Hire Faster in a Candidates Market
Darren Westall
September 21, 2021
Recruitment
Businesses are starting to reopen and begin normal operations and lots of them have found themselves struggling with a reoccurring issue, we’re living in a candidates market. After the pandemic, small businesses all over the world are short-staffed, and the fight for qualified candidates is harder than ever.
Being an employer, chances are you will have to hire new staff urgently to keep your business performing well. Although to be successful in recruiting candidates, it’s important to note that speed is important but quality candidates are vital. A poor hire can cost, and sometimes rushing can cause more harm than necessary.
Let’s take a look at some tips to allow you to hire faster in a candidates market and be as effective as possible.
Respond to applicants immediately after their application
Sounds fairly simple but communication is key throughout the hiring process. A survey about recent job seekers showed that applicants consider prompt and frequent communication with their potential employer to be a major positive factor in the hiring process.
Top applicants will have many job offers, so hiring managers should proceed with urgency before their top choices choose a different role. Contacting applicants as soon as possible increases your chances of securing them over your competitors.
Have a standardised process
We suggest creating templates for all of your most repetitive communications with applicants, including:
- Job descriptions
- Job posts through Paiger
- Interview invitations
- Follow-up emails post interview
- Rejection emails (the hardest ones)
- Reference requests
- The offer letter
- New starter documents
Having documents ready, you’ll be able to speed up the process and also stick to a regular hiring process creating a consistent experience for all your applicants.
Recruit in a candidates market via text messaging
A study shows that two-thirds of candidates expect a mobile-friendly candidate experience. Nowadays people check their smartphones several times a day, and your job seekers are no different. Consider using text messaging in your hiring process. Reports say text messaging has an eight times faster response rate than email, making it a quick and easy way to reach more qualified applicants in this candidates market. Text recruiting is just another way to help your job seekers speed up the process.
Create an ideal candidate profile (ICP)
Before posting a job everywhere, an important thing to look for is exactly what you’re evaluating in your candidates and what kind of candidate you’re looking forward to. A vital step is to create your ideal candidate profile. Thoughtfully evaluating your job seekers allows faster and more precise hiring decisions.
Having an ideal candidate profile allows an easy process when looking for the kinds of skills, talents, and behaviours someone needs to do well in the advertised job. Using this helps with job posting, the kinds of questions you ask in your interviews and the skills you look for in your candidates. Having an idea of who you want to hire helps make the hiring process quicker for everyone involved.
Create pre-screen questions for your best candidates
Having narrowed it down to a select number of applicants you begin to wonder who you should be focusing your time and attention on. Pre-screening questions are the thing for you. Putting questions on the job application can help speed up the hiring process by filtering out people who don’t meet the requirements of the job role.
Pre-screening questions takes all of the mystery out of the process in those first stages of the hiring process. This allows you to spend more time on the candidates who you do want to find out more about.
Ask for employee referrals first
Restricting your hiring channels can hinder you in the long run as a perfect candidate could be right in front of you if you were looking in the right place. An employee referral program can be a major factor in streamlining your business and recruitment strategy.
Internally recruiting via referrals slashes the time taken to recruit as the applicants already exist in the network of your employees. People in your team already know about the business and what an ideal candidate should be, this dramatically reduces the time it takes you to persuade each candidate to get on board with the business.
Create a great candidate experience
58% of job seekers reported declining a job offer because of a poor candidate experience. A candidate accepting your offer or rejecting it is all about balancing their candidate experience. Evaluating your business’ candidate experience and looking for ways to improve it can greatly increase your chances of turning those rejections into accepting.
A bad candidate experience can affect your employer brand and as 2023 continues to be a battlefield for finding adequate candidates, letting your business stumble can put you far behind the competition.
Mastering these skills in your hiring process will not only save you time but magnetise the best candidates for your business. No one is going to go out of their way to boost your business more than the team you have so be certain you have the best people around you.
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