How to Hire Faster at Scale (7 Tips)

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Laurenzo Overee

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Every top enterprise recruiter faces a recurring question: “How can we hire faster at scale?”

While finding great candidates is about diversifying talent pools to match a position, the real challenge lies in doing it quickly. While assessing a suitable fit for a role takes time, delaying your selection could result in top talent knocking on the door of a more decisive competitor.

When efficiently hiring quality talent, companies can shortlist the best profiles faster by offering job seekers a winning candidate experience.

Timing is key in keeping your target audience interested. We at Ongig believe that combining technology with human expertise enhances recruitment. On that note, let’s explore the steps for speeding up recruitment to guide the success of your talent acquisition goals.

How To Hire Faster – The Twin Standards

Two metrics come to mind when hiring quickly at scale. Firstly, the time-to-hire determines how fast it takes to successfully hire a candidate for a role. Essentially, it refers to how long it takes for your team to approach new talent and have them accept a job offer. Your time to hire matters because:

Time to hire directly reflects the time and effort invested in talent acquisition ROI. These include scheduling candidate appointments, preparing/reviewing interviews, and implementing onboarding programs. Your team can review the metric as a litmus test to see what’s working and what needs improvement in the recruitment pipeline.

The metric affects business continuity since it determines how your enterprise runs critical organizational roles and responsibilities without disruption.

Considering the two points above, a quality time to hire presents a competitive hiring advantage over other companies within your industry. The advantage can lead to valuable opportunities during challenging market conditions like an industry-wide skills gap.

The factors that affect your overall time to hire include:

Recruiter efficiencies – The interpersonal skills and competencies that recruiting teams apply in introducing hires to your company culture.

Job description quality—How you frame your JDs will influence a candidate’s perception of your open position and organizational reputation. It is critical to keep your JDs inclusive, accessible, and engaging to maximize job application rates and speed up hiring.

Career site performance—Your career site plays a huge part in converting job seekers into qualified talent. LinkedIn Talent Solutions shared that 68% of talent acquisition teams consider company websites the most effective talent branding tool (which fosters candidate experiences).

Secondly, there is the time-to-fill metric, which measures the time it takes for a new employee to fill a vacant role. While time-to-hire and time-to-fill standards differ according to industries and seniority, you can generally improve these metrics by synergizing AI solutions with innovative talent acquisition strategies.

7 Tips to Hire Faster at Scale

Hiring faster at scale is a challenging priority for enterprises since they constantly deal with large volumes of applicants and open positions. Manually vetting several job applications is manageable, but it becomes a real headache when they stream in by the thousands.

We have identified the following strategies to help you optimize the candidate experience and cost-effectively increase job application rates.

#1 – Identify Upcoming Skills Gaps

Industry skill gap predictions enable your team to initiate the search for the most suitable candidate ahead of the demand. Doing so enables your recruiters to acquire talent with workplace competencies for optimized performance despite volatile markets.

Your recruiting team can achieve this by collating and consulting talent data throughout departments and positions. Competency areas to consider include leadership management, tech proficiency (i.e., AI savviness), and interpersonal skills for maintaining safe and collaborative workplaces.

Regular skill gap analyses can help your recruiters consistently align company priorities/objectives with talent contributions.

You could leverage AI and machine learning with predictive analysis functions to recruit according to incoming workforce and competitor trends. Aside from speeding up hiring, research from Harvard Business Review also shows that predictive analytics can make the recruitment process 15% less biased based on gender, and overall, it makes the team 35% more diverse.

Consult Current Workforce Data

Skill gap analysis tools like iMocha and 360 Learning offer deep insights into your current employees’ competencies for improved decision-making. These tools may include upskilling portals for mapping career progression that inspires more fulfilling and attractive hiring campaigns.

An intelligent AI-based solution also customizes your talent training and development programs so you can track the most critical and in-demand skills that fuel your organizational growth. That way, you can boost your employees’ overall performance while hiring qualified candidates.

#2 – Leverage Employee Referral Programs

Thanks to the power of social proof, word-of-mouth remains one of the most popular ways to attract talented hires. Qualified talent is more likely to accept a job offer if they hear it from somebody they can trust, such as a friend or relative. So, boosting your employee referral program could help you hire faster at scale.

Workforce surveys also show that referred employees are 40% likelier to stay with a company for over a year than their non-referred counterparts. Essentially, optimizing your employee referral program can increase the efficiency of hiring at scale by:

Reducing the cost of hire by appointing your employees as brand ambassadors.
Improving engagement and conversion of potential hires with behind-the-scenes and real-world scenarios/testimonials.

Adam Fitzer, senior talent acquisition manager at technology consulting firm West Monroe, recommends actively involving employees (past and present) in the recruiting process.

These strategies include contacting past hires via social media channels and organizing regular meetings between recruiters and employees. These discussions enable teams to gather insightful workplace feedback to improve the accuracy and engagement of role/job descriptions.

You could also apply specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART) goals to reliably manage employee referral programs. For instance, your team could set goals to involve non-HR representatives from relevant departments in 60% of the final round interview process.

#3 – Implement The Right Hiring Platform

Rolling out the right hiring platform promotes a hassle-free and engaging candidate experience. A smooth and user-friendly platform reduces the complexities and frustrations in job applications and leaves a better impression on candidates, which could improve conversions.

For starters, consider keeping your hiring platforms’ recruitment portals mobile-friendly. According to one workforce research, 41% of job seekers search for jobs on online job boards, with 62% of these candidates using mobile devices to search for job openings. Keeping your job listings accessible via a mobile device is a great way to broaden your talent pool outreach and accelerate the speed of hiring at scale.

Other critical hiring platform considerations include:

AI Automation—An automated or smart recruitment system expedites talent acquisition by tracking candidate suitability and automating repetitive tasks like scheduling interviews. Recent findings show that 65% of modern recruiters actively apply AI in their hiring campaigns, and 95% of recruiting teams believe the emerging technology would elevate the application process.

Smooth integrations—A quality hiring platform should integrate well with varying hiring channels such as social media accounts, ATS, and HRMs. An integrated system ensures undisrupted talent management workflows. Integrated hiring platforms may include Chrome extensions for conveniently sourcing candidates from multiple job boards and career pages.

Resume parsing functions—Your recruiting software should include a reliable tool that converts candidate resumes into structured data. These resume-parsing solutions often offer interpretative functions like statistical and keyword-based scans. As such, hiring teams can consistently shortlist top candidates and spend more time on higher-level duties, such as overseeing interviews and improving the efficiency of the talent acquisition pipeline.

#4 – Prioritize Your Career Page

Your career page is a major touchpoint for driving talent acquisition engagements. As such, it is important to ensure a user-friendly interface that offers a seamless experience throughout the job application process.

Your career page should feature inclusive and engaging JDs with unique employer value propositions. Your website should also be thematically designed and interactive to increase time on page (which improves site engagement) and inspire candidate trust.

Ongig enhances your career pages with interactive recruiting widgets, such as visitor support chat boxes and Glassdoor reviews, to enrich the candidate experience.

#5 – Diversify Candidate Assessment Options

Diversifying your candidate assessment options can open doors to more qualified talent in a fraction of the time. A broader range of candidate tests lets you evaluate multiple job competencies to properly gauge the quality of hires for all job postings.

A comprehensive assessment of soft and hard skills prevents a poor job fit by sourcing individuals that match the role and company culture requirements. Diversifying candidate assessments can also eliminate inherent biases to further your DEIB initiatives.

You could consider switching up standard interviews with the following candidate assessment alternatives:

Workplace simulations
Psychometric and personality tests
Contextual interviews involving industry-related issues like coding challenges

These assessment alternatives can add context to hiring the right person and strengthen your employer brand in the process:

#6 – Automating Background Checks

Background checks are tedious but necessary to select the right job candidates. Collecting, reviewing, and verifying candidate data can take up a sizeable amount of time in the early stages of talent acquisition.

By automating candidate background checks with a trusted AI or robotic process automation (RPA) system, you can exponentially reduce the time to hire. Your recruiters can integrate specialized software like Secure Check 360 with your ATS to securely access data such as employment history and educational qualifications.

Automated background checkers can also help recruiters contact past employers and references, along with systematic steps for requesting sensitive candidate information. These automated solutions also provide real-time updates on candidate background information for optimizing talent management past the initial hiring stage.

#7 – Optimize Your JDs with AI

Ongig’s Text Analyzer offers an automated AI-based solution that standardizes JD libraries for faster hiring at scale. Its advanced algorithm enables your recruiters to create inclusive and engaging JDs (with high readability scores) in minutes through job title prompts and keywords.

Text Analyzer uses AI to keep your JD compliant with the latest DEIB hiring standards, removing discriminatory language that could repel your most talented hires. The Text Analyzer also automatically generates the most critical JD segments that candidates prioritize in their job search. These include role and responsibilities, salary ranges, and equal employment opportunity (EEO) statements.

Text Analyzer integrates with your existing ATS to quickly import your optimized JDs across multiple job boards for greater candidate outreach. Our cloud-based library provides secure and centralized storage for your JD templates so you can tweak and repurpose the content to maximize the ROI of the most complex hiring campaigns.

Closing Thoughts – Hire Faster With Improved Candidate Experience

Ultimately, improving the speed and efficiency of hiring at scale depends on raising the overall candidate experience. Combining AI with skills-based hiring strategies lets you hone in on the most sought-after competencies, perform comprehensive background checks, and consistently reproduce the results of your most successful hiring campaigns.

Why I Wrote This?

Ongig is on a revolutionary mission to optimize JDs at scale. Our Text Analyzer platform empowers hiring teams with intuitive features to create, manage, and upload inclusive JDs that convert top talent. Request a demo with the Ongig team today to discover how to hire faster using AI to boost your talent acquisition practices across unpredictable job markets.

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September 18, 2024 by Laurenzo Overee in HR Content