5 Ways to Improve Your Hiring Efficiency and How to Effectively Measure It

Every company wants to increase hiring efficiency.

With so many fluctuations in the job markets in the last few years, hiring managers, recruiters, and human resources departments find themselves completely overwhelmed.

Fortunately, there’s hope.

You can increase your talent acquisition efficiency without sacrificing effectiveness. With a streamlined, repeatable structure in place, one that includes automated elements to lighten your workload, you will be able to screen a large number of candidates simultaneously, weeding out those who aren’t serious about the job, and allowing the cream to rise to the top.

Common Challenges in Achieving Hiring Efficiency

Hiring becomes inefficient when too much time is spent on tasks that don’t move the process forward. In most cases, the biggest problems come down to a few recurring bottlenecks that slow teams down and make it harder to hire the right people quickly.

• Too many unqualified applicants – A high number of applications can create more work instead of better results when too many candidates are not a real fit for the role.
• Slow hiring timelines – Long gaps between screening, interviews, and decisions increase the chances of losing strong candidates to faster-moving employers.
• Too much scheduling back-and-forth – Coordinating a live structured interview across recruiters, the hiring manager, and candidates can take up a surprising amount of time.
• Poor internal communication – When hiring teams are not aligned on feedback, priorities, or next steps, decisions get delayed and the process becomes harder to manage.
• Manual screening and evaluation – Reviewing resumes, comparing candidates, and gathering feedback by hand can create major bottlenecks, especially when hiring at scale.

5 Strategies to Improve  Hiring Efficiency

Having a structured hiring process and automating any aspects that you reasonably can are two important steps in boosting your recruitment efficiency.

This will both decrease your mental load and increase the speed at which you can move job seekers through your hiring pipeline.

Improve Team Communication

There are two aspects of communication to consider here, both internal and external.

1. Internal Communication. Naturally, everyone involved in the hiring process must be on the same page before you get the collective ball rolling. Proper planning and good communication among recruiters, hiring managers, and the team is a must. Sadly, not everyone has a good structure in place to coordinate internal communication, and endless email chains just don’t cut it.  Instead, making use of collaborative tools offered by a good HR hiring software can help get everyone on the same page and keep them there.
2. External Communication. Candidates say a general lack of communication about the recruiting process or timeline is a big frustration. Given that their livelihoods are on the line, it’s only natural that they move on to other opportunities when they don’t hear back from you quickly. This is where an automated system can really come in handy.

Streamlined structures to handle internal communication and automated systems to help manage external communication can greatly reduce both your workload and the lag time between when a quality candidate applies and when they hear back.

Write Clearer Job Descriptions

When it comes to hiring efficiency, poorly written job descriptions will bring in the wrong employee and waste your time.

Without clearly stated duties and performance standards, you increase the chance of hiring someone without the necessary skills, experiences and personal qualities for the job. (Chron)

Though crafting a thoughtful and effective job description might feel like work, when you see it as an investment in streamlining your process to bring in the best potential employees, you’ll be able to value this work as a wise investment of your time and energy.

Thankfully, much of the recruitment process can be automated and integrated with ATS software, which has been designed to help you to clarify the requirements for all roles. Best of all, these can be updated from one location, after which job descriptions and open positions can be pushed out to job boards simultaneously with just a few clicks.

Speed Up Candidate Screening

One of the most time-consuming hiring scenarios is when you receive a large number of responses only to begin sorting through them and discover that you actually have only a low number of qualified talent or serious applicants.

An applicant tracking system can help you wade through hundreds of applications and find the right candidate.

Additionally, an automated system to set up one-way screening interviews (also referred to as asynchronous interviews ) can help you quickly and efficiently weed out unqualified candidates and focus your time on those who have a serious chance of landing the job.

Use Structured Interviewing

However you decide to conduct interviews, it’s important to have a structured process in place.

Conducting in-person, remote, or one-way video interviews all come with their own pros and cons.

• Scheduling interviews. In-person interviews are the most complicated to schedule, remote video interviews a bit less so, and one-way video interviews the least. With a one-way video interview, you can let the job seeker record their answers at their convenience, and you can evaluate and review them with your hiring team when you’re ready.
• Consistency in the interview process. In-person and live video interviews both allow for the personal touch; however, they also have the potential to go off the rails. By contrast, one-way video interviews allow for greater consistency, giving each applicant a more fair shot.
• Evaluation. Unless the entire team also sits in on live interviews (whether in-person or via screens), they will have to rely on the interviewer fully to remember the details of each interview and correctly read each candidate. Remote one-way video interviews, on the other hand, can be shared and reviewed by the entire team after the fact, giving everyone access to the same information.

While conducting remote video interviews may be a relatively new phenomenon, it’s one that can significantly speed up your hiring process. With one-way interviews , scheduling isn’t a factor, and you can interview a high volume of qualified candidates using the same questions for each one.

Want to see how Hireflix works in practice? Watch the demo to explore its features and workflow.

Make Candidate Evaluation More Consistent

As indicated above, deciding on a new hire proves increasingly difficult when several people need to have input. The more people you add to the mix, the more opinions you have to consider.

Even more seriously to consider is this: when you’re rushing to fill open positions, you’re working against the clock. Not only do separate interviews take time to schedule and complete, but they take time to evaluate as well, particularly if you’re conducting high-volume hiring in a team context.

This is where one-way video interviewing can really speed up the process.

With Hireflix, all team members can have access to the recorded interviews. Working at their own pace and on their own schedules, each member of your team can view candidate responses, share comments, and offer individual ratings for each.

How to Measure Hiring Efficiency

Putting automation and streamlining techniques in place will help you increase your recruiting efficiency. However, if you don’t track your recruiting metrics and progress, you won’t have a good idea of what’s working (so you can keep it) and what’s not (so you can retool or try a new strategy.)

As you measure your hiring efficiency moving forward, some important recruitment KPIs to track may include:

• Time to fill – Measures how long it takes to fill a role from the day it opens. A shorter time to fill usually means a more efficient hiring process.
• Time to hire – Tracks the time between when a candidate enters your pipeline and when they accept an offer. This helps you see how quickly your team moves strong candidates through the process.
• Number of candidates per opening – Shows how many applicants each role attracts. Comparing total applicants to qualified applicants can help you judge how well your sourcing and screening are working.
• Acceptance rate – Measures how often candidates accept your offers. If this number is low, it may point to issues with your process, offer, or candidate experience.
• Quality of hire – Looks at whether you’re hiring the right people, not just hiring quickly. Over time, this helps you judge how well your process matches candidates to the role.

The beautiful thing about the current hiring industry is that you can now use software specifically designed to help you increase your hiring efficiency with analytics to measure your effectiveness.

And with Hireflix, you can have these tools all in one place.

A Final Word on Increasing Hiring Efficiency

Nothing’s ever been easy about hiring, in part because every step involves people, and people are complicated. What makes us interesting and innovative can also make us messy and prone to inefficiency and distractibility.

This is where automation and reliable structures within your hiring plan can really make a difference.

By relying on systems and structures that can work on their own, doing much of the heavy lifting for us, we are free to focus all our energies on the fun part of the hiring process: helping good people find good jobs.

And isn’t that what this is all about?

If you’re looking for ways to provide a better candidate experience and increase your hiring process efficiency, come see how Hireflix plays an integral role in a highly effective and efficient hiring process by leveraging our on-demand interview software .