How to save time in your recruitment process

Time to hire is a key recruitment metric used by most hiring managers and teams to ensure the efficiency of the recruitment process. Keeping this metric as low as possible is key to doing that. Below, we’ve detailed some time-saving ways you can use to keep your average time to hire as low as possible.

Automations

One of the biggest challenges in recruitment is all the manual or admin tasks that are involved. Manually sorting CVs, trying to work out times to schedule interviews and keeping track of where your candidates are in the recruitment process can take a lot of time—time that would be better spent on your candidates. 

Luckily, with the right software, there are multiple ways in which you can introduce automations into your recruitment process to save yourself time and improve your hiring efficiency. 

Move candidates through the process

Let’s say you’re hiring for a role where a certain skill or certification is necessary, so you want to ensure that only the most qualified candidates are moving to the next stage of the process.

You can save heaps of time by having a question related to this in the application process, for example, “do you have a driving licence?” and let everyone who responded with a “yes” move to the next stage automatically.

This stops you having to go through each individual application to make sure they’re qualified, as your ATS will do it for you.

Schedule interviews

Sending multiple emails back and forth just to settle on a time that everyone is free for an interview can be tedious, especially when you need to do this with multiple candidates.

Having an automation in place to do this for you can save precious time. For example, a feature that will allow your candidates to choose the time that suits them best in your calendar, based on pre-approved slots by you. This will rid the need for unnecessary back and forth and create a much more efficient structure and positive candidate experience.

Send surveys

It can be easy to forget about follow-ups when you’re busy hiring, but measuring your candidate experience is crucial to ensuring a successful hiring process. Take the stress out of it by automating your NPS survey to send out after a specific stage. This way, you can keep on top of your candidate experience, without the extra pain of having to manually ask for feedback.

We’ve limited it down to just a few, but there’s a ton of other automations you can use to help save time on your recruitment. For example, sending messages, adding comments, checklists, and much more to ensure you’re being as efficient as possible.

If you’d like to understand more about automations and how they can save you time on your recruitment, click here.

AI

A definite buzzword in today’s landscape, AI seems to be everywhere and, though it may divide opinion, there’s no arguing that it can be used to save you heaps of time in your hiring process. 

Draft job ads

Writing job ads is often a time-consuming process. But if your ATS has an AI function, you can enter the job title and it will provide you with a role description relevant to the position.

What’s more, you can prompt it to suggest relevant skills and traits unique to the role, which you can include in your description if they fit. As with anything to do with AI, it’s important to remember that this isn’t a complete replacement—you should be using it as a guide to help you save time, and edit where you need to so that it still reflects your company's goals and tone of voice.

Summarise resumes

If you’re hiring at a high volume, going through CVs can occupy a large chunk of your time. Even if you’re hiring at a smaller scale, it’s something that, with some extra help, can be made less tedious. AI can help summarise your candidate’s CV and pull out the important information you’re looking for to save you having to do it yourself. 

Transcribe video interviews

Have you ever finished a video interview and wished you’d taken more notes or written something specific your candidate said but forgot? Or perhaps you even record the session but don’t have time to go back and watch 60 minutes of footage. An AI feature can provide a written summary of your video meeting in real-time, taking the notes for you so that you’re free to focus on your candidates.

The addition of AI can do a multitude of things to boost your recruitment. If you’d like to read more about what these are, click here.

Growing your talent pool

Having a built up and healthy talent pool means that when you’re ready to hire for a new role, you already have a wide selection of candidates to choose from. There are multiple ways to grow your talent pool which may require more effort initially but will save you more time in the long run.

Nurture your candidates

On occasion, candidates aren't the right fit for a current role, but it doesn't mean they wouldn't be perfect for something in the future. If you have an ATS, you can build up your talent pool by allowing your candidates to subscribe to future roles in whatever department they're interested in.

This would mean you already have the candidate’s interest and information to save you time during the process in the future. You should also always have future candidates top of mind, so keep your talent pool warm by using Nurture campaigns to keep them updated on what's happening in your business.

Have a strong career site

Recruitment is closer to marketing than anything else in today’s landscape, so it’s important to be bringing high quality candidates to you and attracting them to your organisation. A career site is your company’s essence and could be the difference between a candidate applying for your roles or not.

Use your career site to showcase your employer brand and your employee value proposition as almost all candidates will end up on your page while doing their research, so it’s important to make sure they have a positive experience.

As well as this, you have to make sure you’re honest and authentic as the last thing you want is for a candidate to progress in the process, only to learn that something you mentioned on your career site isn’t true. This could result in them pulling out and wasting more time in the long run.

Candidate chat

If a candidate isn’t ready to apply, they might still have questions about your organisation, the recruitment process as a whole or maybe some of the roles they’ve seen. Because of this, it’s usually a nice idea to have an easy way for your candidates to contact you, such as a chat box on your career site.

If you use an ATS with a career site, there could be a candidate chat feature which you have control of and can decide where it should be active. It’s not a necessity, but it means that even passive candidates can get quick questions to the answers they have, leading to a more positive experience and you’ll be top of mind when they apply further down the line—you could even use it to encourage them to subscribe to future updates and openings.

If you’d like to learn more about how you can save time on your recruitment, get in touch with us below!