Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger. It’s not just a chart-topping electro-bop from the early aughts. It’s also a must-do ethos for modern business — especially when it comes to hiring your ideal candidate.
In today’s competitive talent market, top talent is snapped up faster than you can say “hustle”. The companies who succeed in snagging the best candidates are those that have replaced the marathon hiring process with lightning-fast recruitment strategies.
Because in-demand candidates aren’t going to sit through a seven-stage interview process when they have dozens of other companies courting them.
If you’re vying for the best candidates in a shrinking pool of talent, it’s all about making the right moves, and fast.
Quick tips for a faster hiring process:
- Make your job application more accessible
- Utilize premium job boards
- Integrate candidate pre-screening tools
Is a streamlined hiring process really better?
The short answer is yes.
In today’s tight labor market, employers can’t afford to fall back on the “hire slow, fire fast” mentality, especially when top performers are being snapped up faster than ever.
With 11 million job openings and not enough employees to fill them, companies of every size and shape are struggling to bring qualified candidates into their talent pipelines. And with average time to hire ranging from slightly over one to almost seven months, there is clearly room for improvement.
But it doesn’t have to be this way. By streamlining and accelerating your hiring process, you can secure top hires faster, while creating an experience candidates will remember.
Here’s why you need that speed.
Better hires — sooner
The average hiring process lasts three to six weeks but according to CNN, the new sprint for talent often means the best candidates are snapped up within a matter of days.
Top candidates are fielding job offers from multiple companies all at once. To stand out, you need to get to them first.
And while it pays to be thorough when making any hire, the truth is you can’t afford to hem and haw in a talent market like this one. The longer you participate in time-consuming deliberations, the more likely it is that you’ll lose that candidate to a rival company.
Focus on trimming the fat from your recruitment and hiring process. By paring it down to the essential functions that give you real insight into a candidate’s skills, character, and experience, you can recruit quickly and confidently. (More on how to do this in a minute!)
More money in your pocket
When you’re hiring to fill an empty position, time is money — literally.
According to the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), the total cost of hire lands at around 3-4X the position's salary.
That means if you’re trying to fill a role that pays $50,000 a year, you may spend nearly $150,000 to make it happen. Can someone say “ouch”?
When you combine that with the time and opportunity cost of constantly removing your nose from the grindstone for interviews and overflow work, plus the mounting expense of those empty desks, the price tag is enough to make anyone rethink their hiring process.
Higher response and acceptance rates
No one likes sitting around waiting to hear back about that open role. If you can get back to candidates faster, you’ll not only leave them with the warm-and-fuzzies — you might just leave with a new employee.
Because when you hire faster, higher response rates are basically a given.
By reducing the time between interview and offer, candidates have less time to overthink things and talk themselves out of accepting the job.
This condensed window also gives applicants less time to interview with other companies and entertain other offers, meaning your diamond candidates are less likely to get poached while you get your ducks in a row.
More productive (and less stressed) team members
Recruiter burnout is real. Today’s hiring managers and HR pros are handling an average of 40-60 open positions per recruiter at any given time.
Pair that with tasks like sorting through an avalanche of applications and endless back-and-forth emailing and interview scheduling, and it’s easy to see how the process gets drawn out.
But if you could speed things up even by a couple of days, your recruiters wouldn’t be stretched so thin.
Whether it’s adopting a candidate-friendly applicant tracking system or another cloud-based recruiting solution, do your part to reduce recruiter burnout (and snag those top-shelf hires) by putting the pedal to the metal with your recruitment and hiring process.
Ready to hit the gas on hiring? Here’s how it’s done
Slow and steady might win the race if you’re a turtle, but recruiters need speed.
Here’s how to accelerate your hiring in three simple steps.
1. Make your job application more accessible
The war for talent is happening now. To win it, you need a deep pool of stellar applicants to choose from.
To attract more candidates in less time, make sure your job application is easy to access and can be filled out in a flash.
Here are a few quick tips to get those apps in faster:
- Make sure your application process is mobile-friendly
- Reduce the number of mandatory fields to just the most relevant info
- Set up an automated email to let candidates know their app has been received
Take a page out of WM’s book. The Houston-based waste management company was struggling to find workers. That’s when they decided to switch things up.
To attract more applicants, WM streamlined its job application in a major way. While it once took nearly 20 minutes to fill out, the hiring team pared it down to just three minutes and created a scannable QR code so candidates could access the form instantly.
This helped them move from application to offer in just 2-3 days compared to several weeks, proving that a less cumbersome application can make a huge difference in hiring speed.
2. Utilize premium job boards
Reaching the best candidates takes more than just an accessible application. You need to position your employer brand in front of the right job hunters.
For that, niche and premium job sites may be your best bet. Across all the job boards we analyzed, the programmer-specific site StackOverflow held the top spot for the shortest time to hire at 34.21 days. This figure was followed by WeWorkRemotely, a remote-specific site, at 34.84 days.
In comparison, the average time to hire across all job boards was a whopping 91.5 days, three times slower than the more specialized job boards.
Here’s how to accelerate your recruitment process with a little help from the right job boards:
- Review your top sources of hire for quality candidates
- Invest more time in increasing traffic to your top job sites
- Cough up the extra cash for premium boards, especially when hiring for technical, remote, or niche roles
While spending a little extra dough on premium boards may seem like a waste, it can shave nearly two months off your time to hire. Worth it? We think so.
3. Integrate candidate pre-screening tools
When speed is the name of the game, you need to be able to decide quickly which applicants are worth pursuing first.
Here’s how to kickstart your pre-screening process to schedule the right interviews faster:
- Use AI to integrate blind hiring practices and match candidates faster based on skills and experience — not demographic identifiers
- Use automated skills and personality assessments for highly technical or customer-facing roles
- Skip the phone screen and opt for an automated candidate questionnaire or video application to get to know your candidates before agreeing to a face-to-face interview
- Cut the back-and-forth emailing and send a simple interview scheduling link so candidates can quickly select a time that works for them
From education verification to skills assessments, pre-screenings help connect you to the best candidates sooner. And while a world with no more dead-end interviews may sound like a dreamland, cutting-edge companies are already making it a reality.
Our latest Source of Hire report also found that there were 62% more applicants yet significantly less interviews in 2022. This could mean more businesses are incorporating screening measures into their hiring processes to ensure they only interview the best of the best.
Hire faster with Breezy
With the help of a user-friendly applicant tracking system like Breezy, you can reach all-star candidates in a fraction of the time.
Features like instant job postings, all-in-one candidate screening, and automated stage actions help you connect with the right candidates at speed and scale. What used to take one month can now take as little as ten days.
And with Breezy’s AI-powered Candidate Match Score, you can spend less time sifting through mountains of resumes and more time getting to know your best candidates. Match Score will instantly surface your top candidates based on real skills and experience (not name, age or location), helping you quickly connect with the most qualified applicants in your pipeline.
See for yourself with a free 14-day trial and start speeding up your recruitment!
