Recruitment Productivity: Where Are You Wasting The Most Time

Recruitment is an art and a science. It's also complex and time consuming. One badly sourced candidate can set recruiting back months. But the reward for finding the right candidate? It's a feeling of triumph.

What's Eating Up Your Time?

The hiring process can take weeks to months-even at its most efficient. The truth is, when it comes to recruitment, a lot of it is out of your control. Let's take a look at some of the most common obstacles in the process.

Inefficient Talent Sourcing

Without an effective recruitment strategy, HR professionals can spend countless hours talent sourcing, and often with poor results. Yes, you can always find more potential candidates, but are they looking for a new position, do their skills match the role, and would they be a good fit for the culture?

Building Not Having A Talent Pipeline

A talent pipeline is necessary for any successful recruitment strategy. It provides you with a pool of qualified candidates to choose from for a wide range of job openings. It saves you from having to source talent every time a new position opens up at your company.

But an effective talent pipeline takes time to build. Relationships need to be nourished, and talent does need to be sourced. You're searching for quality candidates that could potentially have a 10-fold impact on your organization. Yet without the pipeline, you risk wasting massive amounts of time. It's a big investment up front, but it pays off in the long term.

Pursuing Passive Candidates

The passive candidate can be a recruiter's best friend or their worst enemy. Research shows that , 73% of candidates are passive job seekers. This means that recruiters must be proactive and go to where potential candidates are searching (i.e., social media). If you're waiting for the perfect passive candidate to come to you, you're wasting time. Being proactive instead of reactive is key.

Inefficient Time To Hire

The hiring process is inherently lengthy. On average, time-to-hire across all industries takes around three to four weeks, with two-thirds of that time spent on the interview process.

Recruiters want to be certain that the candidate will be a good fit. Realizing an interviewee isn't up to your standards once it's too late is a problem no one wants.

Want To Be More Productive? Here's How.

There are certain things you can do to cut back on your time to hire, including automating certain steps of the hiring process and better task management.

But there are a few other ways that recruiters can be more productive when it comes to talent sourcing and the hiring process.

1. Know When To Say Good-Bye

Every recruiter knows this horror story. You spent months nurturing a relationship with someone you thought would be perfect for the role, only for the candidate to flake at the last minute and accept another offer.

By learning to recognize the red flags of a risky candidate, such as lack of enthusiasm, punctuality issues, or poor preparation for an interview, you can better understand when it's time to say good-bye.

2. Leveraging Your Existing Talent Pool

Maintaining and leveraging a solid talent pool is imperative to being a productive and proactive recruiter. As your database grows in both quantity and quality, you won't have to turn to external sources for qualified candidates.

Building a talent pool grows your company community and keeps them updated on current company events. What's more, this has the potential to turn passive candidates into active ones.

3. Create Email Templates

Creating an email template for a variety of scenarios can be a huge time saver. If you have to think of something new to say each time you send an interview request, submit an offer, or handle a recruiting crisis, you'll have to dedicate way too much time to just that one email.

Standardizing processes saves you time and also results in a consistent experience. Just remember that templates work best when personalized. You want to avoid sounding like a robot when you're sending a job offer or rejection letter.

4. Invest In Onboarding

There are few things worse in recruiting than making a bad hire. When you hire someone who leaves within the first couple of months, you're set back months of work.

Whether it's not a good fit or the job isn't what they expected, it all can be mitigated by a solid onboarding process. Organizations with a standard onboarding process experience 50% greater retention.

5. Streamline The Hiring Process

It's important to be thorough when evaluating candidates. But the longer you take, the more you risk them losing them to another (more timely) offer. The best candidates are in high demand and are likely to be considered by multiple recruiters for similar positions. This makes timing crucial.

Developing a faster hiring process will take some trial and error, but thorough planning should allow you to fill positions faster, and with better candidates.

Recruiter Productivity Metrics

With recruitment, making a good hire should be a sign of productivity. But that's not all there is to recruiting. Here are some more specific metrics:

• Time to hire: An efficient, relatively short time to hire is indicative of a good recruitment strategy. If your team's hiring process is longer than the industry average, it's a sign you might want to make some adjustments.
• Cost per hire: Your cost per hire is a good measure of your strategy's cost-effectiveness and efficiency. It's also necessary for identifying areas for improvement and helps create your recruiting budget.

Quality of hire: Does your recruiting process result in strong hires? Quality of hire is one of the most important metrics for measuring the effectiveness of your hiring strategy. Data like real-time feedback, employee engagement, and performance surveys is now easier to collect than ever.