If you’ve been taken by surprise with a sudden employee resignation, or it’s taking much longer than you expected to find a suitable candidate to fill that key vacancy, you will understand the frustrations and challenges the recruitment process can throw your way!
Either way, every day the role goes unfilled is potentially damaging your company’s profitability and putting further pressure on the rest of your team.
In today's highly competitive business world, its never been as important to reduce your commercial downtime by making your recruitment process as short and as effective as possible. Luckily, technological advancements can help you do just that.
A short recruitment process can help you win the talent war
Candidates don’t want to wait a long time for a decision- in fact, in an ideal situation, many would like to be interviewed and hired within the week.
Yet UK companies take an average four weeks to make a decision, with many of those taking much longer. Research shows, candidates will often accept their second and third choice offers if they are fortunate enough to have them, just because their first-choice company takes too long to decide.
Considering that everyone is competing for top candidates, don’t you want to be a company who gives the candidate the quick decision they desire whilst at the same time hopefully derisking your process further?
Ways to speed up your recruitment process:
1. Video screening
Use video screening to reduce your time in interviews. One-way videos are growing in popularity, as they allow the candidate to answer a series of questions in response to a screen recording, meaning that you can reduce your precious time throughout the whole process.
There are at least two key benefits to video screening:
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You will generally know within a couple of minutes of watching the recording whether you want to bring the candidate in for an interview. With a phone interview, this takes much longer. Whereas with a one-way video recording, you just hit stop as soon as you realise the candidate isn’t ideal according to your criteria, thereby gaining that time back into your day to do other productive things.
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It reduces the power of bias, because the video asks the same set questions to each candidate in exactly the same way. It is much easier to compare the candidates’ responses in a fair, unbiased way. This eliminates the dangers of the ‘unstructured’ interview, where hiring managers ask very different questions to each candidate, thereby making it hard to judge different answers, and very easy for unconscious bias to sneak in.
2. Online Behavioural Testing
Online behavioural testing also allows candidates to conduct simulated or real-life tasks they might be expected to do in the job, giving you a real insight into their skill level and predicted performance.
There are three clear benefits to online testing:
- A time-saver: As technology allows them to undertake this testing online at home, you don’t have to spend time bringing them in for testing.
- Better performance: Candidates will often be much more comfortable at home or in their chosen setting/
- Reduced bias: Their performance is extremely clear for all to see based on their online results.
3. Use a Recruiter who Already Uses Advanced Tools
A recruiter has always been the obvious way to cut down your time to hire. They do the majority of the legwork, utilising their existing candidate databases and networks rather than finding candidates from scratch, and meeting with them and vetting their references to make sure they are of a high quality before they put them forward for interviews. Using a recruiter is a far more efficient use of your time than fielding the job ad yourself and then wading through CVs for weeks.
However, the most time-efficient recruiters, (the ones who can really slash your recruitment process time) are the ones who are already using the tools we’ve mentioned above. Forward-thinking consultancies are jumping on board.
Here at Lucy Walker Recruitment for our clients we offer our own Engage product, a recruitment platform which runs video screening and conducts behavioural testing. For further details follow this link. This platform significantly cuts down the time to hire, while creating a higher-quality match.
All with a 12 month Guarantee attached. That’s what we call a win-win!
For more information on time saving options why not schedule a call with the team.
Here at Lucy Walker Recruitment, we have placed and filled over 100,000 temp and permanent assignments over the last 30 years so have a range of techniques, ideas and platforms which could help you. Why not call us on 0113 367 2880 to have a conversation with one of our team. Alternatively drop us an email here or check out our Testimonials and Case Studies.
