A Powerful Guide on how to Reduce your Time to Hire

In today's fast-paced business environment, reducing the time to hire is critical for maintaining a competitive edge. Reducing the hiring time does not only mean speeding up the recruitment process; it's more about finding the right candidates quickly and effectively. As per the latest reports by LinkedIn, “When 250 resumes are submitted on average for a job opening, 75% to 88% are unqualified”. Therefore, it’s no surprise that screening candidates consumes the majority of your time during the recruitment process.

Our guide explores essential strategies and practical tips to fasttrack your recruitment process. It will equip you with strategies to source, attract, evaluate, and shortlist candidates more efficiently, ensuring that your organisation can secure the best talent. Whether you're a small business or a large enterprise, implementing these proven techniques will transform your hiring process and drive your company’s success.

Here are a few strategies HR professionals have has adopted to hire super fast

• Build a structured hiring plan?

Before you start the hiring process, evaluate your current hiring lifecycle and identify the gaps which consume time. In general, recruiting involves planning, attracting relevant candidates, evaluating, shortlisting and interviewing them. Your typical recruitment timeline should include key events and touchpoints that involve a clear job description, planning, sourcing, assessing , interviewing and onboarding.??

Once these are in place, identify which stage of hiring is lengthy and is costing you time. After you identify those factors, brainstorm and devise solutions as to how to cut time in respective hiring stages to optimise faster with innovative solutions.?

Create your hiring timeline keeping in mind the complete hiring cycle and the dependencies on every stage.?

• Optimise your channels to source relevant candidates?

To optimise your channels for attracting relevant candidates, identify sources where quality is high and conversion rate is faster. Find platforms/job portals where your target audience is present and active, such as Naukri or LinkedIn. Customise your job postings to highlight your brand story, key skills required, eligibility criteria, and also explore hackathon/contests which are dedicatedly designed to cut short on your overall hiring time. The impressions created through your contests will help track the performance of your landing page or widget, enabling you to adjust your strategies accordingly. Source candidates through personalised and targeted outreach to maintain a strong employer brand presence. Regularly review and refine your approach based on feedback and recruitment metrics.

One of the best examples of this would be our solution for Thoughtworks. When the demand is unreal, we go an extra mile to turn it into reality. With strategic sourcing and seamless collaboration with Naukri.com and Naukri Campus , we were able to build a talent pipeline of 100k+ relevant talent!

• Build assessment framework and utilise it to shorten your screening process?

Form a framework that leverages useful candidate skill data, shortening screen time by enabling decision-makers to identify top candidates quickly through data-driven insights and predictive analytics. Automated tools can sift through large volumes of applications, highlighting those that best match the job requirements.

Recently, we empowered Dassault to fasten their screening process by integrating all candidate reports into their data lake. This enabled them to shortlist only those profiles which fulfilled their job criteria.?

Additionally, historical data helps refine screening criteria, ensuring more accurate candidate selection. Data integration across platforms streamlines the process, reducing redundancy and manual effort. Overall, data-driven strategies enhance efficiency and speed in identifying the right candidates.

• Devise strategies to engage you talent pipeline efficiently

During the time of engagement and interaction with this pool, you are giving them a candidate experience which will leave an imprint even when the contest or hiring gets over. The more proactively you engage, the better conversion rate you look forward to; saving time to redo the pipeline building efforts. The most accurate approach to create a talent pipeline is through targeted employer branding. While you are getting registrations from relevant and active jobseekers, your brand story is also leaving a lasting impact on the talent that is engaged.

Post attraction, it is crucial to engage this talent pipeline you have created via email campaigns, whatsapp campaigns, installing a proper reminder system etc. The more you keep your talent pool engaged and involved via regular updates, the better quality talent pipeline you will build. Make every engagement strategy count!

• Save interview time by interviewing only relevant candidates with focused questions?

Hackathons/contests shortlist only quality talent, enabling panellists to interview talent that is sharply evaluated and possesses job-ready skills. The more in-depth and pointed your assessments are, the lesser time you will need to evaluate candidates. The only way to cut on several interview rounds and shorten the interview is to shortlist candidates via pointed questions in the assessment. To take it a step further, you can proctor your assessments to ensure you are eliminating the potential of wrong hires at any early stage. This will not only save and fasten your interview time but it will also help you prevent any malpractice that occurs during the test.?

• Leverage ATS for faster and efficient hiring workflow

Leverage an ATS to fast track, streamline and save your hiring efforts. Integrate your ATS into key touchpoints in the hiring workflow to screen relevant applications early on. The centralization of candidate data, streamlining management and tracking processes all join in to save considerable time during various screening stages. The ATS also automates communication with candidates, speeding up scheduling and feedback. Analytical tools help identify bottlenecks and optimize the recruitment process. Time saving hiring strategies cannot drive results in isolation, you must fully leverage the efficiency of an ATS to expect success.

DoSelect is a platform that enables people decisions with skill data for more than 4000+ organisations; discovering, developing, and retaining skilled talent to reach their organisational goals. Contact [email protected] to talk to our expert.

Author -Insha Fatma, Senior Content Executive