6 Tips to Improve Your Hiring Process

Filling an Open Position is Hard

It’s time-consuming, demanding and pressure-packed – especially since choosing the wrong person can set an organization back hundreds of thousands of dollars (the Department of Labor estimates replacing a bad hire can cost on average, 1/3 their annual salary) and negatively impact employee morale. But with a price tag that high, many employers are rushed into bad decisions by hiring too quickly. In fact, the Harvard Business Review indicates that as much as 80% of employee turnover is a direct result of poor hiring decisions.

But Recruiters Don’t Have Forever

On the flip side, open positions create gaps in productivity, which can put undue stress on remaining employees, lead to errors and create an overall sense of frustration and burnout. To help your organization navigate the demands of hiring, here are 6 tips to implement when looking to fill open positions.

1. Manage All Your Hiring in One Place
   The best way to consolidate and manage your hiring data is to automate your applicant tracking. This allows you to store past and current data in one location and even keep track of candidates for future openings if they don’t meet your needs right away.
2. Analyze the Best Places to Find Talent
   Track the sources of all your candidates, such as job-search websites and social networking sites like LinkedIn. It’s important to understand what works for your organization and where you’re finding value in paying for listings or spending time searching and posting. Determine which sources drive the most candidate volume and where you find your hires by position type and location. For example, LinkedIn might be a terrific source for a certain type of job in your company. For other roles, employee referrals might be more effective.
3. Build a Robust Careers Webpage
   Your website is an applicant’s first impression of your business and your brand. Integrate your application process with your careers page, focusing on usability and reliability to ensure you don’t lose top candidates because of technical issues or a poor user experience.

    

   And remember that your careers page is a direct reflection of your company. Include information about open positions, as well as benefits, culture, potential career paths, company news and awards. Offer insight into what it’s really like to work at your organization. Be consistent with your brand to set expectations for candidates and get them excited before they even walk through the door.

4. Make Decisions Electronically
   Use technology in your hiring process to guard against ever losing a résumé—and maybe a great new hire!

    

   Create a binary yes/no decision process for your interview team. That way, no candidate is stuck in the “maybe” category and potentially forgotten or overlooked.

5. Understand Bottlenecks in Your Process
   Analyze your hiring process: How long does it take? Which parts take longer than others? If the process bogs down, you risk losing top candidates to competitors with more efficient processes.

    

   To uncover bottlenecks in your hiring process you should track these 7 recruiting metrics:

   • Time-to-fill
   • Time-to-hire
   • Sourcing channel
   • Cost-per-hire
   • Offer acceptance rate
   • First-year retention rate
   • Applicants-per-hire

   For a breakdown of each metric and how they can impact your bottom line, check out this interactive article.

6. Monitor Compliance
   Understand and avoid Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs regulations—and the major fines that can come with violations. Use consistent, legal processes for hiring or rejecting candidates, and keep strong documentation to show why a candidate was or was not selected.

Paycor Recruiting Can Help

Paycor Recruiting is the simple, smart, safe recruiting platform built by recruiters for recruiters and HR hiring teams. Build candidate pipelines, create branded career pages, customize job applications and find great candidates, all while remaining compliant. At Paycor we offer more than best-in-class technology, we pride ourselves on our expertise. Take a self-guided product tour and see the technology for yourself.

Sources: Department of Labor, Harvard Business Review, Hireology Blog Hiring Statistics