How Inefficient Recruiting Can Hold Back Your Hiring Ability

In the current job and labor market, a recruiter can literally sabotage their hiring efforts with inefficient recruiting practices. Presently, to be inefficient in hiring can mean a company will miss out on strong job candidates that invariably will be scooped up by another employer, who might be a competitor.

 The recruitment to hiring process in today’s work world may feel like a sprint and marathon all in one.

The marathon part of recruiting can entail the continual need to have your finger on the pulse of the recruiting efforts of others – not just yourself – in which you learn where recruiters are turning to find their strong candidates.

And the sprint part – that portion of the race that truly makes the difference in “winning” or “losing” in the recruitment game – is where you have to race for the finish and hopefully succeed with a win.

To that end, and knowing recruiting always ends in a sprint finish for the perfect candidate, are there any processes in your hiring practices that might hamper your effort with that next candidate? Or are there any processes that can enhance your hiring practices?

Keep reading to find out if any of these hiring processes might be holding back your ability to bring on quality workers, and what you should do to improve what you already have in place.

The Inefficiencies

As the Pando Logic website reports, in 2006, Indeed.com announced that it was debuting the first pay-per-click job recruiting program that allowed employers to create targeted ads to reach very specific types of candidates. The initial draw of these programs is that they were designed to make online recruiting more efficient. Over the years, pay-per-click recruiting advertising has proven to be just one more inefficiency in the recruiting process that is holding companies back and preventing the right candidates from being found.

According to Jobaline.com, too many companies hold onto inefficient recruiting practices because they lack the ability to get away from what they know. At 50 cents per click, it could cost a company upwards of $500 just to hire one good candidate using pay-per-click ads, and that is simply not an efficient way to look for help.

With technology on their side, companies need to hunt down their own recruiting inefficiencies and correct them to save money and improve the quality of the candidates they hire.

Monitor Your Recurring Recruiting Activities

While finding qualified employees is critical to the success of your organization, you want to avoid spending too much money in recurring recruitment activities that bring you no value.

If your company is just blindly paying media bills for recruiting tactics that do not work, then you need to monitor those activities and remove the ones that are wasting money.

Recurring radio, magazine and newspaper recruitment ads may no longer be reaching your target audience and they may also not be bringing in enough candidates to justify their costs.

To that end, you need to monitor how many quality applications you get from your recurring print recruiting ads, if you indeed run such ads. If you choose to not monitor the amount of quality applications your ads take in (and you should anyway), then you need to start monitoring all of your recurring ads to make sure that you are not wasting money on a regular basis.

Niche Sites Versus Large Recruiting Websites

If your sales organization invests a lot of money on large recruiting sites because that is what you have always done, then it is time to start looking into niche sites that may get you better results. Doing so may enable you to save on recruitment costs.

Boutique sales recruiting websites can talk directly to the candidates you are looking for and help you to get a better return on your recruiting dollars. If you are constantly combing through hundreds of unqualified resumes that come from the larger recruiting sites, then you are wasting money. It is time to check out niche sites and bring down your recruiting budget, while also increasing your efficiency.

Repairing the Process

A letter from a job candidate on AskAManager.org talks about a candidate that was excited to get a new job with a company, until the actual hiring process dragged on for months. Some companies feel that putting in the time to vet new hires means getting better quality employees. However, in this job market today, that’s probably one of the more inequitable ways to lose out on choice candidates.

The facts are simply this: Qualified candidates aren’t going to wait around for your background checks or other vetting measures to complete themselves. In almost every instance of recruiting and hiring, good candidates understand they are, well, good candidates. These candidates know their value to a company, and may feel on many levels that:

•   They deserve more expediency in any company’s hiring process.
• Expediency leads to respect, and among the topmost candidates, they might feel disrespected by your slow hiring process.
• Other jobs with other companies that are regarded to be as good or even better than your own company are also hiring. So, what’s to prevent those topmost candidates from swinging over to those companies from your own, especially if they’re hiring now and can back that hiring process up now?

 And if you think these other companies are going to respect an even playing field in which candidates are not lured away from companies who can’t seem to get their act together in their hiring routines, then you’re sorely mistaken.

Hiring between companies is as competitive a component as product share and sales. If you delay bringing on new quality employees in any way, you inevitably will lose out on a good, strong candidate.

Simply put, when it comes to a long vetting and analysis process for a new hire, you have to look at things from the perspective of your candidates.

If you were waiting months to start working for a company, would you turn down an immediate job offer from another company?

Most people are not going to turn down good offers from companies that will get them working right away, even if those candidates are waiting to start work for another company.

So, with that, you need to review your process and make sure that you are not losing quality employees to an inefficient vetting process.

Your Screening Process

There are excellent recruiting websites that have features which allow potential employers to screen candidates and remove those candidates that do not meet the company's minimum requirements.

There are also sophisticated recruiting software titles available that can help to narrow down a pile of resumes to only those that meet your basic needs.

The problem is that too many companies still rely on human resource staffs and inefficient outsourcing solutions to try and screen candidates to find the perfect ones.

The process of screening candidates has become much more efficient, but it is only efficient if you drop your old ways of doing business and get into the 21st Century.

Evaluate your screening process and find ways to do the job better, without spending more money.

Your Inefficient Mobile Approach

For some reason, mobile computing is still an after-thought in the recruiting world, and this is why so many opportunities are lost for companies to find the perfect candidates. It is estimated that up to 60 percent of all job applications are filled out online, but that does not mean that companies are necessarily getting all of those applications to consider.

It is hard to understand why, but many companies put banner or pop-up advertising in their mobile job application forms, and that will cause a lot of good applicants to not finish and submit their application. Your mobile recruiting platform is not the place to put random advertising. If you want to collect good recruiting information, then stop trying to monetize the process.

Mobile web development is evolving rapidly and there are plenty of great ways to make online forms that are easy for recruits to fill out. Those forms need to be:

•   Simple and easy to use.
• Free of any sort of advertising.
• Limit a lot of “sign in” or “sign up for” nomenclature that needs to be gone through when all a candidate wants to do is apply to an open position.

 These three features can invariably turn off a potentially strong job candidate. They will see all the superfluous stuff that has nothing to do with them or their application, lose their sense of trust or the reciprocal feeling their work experience is respected, and more than likely move on to another company with a more straightforward hiring process.

The Age of Your Mobile App Can Hinder Your Hiring

Unfortunately, many companies are still using the mobile recruiting forms that were created years ago, and these inefficient documents are costing your company a lot of good recruits.

Invest in updating your mobile recruiting forms and you will be rewarded with quality candidates.

It is estimated that a company spends anywhere from $300 to $500 just to collect enough applications to hire one employee.

If your company has a turnover rate of 50 percent or more, then you are wasting thousands of dollars every year to bring in employees to keep your business going.

If you want to help your business grow, then you need to re-evaluate your recruiting practices and start letting technology help you to become more efficient. Instead of doing inefficient recruiting activities just because that is always how your company has done things, it is time to start updating your recruiting process and save thousands of dollars at the same time.

The Recruitment Roads to Efficiency

So, you might be asking yourself how exactly you can improve your recruiting processes, making your company much more viable in the hiring of new employees. Well, to be honest, your inefficiencies have to reinvent themselves to become efficiencies.

An article that appeared on The Harver website outlines 13 approaches you can utilize to bring out the efficiencies in your inefficient hiring processes.

In short, the article states that there are some things recruiters can’t have enough of, which are candidates.

Well, that makes sense.

Another thing a recruiter can’t have enough of are LinkedIn connections, or innovative recruitment methods.

Of course, as the article highlights, finding the best candidates has never been as tough as it is today.

The Baby Boomers are retiring in droves, and the Millennials are freelancing away in the gig jobs they don’t plan to stay with longer than three months, or so it seems.

That leaves Generation Z who as they begin to enter the workforce, have been found to have little to no experience, and with that, need to have a large amount of a company’s funds invested in their training to get them up to speed.

At the same time, a digital revolution is occurring that many recruiters find they need to pay attention to and continue to stay on top of.

Vendors old and new are throwing all kinds of AI and automation tools at recruiters, with the claim of simplifying the recruiting process.

Needless to say, it can be quite a challenge to figure out which recruitment methods fit your company’s bill, while you simultaneously attempt to stay up to date on emerging ones. 

Luckily, there are plenty of great examples out there to help you get inspired, such as 13 innovative recruitment methods highlighted below.

Sure, some of them may be a bit novel when compared to others, but all of them can give a recruiter an idea about what the possibilities are so they can use the inspiration for their own recruitment strategy.

1. Inclusive job adverts

Let’s start at the very beginning of your recruitment process… with the job adverts. Believe it or not, the wording of your job adverts matters...a lot.

The words you use and the way you phrase things can put off entire groups of the candidate population (women, ethnic minorities, older people). To avoid such a thing – and to keep your candidate pool as large as possible – you can use an AI-driven writing tool for instance.

This kind of tool scans heaps of documents and – based on this data – predicts exactly what job advert will succeed where others fail based on this data.

2. Programmatic advertising

Can we still call programmatic advertising an innovative recruitment method? Probably not, but it definitely is something you should use for your online recruiting.

(For those of you in need for a little reminder: programmatic advertising is the automated posting of job ads that targets the candidate profiles you are looking for.)

Recruiting on niche sites where your target candidates hang out, however, can be pretty innovative. Like when Amazon posts job adverts on Tinder, or when Goldman Sachs uses Spotify.

The key takeaway here is: Know your candidates. Because once you do, you can use programmatic advertising – or another recruitment method – to make sure they see your job advert.

 3. Video interviewing

This one is pretty self-explanatory. That doesn’t make it a less effective recruiting method though. On the contrary. Using video technology can be a great option when you’ve got candidates that live abroad; it saves both them and you much time and money, and you can still benefit from a much larger candidate pool.

But you can take things up a notch video-wise.

By using pre-employment assessments that incorporate video technology, this kind of technology collects data on things like verbal response, eye movements and non-verbal communication and uses this information to predict a candidate’s likelihood of success in their future job.

4. Benefit from the gig economy

This is a recruitment strategy that is quickly becoming more popular. Sometimes you need someone with specific skills – let’s say a graphic designer – and you need them ASAP. But actually, you just need them for a couple of high-priority projects that need to be finished on short notice.

So why not hire a freelancer to do the job?

Just use one of the many freelance platforms out there and hire a motivated freelancer. It will save you a lot of time and money since you won’t have to go through the usual recruitment process.

Besides, working with freelancers gives you the chance to see how good they are and how well they work with the rest of the team. If you like what you see, you know who to hire next time you’re looking for a full-time employee!

5. Passive candidates

Passive candidates have long been a bit of a hidden treasure. In the pre-social media era, it was almost impossible to get in touch with these talented workers who aren’t looking to change jobs.

The arrival of (professional) social networks has been a real game-changer here.

Now, recruiters can reach out to anyone – passive candidates included. They can engage with these candidates and build a relationship.

Even if the passive candidate isn’t interested right now, a connection has been made via social media. As a result, your company will probably be the first one that comes to mind when he or she eventually does want a career change.

6. Employee referrals

When it comes to recruitment methods, employee referrals are among the most effective ones. Referred new hires are usually more engaged, more productive and less likely to leave.

To create your own killer employee referral program you need to make sure it contains the following elements:

•   Incentives. Of course, cash incentives are usually the most effective. But non-monetary rewards such as extra holidays or a personalized gift can also do the trick. 
• Ease of use. Keep your referral program as simple to use as possible. No extensive sign-up procedures or heaps of documents to fill in, keep it short and sweet. 
• Keep them posted. When one of your employees has referred someone, make sure you let them know how their referral is doing. Did he or she just make it to the next round of interviews? Drop the referrer a quick message. 
• Recognition. Who doesn’t like a few words of praise every now and then? Especially when they’ve just found the company a brilliant new hire. Try to think of a nice way to give your employees the (company-wide) recognition they deserve when they’ve successfully referred someone. 

 7. Texting

Texting in itself may not be very innovative. As a recruitment strategy however, it can be super effective. No less than 98% of sent text messages are being read. On top of that, the response rate for texts is 45% (as opposed to only 6% for emails).

As such, texting is a great way to:

•   Check in with candidates.
• Schedule (and confirm) assessments & interviews.
• Engage with applicants during the recruitment process.

 8. Social media

If you don’t use social media yet as a part of your online recruiting efforts, it’s time to get started. Particularly younger generations of job seekers use some kind of social channel when they’re looking for a job (86% to be exact).

The possibilities of social media are endless and now go far beyond the ‘big four’ (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn). Recruiters are starting to think outside the social box and try places like Tinder, SnapChat and Bumble to find new talent.

The key when it comes to recruiting online on social media once again is: know your target candidates (and where you can find them).

9. Virtual reality

Virtual reality (VR) definitely deserves a spot in an article about innovative recruitment methods. More and more companies are using various virtual reality experiences in their recruitment strategy to show candidates that they are an exciting and innovative place to work.

What does such an experience look like?

VR can give your (remote) candidates a realistic, virtual tour or the office for instance, or show applicants your company culture. Compared to a video, VR headsets provide a higher level of realism and detail. And it doesn’t even have to be all that expensive either!

Not that long ago, ING for example released a 360-degree video showing their office. You can check their video out with a Cardboard VR viewer for a price between $7 – $15.

10. Use data

To find out whether or not the recruitment methods you’re using are getting you the results you want, you need to start measuring.

Via what channel do your candidates come in? Which channel gets you the most successful hires? How long does it take from the moment you decide you need a new employee to the moment they actually start on the job?

Knowing this will help you to optimize your recruitment strategy. So, start making your recruitment process data-driven.

11. Employer review sites

Sites like Glassdoor should be a part of every company’s recruitment strategy. We live in an era where pretty much everything gets liked or disliked online, employers included.

Many 21st-century job seekers spend a lot of time researching the companies they might apply to online. So, as a recruiter you might want to go onto these employer review sites and find out where your company’s pain points lie (if you haven’t done so already).

Of course, if you find a flaw here and there, now is the time to straighten things out.

12. Managing the aging workforce

This might not be the first thing that comes to mind when you think about innovative recruitment methods. But the global workforce is aging rapidly; in the US alone, 10 000 people turn 65 on a daily basis.

You see, the fact of the matter is that there are more skilled, experienced people leaving than there are young people to make up for these departures. So even if you’ve got the best recruitment strategy in the world, there physically aren’t enough young candidates available.

So, include your experienced workers in your recruiting plans. Ask top performers to delay their retirement – possibly under slightly different terms – and, most importantly, create some kind of mentoring program.

Your older workers have a wealth of experience, they can transfer their knowledge to younger employees. In return, younger workers may have an innovative way of looking at certain processes that they can share with their more experienced peers.

A two-way mentoring/teaching program is likely to boost engagement too; win-win.

13. Mobile Recruitment

Mobile has been purposely put on the bottom of this list because a mobile recruitment strategy isn’t optional anymore – it’s a requirement.

This is because mobile recruitment is virtually the only way to get in touch with an entire generation of candidates (Generation Z for sure and probably by now a big part of Millennials too).

Secondly, because a mobile recruitment process is a big plus for your candidate experience. In an era where job seekers are used to doing everything on their smartphones, they expect no less from the company they’re applying to.

Third, following the paragraph outlining the importance of text messages, how are you going to make the most out of texting if you don’t have a mobile recruitment strategy?

This makes mobile recruitment a no-brainer.

Conclusion

Like virtually every other aspect of business, recruitment is and should be fluid, intent on innovating itself to keep pace with new technologies as well as new attitudes toward businesses that arrive with new generations.

Keep your recruiting processes fluid as well as efficient to net the best candidates possible. Don’t skimp or cut corners with your recruiting. The payoff of this approach to your recruiting will be the onboarding of employees who will immediately become valuable commodities to your business.