The traditional hiring process is dead. The roles within TA teams are expanding alongside increasing organizational expectations. Maxing output and efficiency while tapping into new opportunities to win top talent are table stakes for the new world order.
On an industry level, recruiters scramble to find high-quality, available talent amidst scarcity. Recruiters have to constantly deliver the right candidate experience to attract and secure the best candidates and maintain the employer brand.
Recruiters could do with a productivity boost, or several, since they’re usually swamped with interviews and job postings. On the flip side, overlooking the little things can often cost recruiters precious minutes that add up in a year, affecting their productivity and morale.
Whether it’s outdated practices or doing things unknowingly, these four productivity killers can seriously stump recruiters’ workflow.
1. Relying on Manual Interview Scheduling
Allocate time where it makes an impact, not on manual, repetitive tasks. Interview scheduling is just one of the many tasks that recruiters have to do over and over. Recruiters can easily spend half of their work weeks on interview scheduling alone. Relying on an inefficient scheduling process will just continue to eat into work hours without bringing much value.
A good number of recruiters still rely on manual processes, such as calling, aligning schedules, sending out invitations and blocking out the calendar on the traditional pen-and-paper. However, because of the volume of interviews that they have, recruiters face the risk of making errors. For instance, they may indicate the wrong times, dates, or names. In other cases, they may forget to schedule other interviewers for a joint interview.
Automating interview scheduling can help streamline the procedure and lead to greater productivity. For one thing, it takes only a fraction of the time it takes to manually schedule an appointment. Most times, the recruiter wouldn’t even need to be involved in the back-and-forth discussion. A study by GoodTime found that relying on an automated interview scheduling tool can increase a recruiting team’s output by up to 200%.
2. Spending Too Much Time on Email Correspondence
Emails are probably a recruiter’s best friend. From contacting potential candidates to sending follow ups, recruiting teams send out tens to hundreds of emails every day. Email communication is still one of the main forms of communication for HR departments today, even with the rise of mobile. In the workplace, the average employee can spend almost three hours reading and answering their emails. This is a staggering amount of time, considering the typical work day lasts nine hours.
It may seem counterproductive when we recommend HR teams to spend less time on emails. After all, a cluttered inbox and draft folder doesn’t exactly scream excellent work ethic. Still, there must be a way for recruiters to cut down on administrative tasks like follow-ups and reminders without sacrificing efficiency. Automating follow-up emails is one recruitment hack, and most workplace tools utilize an automation feature also have various built-in templates to make emails more effective.
3. Overlooking the Value of Integration
As the workplace becomes increasingly digitized, organizations will begin utilizing more external tools to navigate the digital space. Given the various roles of HR teams, this can mean anything from video conferencing platforms, candidate assessment tools, applicant tracking systems, and recruiting analytics.
It could be a problem, since recruiters essentially juggle the functionalities over multiple platforms. Maybe you’re spending too much time figuring out the features of a certain software. Or it may just be an unnecessary amount of money to spend on this many tools.
One way to mitigate this is by selecting a robust recruitment tool that uses integrations. Leveraging an integrated platform helps reduce the number of external tools that recruiters use, from over a dozen to just two or three must-haves. This can cut down on a significant amount of time and cost, while maximizing the return on these tools.
4. Manually Sourcing and Screening for Candidates
The fact that it is time-consuming isn’t the only problem when it comes to manual screening and sourcing. The hiring process is subject to preconceived biases and distortion when not done objectively. While many workplaces have taken the stride in the right direction to a more diverse and inclusive workforce, it can be easy to fall back into old habits.
Ultimately, the top priority for recruiters should be candidate quality, rather than other characteristics. In the long term, inefficient sourcing can lead to bad hires and negative performance.
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CodeSignal is an assessment company helping the world #GoBeyondResumes. CodeSignal created an advanced job simulation technology so hiring teams can assess skills with better fidelity, provide a better candidate experience, and hire the right talent for roles, at scale. Founded in 2015, CodeSignal is trusted by the world’s most innovative tech firms, including Brex, Databricks, Facebook, Instacart, Robinhood, Upwork, and Zoom.
GoodTime enables talent acquisition teams to create an efficient, equitable, and personalized candidate experience that lands top talent faster. GoodTime is the only HR tech solution that helps advance diversity initiatives, fostering measurable impact for every candidate. See why the world’s top talent acquisition teams, including Zoom, Instacart, and DropBox, rely on GoodTime to slash time to hire metrics and deliver up to 50% savings on hiring expenditure.