You know that people are your company’s most important resource; it’s why you always want to recruit the best candidate for the job. But you won’t be able to do this if your hiring process is a mess.
Maybe your hiring has several congested steps, or perhaps you conduct too many interviews. Whatever is causing your woes, one thing is certain: you need to make your systems more efficient.
To point you in the right direction, we’ve compiled several ways you can streamline your hiring process. We’ve also highlighted several real-world examples of how companies made innovative changes that worked for them.
Make it easier for qualified candidates to apply
Consider the experience of candidates applying at your company. If they encounter difficulties during the process (e.g. maybe they found it tedious to fill out pages of past work experiences), they’ll likely move on to the next opening that doesn’t require so many hoops to jump through.
Can you imagine losing out on dozens of highly skilled applicants this way?
The solution is to make the process more accessible. Case in point: Home Depot, the largest home improvement retailer in the U.S., implemented two major changes to streamline their hiring:
- Introducing a smartphone app that lets applicants self-schedule in-person interviews.
- Simplifying their application form and adding five core questions to their career page to help potential candidates decide if working for Home Depot is the right place for them.
The result? Home Depot boosted its online application process by 80% and filled over 80,000 roles in their retail outlets.
Gamify the process
To engage a younger demographic of candidates, consumer goods giant Unilever introduced a series of games in its screening process, which evaluates their applicants’ skills (e.g. problem solving, communication style, personality).
Unilever recruiters are said to report “significant” improvements since.
- In the previous system, recruiters screened six candidates to put one through the hiring process.
- With the gamified process, they’re screening two candidates to put one through the process.
Adding games to your hiring process is an effective way to drum up more interest – provided that the games you introduce are actually effective in identifying desired candidate skills and traits.
Speed up the interviewing
Interviewing qualified candidates take quite a bit of time. At the very least, you need to get each to commit to a schedule, then carry it out for each round. Having more interviewers means extra steps.
Hilton Worldwide used to have an inefficient interview phase that prolonged the hotel chain’s average time to hire to a whopping 42 days. This made it difficult for them to recruit top talent, especially against faster competitors.
To speed up their hiring, Hilton introduced video interviewing through a web-based platform called HireVue, and their process works roughly like this:
- Applicants log into HireVue using any web-connected device (e.g. computers, tablets, laptops).
- Applicants answer a list of interview questions, which the platform records.
- Hilton recruiters watch the recorded videos whenever they want.
In addition to the time saved from not having to schedule interviews with candidates, the platform also comes with artificial intelligence features which assess an applicant’s communication skills.
HireVue shortened Hilton’s time to hire from 42 days to only five.
Get rid of inefficient steps
It took online surveys company Typeform 63 days to hire its content manager Eric Johnson. The process involved a phone screening, a couple of onsite interviews, a two-hour Skype interview, several rounds of project-based testing, and a final interview.
Typeform took many steps because it wanted to ensure their candidates’ competence and cultural fit. Fortunately, they’ve been able to cut this down by 43% in half a year by:
- Adding an initial phone screening.
- Removing tests that didn’t filter enough applicants.
- Scheduling all of a candidate’s interviews on the same day.
Typeform was able to do all this because they started measuring data and identifying the bottlenecks in their process.
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