How To Balance Speed and Communication In Your Recruitment Process

Adrian Dixon

October 12, 2017

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Speed is an important, if not the most important, factor in recruitment, which is why we have metrics such as time to hire and time to fill.

time to hire is the top recruitment process success metric

Source: Talent Tech Labs

When a role is open, that implies increased workload for other members of that team. Managers try to avoid that, so they want a position filled quickly. The problem is that a recruitment process focused exclusively on speed can be prone to a lot of error and miscommunication.

Between 25-33% of employees depart within six months of entering a new job.

Clearly, the recruitment process isn’t being optimized properly. But how can we make sure it is?

A better recruitment process begins with leveraging tech

One of the major benefits of recruiting technology is the ability to automate repetitive tasks, such as screening or even initial outreach via a recruitment chatbot.

This type of automation frees up recruiters for more value-add tasks around network-building and candidate engagement.

Consider two of the major challenges of the recruitment process:

  • Speed of process
  • Communication with candidates

How can you use automation to speed up the recruitment process?

Recruitment automation software can help you speed up sourcing and screening by using AI to learn the job requirements and automatically find, shortlist, and rank candidates for you.

By dramatically speeding up the sourcing and screening stages, you can reach out to candidates that much faster, whether you want to move them to the next stage or reject them.

Here, you’re using human recruiters to do the network-building and context-seeking, and you’re using AI to drastically reduce screening time, up to 75% in some cases.

Screening is frequently one of the biggest complaints of talent acquisition professionals because of its time-consuming nature.

How do you improve communication with candidates?

Software Advice’s research found the top complaints candidates have about the recruitment process are:

  1. An extremely long application
  2. No confirmation email
  3. A long hiring process
  4. Inability to contact a recruiter
  5. No notice when the position is filled

Notice that 3 of the 5 candidate complaints are about communication.

From the same research, these were the top requests of job seekers:

  1. More communication
  2. Notification if passed over
  3. Timeline of hiring process
  4. Human contact after application
  5. Timeliness of replies

4 of these 5 requests are about communication.

Communication is clearly a big issue. You need to nail it if you want to achieve a good relationship with candidates. Technology can help.

Whether it’s attaching some type of recruiting automation to your pre-existing ATS, using chatbots, or automating the process enough that humans can easily email back and forth with candidates.

If you examine your own processes, you’ll probably find some communication gaps.

Fixing those is going to be key to how your employer brand is perceived in the marketplace. Imagine a candidate tell their friends, “This company is so great at following up and just generally keeping you in the loop.”

To get that kind of praise, you don’t need to task dozens of recruiters with emailing all day. You just need the right tech.

A final note on improving the recruitment process

If repetitive, time-consuming tasks are automated out, recruiters can spend more time on actual planning.

Typically, recruiters currently spend a lot of time on tasks like sourcing, scheduling, and “putting out fires.” But that doesn’t need to be the case.

With the right tools, a value-add recruitment process can be a reality and not a fantasy.