The single best thing you can do to improve your recruiting results also happens to be free. If you take this one action, you will hire faster, spend less time on recruiting, have less frustration and will “improve your employment brand” by serving your candidates better… and it won’t cost you a dime.
Do this one thing and you will lose fewer candidates to competing job offers and you will significantly improve your ability to get your offers accepted quickly.
What is the one thing?
Schedule your hiring process like you would schedule a project.
One of life’s cruel ironies is that you only need to hire when you are already too busy and short-staffed right? Therefore, of course you don’t have time to hire. But when you try to save time by hiring ”on the fly” you actually take more time, hire more slowly, and generally make things worse for yourself. (See my previous post about the most common hiring mistakes, and see if it rings true for you).
Trust me on this one. Pop open your Outlook calendar and schedule all the time you need on day one. Then just run your hiring process the same way you would schedule any other project. It’s far less stressful, takes less time, and gets that new person on board about twice as fast. Really. We do this with every search, so if you don’t believe me, you can read what our clients have to say about it.
So where do you start? It’s pretty simple.
Day One Task List: Regardless of HOW you recruit, you end up with resumes to go through. So who will be involved in the resume review process and when will you sift through the resumes? Who will do the phone screen and scheduling? Who will be involved in first round interviews, second round, etc. What pre-employment assessments will you need? How will you gauge each candidate’s subject matter expertise? Plan time for each element of the process and get time from the people you will need. Just guess at how long will the resume gathering process (posting ads, etc.) will predictably take based on your past experience, then block out the interview times for each person (round one and round two). Put time on your Outlook calendars for perhaps 6 first round interviews, put in time to reflect and decide who will come back for second round. Put in time to do second round interviews with perhaps 2 or 3 candidates, time to check references, time to make the offer letter. If your recruiting process does not yield 6 first round candidates, you can always release the time you reserved on everyone’s calendars - who doesn’t appreciate finding extra time in their week?
When your recruiting efforts do produce good candidates, rather than scrambling at the last minute to jam interviews into your over-busy week, or worse – make great people wait 10 days to see you – by the simple act of advance scheduling, your precious potential new hires will instead have the experience of a neat, orderly interview process. They will be astonished that you made a quick decision to bring them back for a second interview and they will appreciate the respect you demonstrate for their time by allowing them to meet all the decision makers when they visit. The will be very impressed when you smoothly move through reference checking and making the offer. They will “feel loved” and tell their friends how organized you are and how quickly you moved them through the sequence. People are generally skeptical about what you tell them, but when you demonstrate a great hiring process – without saying a word - their brains will say “This company can really recognize talent. They know what they want, really have their act together and really want me to work here….this must be a great opportunity.”
Hey I know not every hiring project goes exactly as planned. Some people will turn down your job offers, sometimes your recruiting efforts won’t attract enough people, and other emergencies can arise. But if you can find a downside to hiring this way, I’d like to hear it, because I cannot imagine doing it any other way.
[...] run your search process like a project. It’s sad but true – we get an amazing number of “thank you for my rejection [...]
[...] by our speed, predictability, and low price compared to traditional search firms. They ask how we do it, they try it, love it, and then ask me why other search firms haven’t adopted our [...]
[...] for a first interview. Then long lags occur between first and second interviews. (Schedule your hiring process like you would schedule any other project. Cluster your interviews into one week, so you act decisively and move quickly from first [...]
[...] and everything else we need to move the hiring process along. That’s right, we pre-schedule interview time, so we don’t have to beg for hiring manager time later in the [...]
[...] DISRESPECT: A disorganized, unplanned interview sequence is disrespectful. Rescheduling interview times, making the candidate wait in the lobby, forgetting to include a key decision maker, and adding interview steps at the last minute … all these common occurrences are incredibly disrespectful. Candidates notice when you don’t have your act together. They may politely endure it, but you have wasted an easy opportunity to look good by simply scheduling intelligently. [...]
[...] years ago, one of my first blog posts was about managing candidate expectations during the interview sequence. Candidates assume that how you manage the hiring process is how you manage the organization. If [...]