Does it feel like the hiring process moves faster than ever? If so, you’re not alone. Many human resources professionals find themselves scrambling to keep up with an avalanche of applicants, applications, and tasks during the hiring process.
While each step in the process is necessary, these steps can also make the hiring process lengthy and cumbersome when taken together. Background screenings may be essential for regulatory compliance and safety, for example, but the time required to complete one may also leave an applicant hanging – or cause them to abandon the hiring process altogether, sending your hiring team back to square one.
Meeting these challenges requires a new approach to hiring, sourcing, and onboarding.
The digital revolution has spurred a corresponding increase in the pace of business. Human resources professionals now feel the pressure of faster, more urgent hiring processes.
Today, it can be difficult for organizations to source qualified candidates, hire the best talent, and provide the onboarding their new team members need. Internal constraints on time, attention, and other resources add further challenges to the workload of hiring and recruitment teams.
As hiring becomes more complex, everyone in the organization begins to feel the effect. Open positions may remain open for longer, requiring team members to pitch in to cover essential tasks and leaving some tasks unfinished. Meanwhile, ordinary turnover means that the work of hiring is never finished, even if the particular roles for which a company hires may change.
Applicants feel the impact as well. The longer a hiring process drags on, the more likely it is that qualified applicants will lose interest – or worse, be hired by a competitor. Applicants who have poor hiring experience may never apply for another position with the same organization, forever selecting themselves out of the talent pool.
As the world becomes more complex, so does hiring – for both companies and job-seekers. Building a one-to-one human connection quickly can mean the difference between landing great talent and losing that talent to a competitor.
Early efforts to introduce automated technology to hiring focused on automating the initial steps of the process so that a company’s hiring teams could focus on other key tasks. Today, however, the best technologies coordinate tech with human effort, preserving efficiency while also using automated tools to build stronger human relationships.
Recruiters are embracing the benefits of automated technology not to distance themselves from job applicants but to build relationships more effectively. For example, some recruiters now use tools that help them ensure they speak to an applicant within a few minutes of receiving an application. When the first call is made quickly, the job and employer are still top of mind for the applicant. Catching the applicant’s attention immediately means that both the applicant and the experienced recruiter speaking to that applicant are prepared to have a more focused, attentive conversation about the applicant’s abilities and interest in the position.
While these initial contacts focus on building that human connection, they can also focus on obtaining certain standardized information. A set of pre-screening questions all applicants are asked, for example, makes it easier to compare applicants across a uniform set of criteria and responses to key questions. Based on the results of the uniform pre-screening, the most promising applicants can then be routed quickly into the process of attending a more in-depth interview.
By grabbing an applicant’s attention at the moment they apply for a role, a hybrid tech/human process establishes rapport quickly. It also significantly reduces the time to hire since the initial screening interview follows immediately on the submission of the application. Applicants don’t have to wonder whether their application was eaten by a company’s applicant tracking system – they know right away that the company heard their interest and is interested in getting to know them.
Because many of today’s hiring tools rely on cloud computing and similar configurations, they don’t face the same limitations as older programs that were confined to a single server. For businesses seeking new talent, this means that the process of gathering key data can be further streamlined.
For example, hiring platforms can now incorporate information about applicants’ credentials and experience so that hiring teams have more information about applicants early in the process. With these screening options, the interview process becomes more about getting to know the applicant as a person and professional, rather than checking certifications or background knowledge.
It’s not unusual to walk out of an interview with an outstanding candidate feeling excited but also a bit frustrated. If only you’d had more time to talk about how that candidate fits within the organization – not just for the current role, but for long-term career growth!
Today’s technologies can help allay this frustration by covering ground that used to be covered in interviews. When topics like candidate experience, education, and credentials have already been addressed, the interviewer and candidate can spend time exploring one another’s take on the candidate’s long-term future with the organization. This deep dive can help ensure job offers are made to the candidates with the best chance of staying with the organization for the long term, rather than leaving quickly.
Hiring has become more complex in a world that moves ever faster, with ever more available information. At Chane Solutions, we use technology to cut through the complexity, streamlining and automating key parts of the hiring process so that our clients can focus on finding qualified talent, complying with applicable laws and regulations, and ensuring their new hires have what they need to succeed.