Five ways to instantly streamline your recruitment process
From cost, to staff morale, to employer brand, the efficiency of your recruitment process touches multiple parts of your business. The benefits you can garner from streamlining your process are integrally linked to business performance, and therefore investing in measures that instantly make your recruitment journey more efficient is likely to see significant return.
Here are our recommendations for streamlining investments that pack an instant punch.
1. Automated communication
One of the biggest challenges in recruitment, particularly for roles that attract a lot of applicants, is keeping in touch with candidates.
Many employers adopt a similar approach to this – informing all candidates of the cut-off point by which, if they haven’t received a response, they should assume they are unsuccessful. This is usually adopted to save time, and allow recruitment teams to focus on the candidates that are more likely to be offered the job.
However, for a candidate experience that ensures unsuccessful talent will continue to apply for positions, as well as spread the word about you as an employer, it’s important not to push away the candidates who aren’t appropriate this time around.
So keeping in touch with all of your candidates is essential for maintaining your employer brand, but manually maintaining those relationships is time consuming.
With an Applicant Tracking System (ATS), you can automate this communication, allowing you to streamline your recruitment process while ensuring your employer brand is boosted, and your talent pools remain full.
As well as informing of the status of their application, you can also schedule communications at each point of the recruitment process to keep your candidates in the loop, from receipt of an application to job offer.
2. Digital right to work
For many employees, proving their right to work is a minor part of the recruitment process, however, it can be a stumbling block for many employers in terms of streamlining.
Pre-2020, employers were required by law to validate a new employee’s documentation in a face to face meeting, which was a time consuming process, and posed challenges for new employees if the role was based remotely.
Recent changes in legislation, however, now enable document verification to take place digitally, meaning that candidates no longer need to present their identification documents for verification to the employer in person before starting work. Now, candidates can scan their ID documents and upload facial images to an app or online portal, which uses AI and machine learning to verify the authenticity of the documents.
For employers, this means that the process of verification is significantly streamlined, and for the employee, it means they can start work, whether at the office or remotely, much more quickly.
3. Automated sifting
When there’s a high candidate to position ratio, ATS technology can speed up the decision making process by analysing applications and video interviews to group candidates in a way that correlates well with the company’s own assessments. This has been shown to cut time to hire in half, reduce candidate dropout rates by 30%, and triple cost savings.
For some work seekers, however, use of ATSs can be considered intimidating, with many online resources offering advice on how to “beat” or “outsmart” them. There are compelling reasons behind this logic, as it’s argued that an ATS can actually make recruitment less inclusive.
For example, by using algorithms to search for key words, applicants may be automatically rejected for using different terminology than the recruiter would expect. This particularly affects those who speak English as a second language. As well as this, depending on how the ATS has been programmed, there is potential for older candidates who have O Levels instead of GCSEs to also be automatically rejected, which can be seen as a form of age discrimination.
Therefore, use of an ATS for automatic job posting, interview scheduling, data management and communication is a sure-fire, instantly streamlining asset to your recruitment process, but some caution is required when using for sifting and sorting of CVs and applications.
4. Video interviews
Arranging and carrying out interviews can be a resource-draining process – ensuring the right, high-level people are in the same room for the whole day, booking and paying for interview rooms, as well as managing access needs, providing refreshments, and ensuring candidates are directed to the right place all adds up to a time-consuming process – and that’s before any candidates have even entered the building.
Instead, virtual interviews can be a time-saving, more easily managed alternative.
Conducting video calls over Zoom or Teams means that the panel doesn’t have to be gathered in the same place, organising a room and physical access requirements is no longer an issue, and time between candidates can be shortened.
With video interviews, you can make the process not only more straightforward to manage but also more inclusive – for example, candidates with physical impairments can participate without bias, neurodivergent candidates can manage their own environment to give their best, and candidates from lower-income households don’t need to worry quite so much about looking the part in an expensive suit.
To streamline the process further, as well as improved efficiency, you can allow candidates to self-schedule interviews. Using tools like Doodle Poll and Calendly can provide your candidates with flexible time and date options, meaning less time and pressure rescheduling interviews for those who can’t make their given time and – better yet – less drop out from qualified candidates at this stage.
5. Outsource screening
If fast and thorough onboarding is the goal, then outsourcing your employee screening can streamline your process considerably.
Whether you’re onboarding one employee or 100, it’s vital to ensure they are fully screened not just to meet your legal obligations but to ensure your business is in the hands of honest, trustworthy, and capable people.
For the fastest option, ensure your screening provider operates 24/7 – this means that you can request screening for a candidate in the evening, and depending on the level of checks you require, receive the results the following morning.
How can Reed Screening help?
At Reed Screening, we have years of experience in providing fast, smooth, and thorough employee screening and background checks for workers of all kinds.
With screening and checks happening 24/7, we can vet your candidates within a timescale that suits your business, and our AssuredID service offers an easy and accurate way to verify a candidate’s ID digitally and remotely.
For more information, get in touch with our team.