How To Get Off That Open Req Hamster Wheel

Adrian Dixon

October 22, 2018

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Are you struggling to have control over all of your open requisitions?

The problem and why it exists

True story: at a trade show in 2018, we met one recruiter from an organization in Florida who was outpacing all her colleagues in terms of billing by a factor of fifteen to one. Yes, it was third-party and not in-house, but her revenues were amazing. And none of her colleagues could figure it out. She never seemed to fill open reqs. How was she billing so much?

Short answer: she had the clients. But she was so good at building proactive pipelines that clients were coming to her before an open req and she was finding them the ideal person. She was beating the system. She was ahead of the recruitment process.

And sadly, the current recruitment process at most organizations isn’t always optimal.

This makes sense, of course: speed is often an important factor in recruitment, which is why we have metrics such as time-to-hire or time-to-fill.

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 hiring processes focused on speed alone can be prone to a large amount of human error and miscommunication.

Statistics can vary, but somewhere between 25-33% of employees depart within six months of entering a new job.

Clearly, then, the recruitment process isn’t being optimized properly.

But how can we make sure it is?

A better recruitment process begins with leveraging technology

One of the major benefits of recruiting technology is the ability to automate repetitive tasks, such as resume 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 could recruitment automation improve the speed of the recruitment process?

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

By dramatically speeding up the screening stage, recruiters can reach out to candidates that much faster, improving the candidate experience and increasing the likelihood that top talent is still on the market.

Here, you’re using human recruiters to do the high-value network-building and context-seeking, and depend on tech talent (AI) to drastically reduce screening time, up to 75% in some cases.

Candidate screening is often cited as talent acquisition professional’s most dreaded responsibility because of its repetitive and time-consuming nature.

What about better communication with candidates?

Software Advice’s research found that 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 position is filled

Three of the five above 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

Four of those five 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 form 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 look at the above research and then 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 about your positive experience instead of your rival’s negative one.

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 the rote, 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 mirage.

It’s time to get off that open req hamster wheel and start leveraging what’s being built around you.