Finding and retaining skilled talent has been one of the most significant challenges business owners have faced in the last few years. Due to the shortage of candidates, more than 36% of employers are seeing vacancies remain open for up to six months. This can have detrimental effects on operations, from reduced productivity, to low staff morale, and increased costs.
Many have touted raising wages as the best solution; however, attracting skilled candidates into the hiring funnel is only the first hurdle in the hiring and early employment process. A 2015 Leadership IQ survey looked at 20,000 new employees over a three-year period and found that 46% of those hires had failed within 18 months, and many employers have just accepted that nearly one out of every two hires simply won’t work out.
What if instead of accepting such low standards like the rest, your company reevaluated the process entirely and built a better, more efficient recruitment and hiring journey?
Streamlining your recruiting and hiring processes has the potential to will result in filling open positions faster, and with superior candidates. A fast and efficient recruitment process can reduce costs, boost productivity, enhance a company’s reputation, and ensure that the very best talent is identified, engaged, and brought into the business, saving you time and investment.
But in order to move forward, you must first identify how the process got so clunky and ineffective in the first place.
Why is the hiring process so slow?
Over the last decade, the typical hiring process has gotten longer and longer. This is largely due to increased background checks and rigorous vetting. Some common things found in hiring processes today that slow things down are group panel interviews, candidate presentations, background checks, skills tests, and drug tests. All of these “screening” steps can take up to a week to execute and often leave the candidate anxious and exhausted.
Entering a new phase of your career should be exciting, not stressful. It’s up to the employer to understand which steps of the hiring process are truly necessary and which are redundant, excessive, and may be accidentally filtering out quality candidates.
Steps to Streamline
Thankfully the journey of streamlining your business’s hiring process is pretty straightforward; it’s all about utilizing intentional screening steps and understanding exactly what you’re looking for. The clearer your focus is, the better candidates you’ll attract.
Some of the steps to developing a more intentional hiring process are as follows:
- Have a good first contact
- Know what you want
- User referrals for passive candidates
- Have a good mission/value statement
- Bring in fewer candidates
- Implement a long-term talent management strategy
- Eliminate bottlenecks
Most of these things seem like common sense, but are often much harder to execute than they appear. That’s why the most effective way to streamline your hiring process is to outsource it to a trusted partner.
The Ultimate Hiring Process Hack: Having a Skilled Partner
Many are dubious of working with an external staffing and recruiting partner due to the long-held stigma around contract workers and under-qualified hires. And yes, there is the argument that the use of a specialist recruitment agency comes at a cost but the drain on both time and resources for a hiring manager, plus the potential negative impact of a bad hire far outweighs this cost.
Some of the benefits of relying on a partner and employment models, such as contingent workers, include greater flexibility, expanded access to skilled and niche talents, and of course, an expedited hiring process. Having an experienced staffing and recruiting partner frees up a huge amount of time and resources, ensuring your business keeps moving.
MAU has long been heralded as a trustworthy and exceptional solution provided for recruitment and workforce issues. To learn more about the ways we can support your business, check out some of our case studies!
