The average time to hire in the US is 24 days, stretching up to 32 days for some industries. To some staffing pros, this isn’t all that surprising. Others may be scratching their heads, wondering how to shave off a few days on their time to hire. Still others may have just realized that they should be tracking their time to hire in the first place!
Whichever camp you fall in, the truth is that most companies need to streamline the hiring process. Research by staffing firm Robert Half revealed that: 39 percent of candidates believe that waiting 7 to 14 days is too long of a hiring process — that’s a far cry from our respectable average of 24 days. And once this waiting period hits that “too long” threshold, 57 percent of candidates were found to lose interest in the job.
If we want to have access to the biggest candidate pool possible and maximize our chances of placing that perfect candidate in the perfect position, we’ve got to streamline the hiring process.
There are a lot of tactics staffers can deploy to make this work, but one stands out as the simplest and most impactful: tightening up the way in which we communicate with our candidates.
Communicating a galaxy of requirements
In a typical onboarding process, candidates are often in communication with multiple HR professionals, each asking for candidates to complete the individual aspects of the onboarding process that falls under their purview: background check information, resumes, interview availability, contracts, payroll information, training documentation and more.
This process becomes even more convoluted if the candidate is a remote hire, or if they are in an industry like healthcare where a significant amount of credentialing must be completed.
When candidates are faced with demands from multiple stakeholders in your organization, they’re going to feel overwhelmed. What’s more, many HR professionals need the same information from the candidate, resulting in duplicated effort on their part, time wasted, and a greater risk that documentation gets filled out incorrectly.
This chorus of HR requirements also puts you at risk of missing out on critical information. What happens if a key HR professional is unavailable to complete their part of the process? What happens if two individuals believe that their counterpart is reasonable for a given activity? How much time do we have to waste figuring this stuff out?
With onboarding like this, your hiring process timeline dies a death of a thousand papercuts.
Give your staffers room to communicate
Largely, the communication challenges inherent to so many onboarding processes are a result of an over-reliance on manual effort. There’s something to be said about the human touch: The staffing industry is fundamentally about human beings, after all. People want to know they’re talking to another human that understands their concerns and can respond intelligently with solutions.
However, staffing professionals are always going to need to deliver that human touch, even if they’re being supported by an automated system. In fact, automation means that they’ll be able to devote more time to delivering the consideration and communication that lets candidates know they’re not just an item on a list waiting to be crossed out.
What an automated communication system does for your hiring process timeline is to ensure that no elements of candidate onboarding fall through the cracks. Such systems commonly provide automated reminders for when credentials expire, alert stakeholders to when forms must be submitted, remind candidates about training documentation and enable staffers to ping their candidates for any requirement particular to their own process.
The biggest effect that automation has on candidate communication is that it enables a streamlined hiring process. Rather than fill out multiple forms with identical information through multiple portals, candidates can input their information once into one portal and have it populated into all required forms. This completely knocks out the sometimes overwhelming problem of communicating the requirements of a dozen slightly different forms and documents. That, in turn, presents an easier experience for the candidate and a streamlined hiring process for you.
Curious about whether Xenqu can accelerate your hiring process timeline? Get in touch with an expert today.
