A hiring process that draws on too long is detrimental to both the employer and those seeking new employment opportunities.
A recent study found that more than 57 percent of the 1,000 U.S. workers polled said the most irritating part of the job search process is waiting to see if they got the job. What’s more, one-quarter of those surveyed stated they actually lose interest in the firm if they don’t hear back about their status within a week after their first interview, and another 46 percent lose interest if there’s no update one to two weeks post-interview.
This illustrates how important communication and speed are when you’re looking to expand your team. To keep the process moving along at a pace that’s both effective and efficient, consider these tips:
How you schedule interviews
If you’re forcing candidates to go back and forth with you for weeks at a time simply to get a first interview on the books, don’t be shocked when you end up losing would-be hires who don’t want to continue with the process.
With interview scheduling software available, it’s become easier than ever to get interviews set up. This means there’s no excuse to force the process to draw on over the course of weeks or even months.
Getting too many people involved in the interview process
It’s certainly important to have buy-in from different managers within your company as you begin to expand your team, particularly if these individuals will have to interface with the new employee on a regular basis. However, be selective about who you’re inviting into the room during interviews.
Collaborative hiring can be helpful as you make a decision, but when you start to get a room packed with people wanting to offer their opinion, it can slow down the process and make it nearly impossible to come to a decision. For this reason, you’ll want to limit it to essential personnel only.
You head into the hiring process unsure what you’re looking for
Perhaps you wrote a job description looking for a web designer, but only after you began interviewing did you realize that you actually have more of a need for a graphic designer. This requires you to begin the process over, with new criteria in mind, thus slowing everything down.
Before you put together a job description or start bringing in candidates for interviews, take time to do a full analysis of the business’s needs so you can be certain about what you’re looking for in your hire.
What skills do they need to have? What duties will they take care of on both a short- and long-term basis?
Get feedback from other departments to ensure the type of candidate you’re recruiting is actually the type of professional you need to help your business move forward.
There are no timeline benchmarks
If you’re not careful, it’s easy to let the timeline of the hiring process slip away from you.
Your schedule gets jam-packed one week, so you push the interviews off until the next week. But then those days fill up, so you postpone until the following week, and so on. Suddenly, it’s three months in, and you’re no closer to finding the newest member of your team.
Before you begin the interview process, do yourself a favor and set benchmarks for you and anyone else involved with hiring. If you know that by X date you need to have completed your first round interviews, and by Y date you need to have narrowed it down to your top three candidates, there’s more pressure to keep things moving, thus preventing your hiring from extending on for months on end.