Ways to improve recruiting time management
We all know the scene. A busy and highly productive company running lean and realizes the need to hire has become very urgent.
Person one: “We need to hire, like yesterday!”
Person Two: “Well let’s post a job ad and get started on finding them!”
Person One: “Alright, add this whole job to your already full-time job, and let’s do this as soon as possible”
Person Two: *big sigh* “alright, we gotta get this done!”
From here an ad gets posted while all the daily tasks of the regular life of the business are kept at that high productivity state. It means now someone has to put in more time, effort, and energy in screening resumes and making calls to potential candidates… and this is additional to their daily tasks, which often aren’t able to be sloughed aside.
This is where a company needs to control the chaos – as we like to put it – organize the chaos. Depending on the role, the number of applicants can overwhelm a person in a snap.
What often happens? An initial review of the resumes, picking a few that seem to fit. Phone calls are made right away to those candidates, in the hopes of achieving a phone interview at that immediate moment. Often the candidates don’t pick up, and call back later when it’s highly inconvenient, or do pick up and ask to be called back later. This game of phone tag is easily nipped in the bud if you schedule to phone interview via email or text communications. What this allows is for the person who is organizing the interviews to pre-block specific times that would be known to be most convenient to not interrupt the daily operations.
Manage your time, and manage the potential applicants too!
Here are some very easy to implement strategies that save time, and help make the process of hiring much much smoother.
Step one: Block your time and don’t deviate.
This can look like coming into work in the morning and for the first 30 mins, you review resumes and select the ones that you believe fit, reach out to them to schedule phone interviews immediately as you go along, or reach out every two to three days as candidates apply for the role. There are 3 very important time blocks you can plan that assist in the immediate management of this.
- Resume review
- Scheduling phone interviews (phone screening) and face-to-face (or virtual face-to-face) interviews
- Hosting phone interviews.
Step two: Modes of communication.
Cold calling for a phone interview is ineffective and quite honestly disrespectful of your potential candidate’s time. Imagine they are working full time and you call right when they start their shift, or on their lunch break. When you schedule the phone interview ahead of time you allow them to prepare themselves. This prescheduling does not have to be limited to email – use text (if you can) it’s powerful and often you’ll get faster responses!
This also will assist in highlighting that your company is a strategic and well-managed facility – it gives the facade this is not chaos. (Even though we all know that this is adding more workload to the daily task list) It’s organized and thought out before the posting going up! This is the first touchpoint for your potential new employee and it matters!
How you manage this aspect of hiring reflects directly upon your company. This is your first impression and that potential candidate’s first taste of your employee experience.
So email or text the candidate first and schedule the phone interview. If you have done step one you have pre-slotted times that you have prepared to schedule effectively and start the process.
Step Three: Be mindful of candidate drop off and MANAGE IT
Sounds a bit scary, but what this is talking about is making decisions promptly. Let’s give an example.
A candidate with all the right skills and background experience happens to be an early applicant. You conduct a phone interview and a face-to-face interview with this candidate, however, the candidate happened to apply within the first few hours of the job posting being advertised. Everyone agrees the candidate is a perfect fit – but this is the first person to go through the whole interviewing process and you’d like “someone to compare them with.”
HOWEVER, the candidates that have been trickling in since do not seem to meet the same caliber. What most companies do is keep searching and hoping that the perfect candidate they have already interviewed holds out long enough for them to make some comparisons.
What’s happening behind the scenes? Well, that perfect candidate is interviewing elsewhere at the same time. 3 weeks roll by since that candidate has heard from the company and finally, the company decides that the first candidate was indeed their best fit and extends an offer to them. Only to find out that the candidate interviewed elsewhere and was offered a position within days of that interview and has been on the job for over a week.
The moral of this story is when you find the right candidate – act right away. Finding your next employee should not resemble a contest, but a skills and knowledge assessment-based decision. I advise my clients that a 2-week turnaround is the maximum amount of time you should allow from the first point of contact to the hiring decision. During those two weeks the candidates that are deemed a fit should have regular communication and be advised when a decision will be made.
This brings us to the last step!
Step Four: pre-schedule a timeline to make a decision.
After the phone screen and after a face-to-face interview, have a timeline to when you will advise of your decision.
Yup. This sounds nuts to some companies as they have no idea what applicant turnout will be like. HOWEVER, when you preplan a hiring decision date you can adjust as you go. This will organize your communications with potential candidates you’ve interviewed. If you know that you have interviews being hosted for this week, advise everyone that a decision will be made by the following week – and then follow up with everyone on that day. Whether it’s “we are moving on with someone else ” or “ we’d like to extend a job offer to you” when you pre-plan this in advance it makes keeping track of the candidates easier and assists in the reduction of candidate drop-off.
Do you notice the theme yet? YOU control the timeline. The number one complaint we hear from clients is they “don’t have the time to hire” and by not hiring they are losing even more time. More often we hear about how they make phone calls to host phone interviews and end up leaving voicemails, and those individuals manage to call back at the most inconvenient times, and how they chase them after. All of it comes down to a lack of pre-planning and scheduling.
Your time is important – and so are your candidates. The only person who can control the chaos of a recruit boils down to the company hiring, and their ability to carve out specific time to get the job done, and done well.
What tips and tricks have you found? Do you think our list needs additional steps? Let us know in the comments below!