new hires to learn about their experiences.
Note the ease of use, how available information was, and how meaningful each engagement was to building brand equity. By committing to perform a diagnosis and a deep analysis of your recruiting, you can uncover process improvements that drive better recruiting performance. Most importantly, you have two outcomes at the end stage: knowing what needs improvement and where you are succeeding today.
Change can be difficult, but an analysis with no action is as much help to you as studying for a test you'll never take.
For many organizations, this means cutting out levels, slowing things down, or taking unnecessary people out of the process. Instead, think about adopting what works well in one area into another or considering how a tool or technology could be a solution.
To get started, go to the top of the list created from your analysis and write out what led to the breakdown in each point that wasn't working. This process not only helps you determine where and what to adjust, but it can also provide evidence for others in the organization that change is necessary for that specific pain point.
It also means assessing the current capabilities of your existing team. For example, do you know how well your recruiting team members deliver top talent to your hiring managers? Are you aware of any skill gaps your group may have regarding sourcing, screening, and building solid relationships with hiring managers?
Developing your recruiting teams' skills will help them feel more confident in using emerging technology, and they will become more efficient in their recruiting processes to meet their KPI goals. Helping to ensure there are no skill gaps in their ability to understand advanced searching techniques or how to manage difficult hiring manager conversations that will afford your team a way to identify talent profiles outside of the traditional platforms, for example.
As you work on adjusting your recruiting processes, it may become apparent that your processes — no matter how efficient you work to make them — just aren't cutting it. As a result, you may need to replace your current systems or tools entirely rather than improve what you have.
An essential part of optimizing the recruiting process is knowing when to assess your tech stack. There are many recruiting technologies and services in the market today, and they can automate almost every part of your recruiting process. These tools can also speed up candidate engagement, elevate your brand, and allow more time for your team to be the advisors you want them to be. If your analysis revealed significant inefficiencies in your recruiting process, first take that nearly every company has some. Then, start thinking about how an RPO Provider with the resources, tools, and technology could help you in your recruiting process.
Sometimes the problem in recruiting isn’t the tools, the processes, or the people. Sometimes the foundation of all those activities — the strategy — needs to be adjusted.
We sometimes see that recruiting teams focus only on individual actions and then need help understanding why they fail. Where we look first is a few key points of the recruiting strategy that affect everything recruiters do. For instance, setting the stage for a strong employer brand is often an afterthought. Still, a strong one could help to improve every part of the process to make it easier and more accessible for your recruiting team to engage with candidates. It may be time to start making it a focus.
Another area you'll want to focus on is your sourcing strategy. It's another point that seems overrun by the actual activity, but it's vital to know your ideal candidate so you can source them and understand where they spend their time.
These are only two areas of strategy to revisit as you optimize the recruiting process, but they will have an enormous impact.
Optimizing the recruitment process takes time and commitment. However, in the end, it is valuable and brings better clarity for everyone involved in the recruiting process. In addition, optimizing your recruiting process could save your organization and recruiting team considerable time and money.
If you'd like to understand more about Aspirant RPO's Recruiting Process Optimization, fill out the form below, and we will be ready to share our expertise and experience.
