5 Smart Ways to Streamline the Recruitment Process When Hiring

pymetrics
September 7, 2021
pymetrics streamline recruitment

Bringing a new employee onboard is always going to be a big investment. It takes time to find the right candidate, finish orientation, and fully integrate them into operations. 

Any inefficient search practices or time invested in the wrong candidates is also time that could be spent on core business functions, and it is often possible to quantify the lost value in labor hours.

To make your recruitment process cost-effective without compromising on your goal of finding the right candidate, you need to streamline recruitment process steps in ways that optimize your decision-making.

1. Make Every Word Matter in the Job Description

It's said that brevity is the soul of wit. It's also the breath and life of an effective job description.

• Use short but detailed line items to communicate the job's core responsibilities. Make sure your core duties actually reflect the responsibilities assigned

• Make it clear where candidates may be able to delegate or collaborate when needed

• Understand the difference between skills you can assume a candidate will have based on the job's education and experience requirements, those you absolutely need a candidate to have, and those you desire most

There's nothing wrong with listing desired or ideal qualifications, but you need to communicate the difference to open up the field to everyone who could be successful in the role

That's a necessary step to finding the candidate who might be a step or two short of your ideal in one area while exceeding it in many others.

2. Post Widely and Optimize Posts To Spread

What is recruitment process success without the candidates that map closely to your desired skill set? 

After all, to find the best fit for a job, you will need to sort through a bunch of pretty good candidates as well as a lot of them that just don't work for your current needs. It takes more than just good language in the job description to get there, though. You also need your posts to spread. 

That involves a couple smaller steps to make sure you have traction:

• Post to major job search sites and social media like Google Jobs & LinkedIn

• Submit your description to industry-specific job search boards

• Contact local recruitment agencies to query their talent pools for possible candidates

• Post SEO tuned versions on your public facing website

Along with these steps, make sure you optimize the text of the post to include keywords your ideal candidate might search on every platform, not just your website.

3. Make the Most of Your Candidate Pre-Screening Process

Digital assessments of soft skills like active listening or critical problem solving are getting more and more effective with each passing year, and putting them to work can help you weed out candidates whose temperament or moral orientation to other employees and the company might conflict with your goals. 

Pre-screening is about finding people who make the right decisions, though, not just weeding out the ones who are going to make the wrong ones. 

Today's digital behavioral assessment tools pose scenarios and provoke thoughtful responses that help you find the person who will quickly and enthusiastically solve problems while communicating well to the team.


4. Set Up Quality Interview Processes

Quality control is just as important when planning your interview and hiring process as it is when considering what to allow out the door to customers.

Not only does a quality hiring process hone in on the top candidates faster, it also minimizes the time you spend interviewing by weeding out the questions or steps that contribute less to your search. 

Last of all, quality control when selecting the interviewers and the questions in play means avoiding exposure to legal liability, since there are limitations on what can be legally asked of a candidate.

Those limitations include:

• Age

• Race

• Religion

• Marital Status

• Other state-protected legal information like medical or salary histories

The limitations vary from one state to the next, but those aren't the only interview mistakes to look out for. Your interviewers need to be perceptive enough to pick up when candidates make mistakes like showing a lack of investment in the job or company, focusing solely on material benefits, or presenting themselves dishonestly.

Keep in mind that job candidates will be practicing to prepare for the interview, so you must do the same when preparing the material for them.

5. Standardize Your Evaluation Process When Offering Jobs

Evaluating the candidates still in play after the interview process and selecting one to extend a job offer is best done with a consideration of just the facts about the candidate. This ideal isn't possible when dealing with any process that depends on human judgment, though. 

The best you can do is make the rubric consistent, then fit it to the best candidate in ways that don't rely on just one person's judgment. If you do less, it's not only unfair to the candidates, it's also unfair to your company because you won't actually hire the people with the best chance of flourishing. The more consistency you build into your process, the more diverse your candidate pool will be.

Consistency, on the other hand, is the key to finding those candidates whose most important skills truly shine.