Boost Recruitment Productivity | Avoid these 12 Routines to foster Your Agency Growth

Recruitment is a time-consuming, lengthy process; it requires a lot of time, energy, focus, money, and workforce. However, finding the best-fit candidate for your client is worth the hassle. 

While efficient hires can save your client money and time, failed hires will waste a lot more of it. And it won’t do any good to your agency. While some of the best recruitment practices are time-consuming, they may save time in the long run. A lengthy hiring process doesn’t ensure top-quality candidates. While recruitment is a complicated process, it consists of multiple phases that require focus and unique expertise.  

Many recruiters believe they could have done a lot more if they just had 2 hours more to work on a specific requisition. We’ve all been there, haven’t we? But that’s an imagination far from reality. However, if we can stop wasting time chasing unrealistic figures or working through processes full of errors, there is a lot of room for improvement. We can quickly save two extra hours if we stop wasting our time behind meaningless labour. 

What is Wasting Your Valuable Time? 

To stop wasting time on fruitless labour, we need to recognise where we waste our time and inhibit our potential productivity. Here is a list of 14 things recruiters do that waste their valuable time.

1. Not building a Talent Pool:

If you don’t have a quality, organised talent pool, you cannot source candidates with maximum efficiency. Building a pool of talent is essential because it saves you time and efforts; it also reduces your time-to-fill / time-to-hire metric. Leveraging social media, using traditional job boards, job sites, and skill-related social media will help you engage with a mix of the active and passive candidate and help you to build an exceptional candidate database 

With this pool of talent at your disposal, you can source, screen, interview, and hire candidates faster. Using referral programs and internal transfers is an excellent way of building a talent pool of vetted candidates. It is advisable to develop and maintain a pool of candidates to speed up your talent sourcing process, giving it enhanced process efficiency and cost-efficiency.

2. Inefficient Talent Sourcing

Talent sourcing without a proper strategy is strenuous and inefficient. Yes, you can always find active candidates seeking new positions, but you may also miss out on hard-to-find passive candidates. Identify the channels in advance, make sure you have a communication plan ready, although you must tailor it per the candidate you engage with. While sourcing and selecting candidate, you need to check if they match the company’s expectations and work culture. If it is a role that requires specific niche skills, then you need to screen it more thoroughly. Even if you find a candidate with the perfect skill set and cultural match, they might not be interested in working with your company. 

Many things can attract or drive candidates away from your company. Simultaneously, you need a proper strategy to attract suitable candidates and hire the best-suited ones. Sourcing candidates efficiently will make the whole recruitment process a lot faster. 

3. Incorrect approach to Passive Talent Sourcing

Let’s be honest; sourcing passive candidates is essential. More than 70% of job seekers are passive candidates. This means avoiding passive candidates is not a choice. However, if you fail to convince and hire the candidate, it sure is a waste of time. 

Recruiters need to be proactive and have to look where they will indeed find a candidate. If you are waiting for passive candidates to walk up to you, you are wasting your time. Leverage social media, referral programs, or even consult an RPO service provider to efficiently source and hire passive candidates. Also, you cannot stick to a robotic script while engaging with them, now must the communication be transactional. Value-driven high-touch engagement is crucial to attracting passive talent.  

4. Inefficient Time to Hire

Unnecessary lengthy talent acquisition process can waste your lot of time and keep you occupied. The hiring process is time-consuming, and it consumes around three to four weeks. One-third of that time goes behind interviews.

The screening process can take away much time and efforts, so does a background check. Recruiters want to be sure that the candidate is a good fit for the company. While resumes will tell you a lot about the candidate, face-to-face interviews are essential as well. It allows the recruiters to judge the candidate’s body language and make assumptions.

Remember, on a resume, you can only see what a candidate wants to show you. Interviews are where recruiters can judge the candidates for themselves. Realising that the candidate is not a good fit or not interested in the role is a different problem.

To deal with these problems, use specific processes to cut back on your time to hire. A lot of low-value functions and phases can now be automated. Recruiters should take full advantage of that. Recruitment Process Outsourcing service providers are equipped with the most excellent tech stack that can speed up the talent acquisition process and improve time-to-hire.

5. Too Many Candidates to Interview

According to a 2015 Glassdoor survey, US companies take around 22 days to interview candidates on average. Narrowing down the list of candidates to interview can cut that list short and save your time.

Before posting a job ad or sourcing candidates, tighten your qualifications and focus on precisely what you need. Put together an essential list of qualities and skills; these are the minimum requirements for the job. Share this with everyone in the recruitment process, so they know what you are looking for.

Automatically reject all the applicants and sourced candidates who don’t meet the requirements. Only interview candidates who meet the job position requirements. This will make your hiring process fast and efficient.

6. Dealing with High Maintenance Candidates

Dealing with high maintenance candidates can be difficult and time-consuming. Most of the time, these high-maintenance candidates are passive candidates, which means they are not actively looking for a job.

Being able to manage these candidates is the key to saving time. Building a good relation, creating two-way communication, and taking time to understand their goals can help you a lot. And if you find concerns around a candidate’s attitude, better move away from him sooner rather than later.

7. Wasting Time on Candidates Who are Window Shopping

Working with candidates who are not serious about the job search is a waste of time and probably leads you to a dead end. It is essential to ask a candidate why they are interested in the role and what changes they are hoping for in this new role.

Judging their answer and how genuine they were in their approach will tell you if the candidate is serious or not.

8. Unnecessarily Long Interviews

While recruiters often want to check the nerve of a candidate through several stages of the interview, shortening the interviews can make the recruitment process short and successful. Make sure the candidate is comfortable and doesn’t hesitate to provide truthful information.

Allow the candidate to talk about themselves and what they bring to the table to help you attain valuable insights and learn more about them – their interests, strengths, and weaknesses.

In an interview, the candidate wants to impress you. If the candidate is strong in specific skills and fields, they will mention it to you. What you need to find out are their weak points.

9. Not Generalising Your Interview Approach

Recruiters often conduct interviews of candidates with one job or role in their minds. However, it is more beneficial if recruiters interview candidates with a general approach.

While you are interviewing for one job and focusing on the role at hand, you miss out on the candidate’s interests and passions. Even if the candidate is not selected for a specific job role or shows interest in other job roles, he can always be a better fit and show a keen interest in other positions that come on your plate in future.

However, knowing about candidate’s interests and skillsets will allow you to build an organised talent pool, which you can use to source and screen candidates for other roles. Keeping historical data in mind when recruiting will help you a lot. This exercise is one of the best practices for passive candidate sourcing.

10. Handling Under Qualified Candidates

Recruiters get a bunch of calls every day from candidates. Half of them are under-qualified and will not be selected for any position. In this scenario, it is best to tell them where they stand. Instead of giving them false hopes, and getting more calls, be straightforward from the beginning.

However, being rude is not the solution. The candidate who is not needed today might be required for another role tomorrow. Be sure to provide them with some viable solution or advice which they can use to move forward.

11. Not Scheduling Candidate Calls

Recruiters get a massive amount of calls every day, and a lot of them are from candidates asking for their status. Many candidates appear in interviews for multiple companies, and for them knowing where they stand is essential.

However, receiving calls all day can be hectic. Try to fix a time for these calls. Instead of taking calls all day, set aside an hour or two during which you will take these status update calls from candidates.

12. Inefficient Screening Process

Inefficient screening process can eat up more time than you can imagine. If the screening process is full of errors, it will delay the whole recruitment process, costing you even more money and time.

Screening candidates is critical, and an inadequate screening will make you interview candidates that your clients will never hire. That is a waste of time for you and the candidate both. Especially if you are hiring for a specific industry such as IT or Healthcare, it is essential to be straightforward. 

The 12 problems mentioned above are why your recruitment process is eating up your valuable time. If you manage to eliminate these problems, that should free up your time and add the extra two hours to your day. However, how to judge if you are productive? With the recruitment process, it is fair to say that successfully recruiting candidates is a sign of being effective. But that’s not all the recruitment process has to offer. 

Failed recruits cost a lot more time and money, and you need to avoid being inefficient. There are specific, trackable metrics for the recruitment process that can tell you if your recruitment process is better or worse.  

What are the indicators of a good recruitment process? 

Hiring top-qualified candidates faster, at a significantly lower cost, is a good sign that your recruitment process is error-free. 

Time to Hire

Hiring candidates faster and filling up empty roles sooner is a good sign of a healthy recruitment process. This means recruiters are spending less time finding and sourcing candidates and can save time, which can be directed towards the core competencies. 

Cost to Hire

Cost to hire is a good metric to follow if you judge the recruitment strategy.  A good recruitment strategy should lower the costs of operations and spend resources only where it is needed. 

Quality of Hire

This is the most critical metric that decides whether your recruitment process is effective or ineffective. The end goal of the recruitment process is to hire a candidate for the role. Making sure you only hire the best-suited top-qualified candidate is your responsibility. Failed hirings waste more time and money than empty roles. 

Concluding Thoughts

The end goal of a recruitment process is to hire the top-qualified candidates faster and at a lower cost and make sure the candidate is a good fit for the company. Recruitment is a lengthy process, and eliminating the things that can waste your time during the process is necessary. Doing so will allow you to have more time to focus on the core duties. This will eventually improve your hiring process and save your time, money, and energy in the long run.

If your staffing agency faces productivity challenges and needs recruitment support, click the button below and request a callback from our experts at QX Global Group. QX Recruitment Services, a part of QX Global Group, offers strategic recruitment support to staffing businesses in the UK, including talent sourcing, 360 recruiting, compliance check, and so much more. 

Originally published May 11, 2021 10:05:09, updated Feb 02 2023

Topics: Process optimisation, Recruitment