Today, there’s a need for speed in your hiring practices and in order to keep pace, your company must be fast moving, flexible and nimble. 

 

So what is the main reason for speed in hiring? In-demand talent doesn’t wait. They’re an ambitious (and sometimes impatient) lot. Companies need to realize that top performers lose interest if their hiring process is too slow and drawn out. According the SHRM (Society for Human Resource Management) Benchmarking Service, the average time to fill a job vacancy is 34 days and 43 days for companies with 1,000 employees or more. 

 

One leading and well-known tech company, Intel, is currently making the necessary adjustments. Intel Corporation is shortening its hiring process so as to hire for some jobs in a week instead of the many weeks it previously took to fill a position. The company now recognizes that in order to snag top talent, employers must act quickly.

 

To that point, Direct Recruiters recently were working on a search for a manufacturer in the flexible packaging industry. Our client was conducting a difficult search for a senior sales leadership position. In this case, the candidate pool was fairly small and had nearly 100 percent employment, and therefore, this became a passive candidate search. 

 

Our client was able to narrow down its short list to two final candidates. However, at this point, a company’s worst enemy came into play: Analysis paralysis. This is the point where a decision to hire cannot be made due to analysis after analysis conducted by decision makers. The result: One candidate was promoted internally at her current company, and the other candidate was scooped up by another company that moved faster in its hiring process. This was not only frustrating for the client, but costly as well, as each open position has a significant dollar value attached to it. 

 

In the end, our client learned that time kills deals, and thusly shortened its hiring process, ultimately landing its senior level candidate. A painful and costly lesson for sure.

 

With this in mind, here are 5 tips to speed up your hiring process:

 

1. Use Your Internal Network 

Start by posting the open position in-house and give your employees who may want to make a move or change jobs a chance to apply. You will reduce the candidate search time by identifying candidates already within your organization who are top performers and already fit the company culture.

 

2. Write a Clear Job Description

While this might seem like a no-brainer, many organizations do not clearly specify required competencies i.e. skills, motivations, behaviors, etc., for the job at hand. Every hiring manager needs to take time to put some real thought into creating the job description. An accurate description will help to identify qualified candidates from the start will yield a faster hiring process. 

 

3. Streamline Steps in Your Hiring Process

Eliminate unnecessary screening and multiple rounds of interviewing. In fact, schedule a block of interviewing time and have the required personnel and hiring managers schedule their time within the block. This will avoid having to bring the candidate back for additional interviews. 

 

4. Utilize Technology Advances 

To accelerate your search process, allow job seekers to use video interviewing to provide a more comprehensive profile of themselves, beyond the traditional resume. For hiring managers, this is both efficient and collaborative as well as enables them to gain a truer sense of the individual before inviting them to interview in person. 

 

5. Use a Recruiting Firm 

Having networks and resources in place to find the passive candidate market allows reputable recruiters to find that “needle in the haystack” candidate. In addition, they go far beyond the customary process of finding candidates and typically present 3 to 5 pre-qualified candidates, saving you the time of filtering through job boards and piles of resumes. 

 

Implementing a speed in hiring strategy will decrease the cycle time for making a hiring decision and improve your chances of landing your candidate of choice. In addition, you will edge out your competition. You will have already hired your candidate before your competition even has had time to entice them. 

 

Direct Recruiters

www.directrecruiters.com