Big Stumbling Blocks That Affect Your Recruitment Process

Identifying the right employees to accomplish business goals is a must for every organization. The quality of the people hired is an outcome of a successful recruitment strategy. That is precisely why every firm places a strong emphasis on designing a hiring approach that is error-free and effective. 

Now, the question is how to design & achieve that complete, error-free, and effective hiring process by transforming obstacles into stepping stones.

Therefore, in order to make your hiring process clear, easy and effective, let's first identify the main roadblocks and then turn them into the pillars of your effective hiring strategy so that you always hire the best talent.

Here you go!

Four stumbling blocks of hiring and ways to turn them into stepping stones

Time to hire

Timeline for recruiting new employees depends on factors like job position, location, number of applicants and recruiting method. 

Time-to-hire is the average amount of time it takes to fill an open position. A long time-to-hire affects productivity and revenue until a profile remains open. So, to avoid loss and not to sacrifice quality for time, recruiters need to cut down on the time it takes during hiring.

Here are a few ways to hire the right people within the expected time frame

• Document your hiring policy: Standardized, and a well-documented hiring policy is a fundamental building block of a recruitment process. It ensures a legitimated recruitment process, provides consistent results and sets a standard for selection criteria at every stage of hiring which leads to decrease in time-to-hire.
• Be ready with the qualified skill-force: To decrease the time-to-hire, try to be prepared with qualified candidates well before you have an open position. It will help you to save time in a job advertisement, resume screening and shortlisting.
• Screen candidates for skills before interview: Pre-employment skill testing software will help you to send quality candidates to the hiring managers and hiring teams. Online ready pre-hire skill tests can significantly reduce screening time & interview time and also make mundane tasks easy. It is a sure shot way to cut time-to-hire without losing quality candidates.

Hiring Investment

Another block is hiring investment. Recruiters and hiring managers spend money, efforts & resources on streamlining the hiring process to get the best employee for their organization. A right hiring decision leads to better productivity & sustainability, but a lousy hiring decision affects the efficiency at work and causes a loss in terms of time, money & efforts.

Here are a few ways to get better candidates in minimum investment.

• Referrals: Hiring referred candidates is a bonus for recruiters and hiring managers as it speeds up the hiring process by eliminating sourcing & initial screening steps like resume screening. It cuts the advertising cost; cost associated with the services of recruitment agencies and also reduces efforts of recruiting departments.
• Skilled candidates: To make the hiring process more productive and cost-effective, hiring skilled candidates would help the companies to give more output in minimum time. Look for the right skills to bring employees who can perform their assigned role efficiently.
• Recruitment automation: Technology makes the recruitment process better, faster & cheaper by supporting various aspects of its functions. Use recruitment tools that can reduce the time and save money to find the right employees. Recruitment automation includes everything from resume scanning to online pre-employment testing to video interviewing.

Identifying and attracting applicant pool

Though sourcing good candidates is not as big a challenge for recruiters nowadays as it used to be ten years ago, getting the right pool of candidates is.

Here are five ways to identify and attract the applicant pool.

• Decide the type of candidates to be targeted: Before planning a recruitment campaign, the most crucial step is to decide the kind of candidates desired for the open job position. Candidates can be identified based on their qualification, knowledge, skills, abilities, experience, and diversity.
• Identify the right places to target: To get the highest quality applicants the most reliable and proven ways are employee referral, social media, recruitment agencies, paid job portals, non-paid job portals, direct applications, and internal hires. Out of all these employee referrals and direct applications may provide a maximum outcome.
• Communicate the recruitment message effectively: Communication plays an important role in improving recruitment efforts. A well-communicated recruitment message helps in attracting the right candidates the first time. To keep your candidates informed about the hiring process, you can make the most of artificial intelligence, social media, texting, emails and calls.
• Attract the attention of candidates: Share the recruitment information with your network, own employees and recruitment groups to let them know about the open position. Before the candidates visit your site update the page with the perks of working with your organization. Candidates research about companies to understand on a personal level. So, communicating the company values, work culture, employee experience and uploading pictures of a soothing work environment will be an added advantage to attract potential candidates.
• Generating their interest in a job profile: Only attracting candidates will not serve the purpose of getting the right candidate but interest in an open job position will so that they can apply. To get them interested, you can use job roles, benefits, compensation, company culture, location and more to attract candidates to your offering.

Separating the wheat from the chaff

It’s always better to make your pipeline ready for future recruitments. However, having a quantity of applicant pool doesn’t lead to the right hiring decision, for that quality of talent matters. After getting the applications, online pre-employment testing helps to filter out the best talent based on their knowledge, technical skills, and cognitive ability. Various types of recruitment assessment tools are available nowadays to make the hiring process seamless and give the desired outcome.

Here are a few variables to look at before choosing online assessments quickly and accurately.

• Quality tests: High quality and accurate tests improves the selection process and enables recruiters to screen out candidates with desired skills and abilities. To choose pre-employment assessments, evaluate them before using it or find out if it will serve the purpose after purchase.
• Ready to use skill tests: The platform with prepared to use skill tests for cognitive ability, knowledge, language proficiency, and technical skills saves the time of a recruiter or hiring manager, you should also check whether the assessment provider can provide you with custom made tests to suit your job descriptions.
• Instant & detailed reports: Intuitive reports enable you to analyze the result with ease and help to create a right hiring decision.
• Cheating prevention: You can use online proctoring to ensure fair assessments and prevent cheating. Pre-employment skill testing software should provide you with advanced proctoring such as image proctoring, video proctoring and window violation. It also eliminates schedule, location constraints and doesn’t need invigilation.
• Excellent candidate experience: Assessments play a vital role in forming the impression of an organization. Your recruitment assessment should aid in excellent candidate experience by providing flexibility to take a test from their convenience, an opportunity for all candidates to showcase their talent beyond the resume.

These are the major stumbling blocks that every recruiter or hiring manager is struggling to make the recruitment process seamless, precise and prompt.

So, what are the stumbling blocks in your recruitment process? You can add yours and let us know in the comment section how you deal with them?