7 Best Ways to Improve Recruiting Efficiency

The more efficient your recruiting process, the quicker you can convert candidates into employees. But efficiency isn’t only about working smarter. With a shortage of recruiters and an overwhelming number of applicants, the time between recruitment process and next hiring action can take weeks, if not months.

What candidate wants to wait that long for next steps? Not many.

In order to boost recruiting efficiency, organizations need intelligent technology that can automate aspects of the hiring process for a seamless candidate and recruiter experience. Having a solid strategy — partnered with Interview Intelligence — allows hiring teams to identify top talent quickly, nurture that talent in a personalized way, and even re-engage them down the line if they aren’t the best fit for a current role.

How to Make the Recruitment Process More Efficient

When examining your recruitment process as a whole, there will likely be multiple areas for improvement. Depending on the size of your business, making those necessary changes may take some time. To help you get started, here are seven steps that outline how to improve recruiting efficiency at your organization.

Step 1: Audit Your Current Hiring Processes

Before you can do anything, you need to audit your current hiring processes to see what’s working, what isn’t, what’s taking too long, and whether there are bottlenecks that are disrupting the experience.

Specifically, work with your TA team to examine:

• How well your hiring process aligns with your company's overall strategic objectives and values

• The clarity and accuracy of your job descriptions

• The effectiveness of your sourcing channels in attracting a diverse and qualified candidate pool, and how well you promote diversity and inclusion

• Whether screening criteria are consistently applied across all candidates, and accurately measure the skills, competencies, and cultural fit required for the position

• Whether your interview process process provides a fair and comprehensive assessment of all candidates' qualifications

• How well candidates are informed, engaged, and supported at each stage of the hiring process

• The time it takes to fill positions (including time to schedule/reschedule candidate interviews and collect interviewer feedback) and factors that may be causing any delays in the process

• The performance and retention rates of employees hired through the process

• Whether or not there is consistent branding throughout the entire process, including on your company site and through candidate communications

As you review your hiring process, be sure to also note areas where there is significant tedious, manual effort involved — such as sifting through hundreds (or even thousands) of resumes and interview scheduling. Automating these types of tasks (which we’ll touch on later) will be a key way you can improve efficiency and the experience for everyone involved, from recruiters to candidates.

Step 2: Re-evaluate and Promote Your Employer Brand

Developing a compelling employer brand that highlights your organization's values, culture, and opportunities is an organic way to attract best-fit candidates to your company. A strong employer brand enables candidates to quickly determine if an organization is right for them and apply to open positions, significantly reducing the time recruiters spend on sourcing. Instead, recruiters can focus on turning those job seekers into applicants — and eventually, employees.

Over the past three years, candidates have become increasingly clear on what they prioritize when searching for a new role, and it’s not a snack wall or ping pong tables. They are looking for an organization with appropriate compensation, quality healthcare coverage, collaborative peers to work with, and the ability to do meaningful work. If you’re able to showcase authentically — through things like employee testimonials and video content — that you have all these things and more, you will attract more qualified and motivated candidates that are looking forward to the opportunity to work for your business.

Related reading: Why Genuine Employer Brands Resonate Louder

Step 3: Match Candidates With Open Roles Faster

Speed is the name of the game when it comes to recruiting. So, how can you capture quality candidates quicker than the competition? With intelligent automation, job matching technology, and personalization.

Candidates who aren’t able to find relevant jobs on a career site are quick to abandon the search and leave. To ensure job seekers discover what they’re looking for, leading global organizations are leveraging hyper-personalized career sites that connect candidates with personalized job recommendations based on their resume, skills, and geographic location.

They’re also ensuring the career site is equipped with an always-on chatbot, which can take the heavy lifting off your recruiters while still creating a personalized candidate experience for applicants. Phenom Chatbot, for example, can automate sourcing, screening, and scheduling while answering candidate FAQs 24/7. It captures leads for your hiring team and surfaces best-fit opportunities to candidates, connecting them with relevant job descriptions and prepping them for the next step in the process as soon as a recruiter reaches out.

Step 4: Fully Utilize Your CRM

If you aren’t using Candidate Relationship Management (CRM) technology, it’s time to reconsider. A CRM can empower TA teams with the intelligent tools needed to engage, nurture, discover (and rediscover) best-fit candidates for open roles, and more — all of which help increase applications and ultimately hires, in less time.

If you already have one within your HR tech stack, be sure to maximize it to reap the full benefits. Phenom CRM, for example, can help recruiters manage and monitor candidates throughout the entire hiring process. It also builds, engages, and tracks talent pipelines. With an AI-powered CRM, you can boost recruiting efficiency and recruiter productivity through the creation of dynamic lists, actionable insights, fit scoring, and more.

CRMs can also automate tedious, manual tasks such as resume screening, candidate communication, and interview scheduling — ultimately reducing the effort required by recruiters so they can have more time to make meaningful connections with candidates. Once qualified job seekers are added to your talent pool, recruiters can communicate with them through SMS capabilities and campaigns that can be used for status updates, personalized communication, and nurturing candidates. This helps reach them in real-time without adding another item to your hiring team’s to-do list.

Related reading: ATS and CRM: Powering the Candidate Experience

Step 5: Streamline Interview Processes

Streamlining your interview process is imperative for improving recruiting efficiency. You can optimize the interview process by:

• Leveraging AI, like a conversational chatbot, to pre-screen candidates and move them ahead in the interview process without the need for recruiter intervention.

• Utilizing AI scheduling technology that syncs recruiter, candidate, and hiring manager calendars to automatically schedule — or reschedule — interviews on its own.

• Screening candidates via one-way interviews to allow flexibility for both candidates and recruiters.

• Standardizing interview questions to reduce unconscious bias and facilitate effective candidate comparisons.

• Conducting panel interviews when appropriate to reduce time spent interviewing.

• Fast-tracking communication between interviewers and other hiring team members via a CRM that houses all candidate information and hiring team reporting in one place.

Using technology to make these changes can help recruiters find top talent faster than the competition while drastically reducing time to offer.

Related reading: 4 Ways to Improve the Interview Experience

Step 6: Provide Ongoing Training and Development

Investing in training and development programs that allow recruiters, interviewers, and even hiring managers to enhance their skills and knowledge — while reducing unconscious bias — will always lead to a more efficient and effective recruitment process.

Continuous learning ensures recruiters stay up to date on the latest industry trends, interview best practices, and AI technology, enabling them to improve their screening and interviewing skills.

Here are a few ways to invest in learning and development for your recruiting staff:

• Provide training materials and resources to the interview team throughout the entire process.

• Offer opportunities for interviewers to shadow more experienced peers.

• Share both situational and continuous feedback. Context helps everyone improve.

• Analyze data regarding your recruitment process and share with hiring teams in order to establish benchmarks and identify areas for growth.

Allowing your hiring team members to grow and learn will boost both efficiency and effectiveness throughout the interview process.

Step 7: Embrace AI Technology Innovations

As we’ve all seen and experienced, technology changes — and is changing — rapidly. Embracing new and innovative technology and automation that streamlines repetitive tasks is essential to maintaining a competitive advantage.

Interview intelligence, for example, automatically records any interview and offers additional insights into candidate responses, ultimately improving collaboration between hiring decision-makers and decreasing time-to-hire.

Generative AI is another way to innovate your recruiting processes. Designed to improve productivity and assist with filling critical roles faster by automatically creating content, surfacing actionable intelligence, and eliminating time-consuming tasks, your hiring team can rely on it to improve recruiting efficiency as well.

The more technology you have that can take the manual lift off of recruiters, hiring managers, and interviewers, the more successful your interview process will be.

Related reading: Top Tech to Boost Recruiter Efficiency

Hiring team members and candidates alike are looking for an interview process that is quick, efficient, automated, and clearly showcases company brand. With these seven steps, you can take your recruitment strategy from scattered to efficient in no time.

If you’re ready to see how Phenom can help you boost recruiting efficiency, you can book a personalized demo today.