Streamline your recruitment process and ultimately hire the best talent

7 Ways You as a Hiring Manager Can Improve Your Recruitment!

Having worked in Technology Recruitment for almost a decade, I know that there are lots of ways that you can improve your recruitment process and talent attraction strategy. There is no one size fits all approach. I have found over the years that the following 7 tips, will help you to streamline your recruitment process and ultimately hire the best talent, which is what it is all about.

1. Know what you want before you start hiring – this is a simple, yet basic part of the processes that a lot of hiring managers get wrong. Changing the goalposts mid-search or at the end of a recruitment process will alienate candidates who were in the process and have a negative impact on your employer brand. Getting this right from the get-go will save you time!
2. Ensure all relevant parties understand the role – you’re responsible for ensuring that your HR, Talent Acquisition and/or Recruitment Partners are bringing the right message to the market. I advise sitting down with all the relevant parties to have a discovery session so that they understand the tech skills, soft skills and cultural fit you’re looking for. Use your recruitment partners as a sounding board. Doing this will cover point 1 as well.
3. Optimise your recruitment funnel – you wouldn’t use a catch-all approach when creating customer personas for your product or service, so don’t do it for your recruitment. Let’s use Google as an example; they get over 2 million applications a year and hire nowhere near 2 million people annually. If you were Google, you might think, that’s great 2 million people want to work for us, in actuality this creates more headaches than its worth. Having that volume of applicants overwhelms a recruitment team and you, as you will have to say no to 99% of those applicants. So, optimise your recruitment funnel early and focus on what it is you are looking for in your next hire, by not having an optimised recruitment funnel you may be missing out on the best talent.
4. Reduce your time-to-hire – the average time-to-hire for technical roles in the UK & Ireland is 65 days. Define your processes early. Work with your HR, Talent Acquisition and Recruitment Partners to understand how many rounds of interview you need (and is every round essential), what they need to look like (technical vs competency), are the tests that you use fit for purpose and who needs to meet this person. You also need to set aside time to meet candidates, a very important, yet often-overlooked aspect. Set expectations early, that way, they can be managed with prospective hires, and there are no unpleasant surprises.
5. Communication – be open and transparent with prospective employees throughout the recruitment process. Share pain points with them and have an open discussion on how they could help you solve those. This will help you to build credibility with candidates, while also giving candidates an insight into who you are and how you work.
6. Be impressive – you might be interviewing the candidates but there’s also a good chance that they’re also interviewing you. With it likely that candidates are considering other companies, you need to show them that your business is the place to be. Simply put, I always advise hiring managers to give any prospective employee a recruitment experience that you would wish for. And even if you decide that they’re not the right hire for your position, have them leave being a brand ambassador. A candidate’s experience and your company reputation will travel. It’s that simple.
7. Retrospectives - even good recruitment processes have room for improvement. Like anything don’t just sit on your hands and think we have cracked it when everything starts to run smoothly. Constantly look for ways to improve how you recruit because invariably hiring managers who offer the best recruitment experience will attract, hire and retain the best talent. After all, that’s what recruitment is all about. 

To show the true value of what I am talking about, let us look at an example. Say you are looking to hire 5 people this year. Given that it takes on average 65 days per hire, you will have spent 325 days recruiting 5 new people if there is no overlap in the hiring/recruitment processes. By implementing some or all the above recommendations you will reduce your time-to-hire. If you reduce your time-to-hire by 10-20 days per hire this would give you back 50-100 days to focus on your team, project timelines, innovation, and growth. Your time is precious so don’t waste it by falling into many of the recruitment pitfalls I have witnessed over the years.

I hope that you enjoyed the content of the blog and that it has served a purpose in either refreshing what you as a hiring manager can be doing to streamline your recruitment processes or shed some light on areas of your recruitment processes that you had not considered before.

If you have any questions or would like to discuss the above please feel free to get in touch, via our contact us page.