The Recipe for an Efficient Hiring Process

We’ve talked about what it means to have a hiring proccess, but we haven’t discussed what I think are the key elements to an efficient hiring approach. These features comprise the basis for ApplicantPro hiring software.

Attract

In its simplest terms, attracting means drawing applicants to you. You want the most quality job seekers you can find to apply to your open positions. It’s a simple math problem really – the more people you lure to you, the higher the likelihood is that you’ll find that diamond-in-the-rough employee who’s a perfect fit for the job.

Now, there are two primary lines of thinking when it comes to recruiting: there’s the hunter (which entails a more aggressive mentality employed by most head-hunters), and there’s the fisherman approach (this involves a more passive approach that is reliant upon job ads and career sites for applicant flow). Since the vast majority of you are more likely to fall in line with the passive camp, it’s important that you create job postings that are optimized with keywords and wording most likely to appeal to your audience (aka job seekers).

Convert

Conversion is one of the most vital steps in your hiring process and yet, it’s often overlooked by HR Professionals. Perhaps this can be accredited to the fact that it’s more of a Marketing term than an HR term. The HR way to say conversion is engagement. In a nutshell, you want your applicants to be engaged enough to complete an online application.

This is something that we excel at here at ApplicantPro and affords us the ability to promise an average of at least 10% conversion from job views to completed applications. This is significantly higher than the almost nonexistent pool my clients had to work with before we helped them setup a functional, mobile optimized, and aesthetically pleasing career site.

Screen

Screening involves any tools used by an employer to filter through their pool of applicants. This includes: screening questions, audio/video interviews, hiring assessments, and typing tests. Initial interviews would fall into this category as well.

Select

Selection marks the beginning of the second half or the final phases of hiring and it tends to be more “in-depth.” Here you have assessments that measure whether someone would be a good fit for the job, contact their list of references, and conduct interviews that involve both HR and department managers.

Onboard

Most of you probably equate onboarding with pre-employment paperwork like I-9s, W-4s, and the internal paperwork required by your organization, but background checks are included in this category as well since it’s likely you’ll pursue a background check after your applicant has accepted a job offer.

Report

When it comes to my clients, this, like conversion, is one of the most under-utilized and misunderstood steps in the hiring process. There are infinite ways to use data to make your company more efficient employers, but some of the most common and widely known are: data exports, compliance reports, time to fill, cost per hire, and quality of hire.

I hope this helps to paint a more accurate picture of what your bare minimum approach to hiring should include. We have quite a few resources on this site to help make you the most efficient hirer you can be. Feel free to browse some of our blog topics or attend one of our free HRCI approved webinars to develop a plan that is custom-fit to your needs.