In today’s post-recession market, top-performing candidates are in high demand. Many have the luxury of choosing between numerous offers, making it more important than ever that your company has a streamlined process for sourcing, recruiting, landing and retaining A-level talent. Because otherwise, the competition will beat you to it.
How can you minimize your time to hire while at the same time containing related costs and reducing the risk of critical positions being vacant?
Always Be Recruiting
Your hiring process begins long before you have a job vacancy. In fact, it’s a proactive, ongoing way of doing business that helps keep you ahead of the competitive curve.
- Build a robust talent pipeline. This includes both internal and external candidates. In the latter category, keep your pulse on passive job seekers – those top performers who aren’t actively job hunting but might be interested if the right opportunity arose. Every manager should have at least two or three potential candidates for each key position in their department.
- Be ready to move quickly when the time comes. Your ongoing recruitment pays off when, inevitably, a key employee leaves. Then, your recruiter can quickly send a person up the pipeline, at which point your decision makers can take timely action.
Establish Your Hiring Team
Line up your recruitment team and keep members trained and up-to-date on trends, market analyses, and positions that leadership feels may become vacant due to pending retirements or other factors.
- Define roles. Each team member should know and be adept at their tasks and responsibilities. This starts with identifying hiring needs and continues through resume screening, interviewing, making job offers and ensuring efficient follow-up.
Streamline
Commit to the efficiency of your hiring process. You can’t afford to cut corners, but if it’s well strategized, you won’t have to. The process should take a reasonable amount of time and be neither rushed nor unnecessarily prolonged.
- Get an early consensus on job profiles and descriptions. This way, if key managers have differing ideas of what a position entails, they can be ironed out in advance. This also provides clear, specific information for you to pass on to your recruiters, so you can avoid wasting time interviewing unsuitable candidates.
- Resume screen in bulk. It’s tempting to manage the burden of screening hundreds of resumes by dividing them into smaller batches that can be tackled in short intervals in between other responsibilities. But a better plan is to schedule a solid block of time, wrap your brain around the entire field of applicants and get the job done quickly.
- Shorten time spent on phone interviews. Ask questions in order of importance. Then you can end calls as soon as it becomes apparent that a candidate will not qualify.
- Consolidate interviews. Schedule them close together. In the early rounds, you should be able to complete several in a single day. As you grow nearer to final candidate selection, allow ample time to cover all key details, but don’t let your commitment to timeliness lapse. It’s especially critical to minimize time between your final interview, candidate selection and the offer itself.
A professional recruitment firm can partner with you to design and implement an industry-leading hiring process – and maintain it for today, tomorrow and the future. The recruiting team at Employment Professionals Canada are experts at helping Ontario businesses recruit and hire strategically. If you would like more information about our employment services, contact us today!
