The coronavirus pandemic caused a slew of crises all at the same time. one that not many people pay attention to is the hiring crisis that has resulted from the pandemic and the countermeasures used to fight against it. Many companies are struggling to fill all of the positions they have available and are looking for ways to up their hiring game.
This is especially important when a company has an urgent hiring need. The right person to manage important positions in a company can make the key difference between success and failure. And sometimes, the speed at which you can hire someone will make the difference between success and failure.
So how can you make sure that you find the right people in the right time frame? Read on to learn all about how you can hire people more quickly!
Prepare All of the Right Data
When you are urgently hiring, it can be tempting to rush your hiring process. However, if you really need new employees fast, it is important that you lay the proper groundwork to do so.
If you want to know how to hire new employees quickly, then you should take a look at how you are currently managing that need. Take stock of how long it takes you to hire people historically. Also, note how long it takes you to move candidates between the preliminary and final stages of your hiring process.
If you can manage it, it is also helpful to check your own hiring speeds against those of your competitors and how many of your applicants are good enough to take a second look at.
Often, when you want to hire new employees quickly, looking at these kinds of numbers will suddenly make certain problems pop out to you. If you see any obvious problems when you prepare this data, then you should probably focus your efforts on resolving them.
For example, you might notice large gaps in time between certain parts of the hiring process. If there is a large gap between when you receive applications and when you reach out to applicants, then that problem can be easily solved by making sure that you reach out more quickly.
If, on the other hand, you are taking a long time to do all of your first interviews, and so you are making your best candidates wait a long time for a follow-up interview, then you might decide that it is worth it to move to follow-up interviews on your best candidates even before finishing running through all of your applications.
If, after looking at all of the data, there are no obvious problems in that data, then you can learn how to hire new employees more quickly using general improvements.
Establish a Hiring System
If you want to hire employees now (or sooner), then it can help to set up a hiring system that functions like clockwork.
If you have ever hired in the past, then you implicitly have a hiring system. But it can often accelerate your hiring process to make that implicit system explicit.
If you can make it crystal clear to everybody involved what the next step in the process is at every single given point in the process, then they will be better able to speed things along when you ask them to.
Keep Track of Talented Candidates
Sometimes, you can hire people more quickly by reaching out to them. This way, you don’t have to wait for them to stumble across your job listing. And you also don’t have to wait for them to submit an application.
But how can you find people who are interested and qualified? Consider the role that you want to hire for. It will have a certain set of requirements.
If you can find out where people who meet those requirements hang out, then you can reach out to them. Even if some of them are not available, they are likely to know people similar to themselves. This kind of word-of-mouth communication can often accelerate the hiring process in other ways, too.
On top of that, if you want to hire more quickly in the future, you can keep track of past applicants. Make sure to record all of the best applicants and what kind of positions they might be suited for. When the time comes that you need to fill those roles, you will have a pre-screened set of candidates.
Update Your Careers Page
Many people look for jobs on the careers pages of businesses. If you want to improve the chance that they will apply, then you want that page to look as good as possible.
A good careers page should do two things. It should sell people on the value of the job you offer. And it should make it convenient for them to tell you that they are interested.
There is a potential trade-off that you can consider here. The less information you ask for, the faster it is for people to provide it. That can increase speed.
On the other hand, this approach can also make it harder to screen out poor candidates. At the same time, screening out poor candidates can potentially be done if you can simply put in the hours to make it happen. Depending on how urgently you need to hire, this approach might work for you.
Outsource Hiring Employees
Sometimes, it is best to outsource a task to the experts. Finding people who do only one thing, and do it well, can take a heavy burden off of you.
Specialized hiring services have a long list of techniques that they can use to customize the hiring process and its results. Once you have seen what they can do for the hiring process, you might want to use them to help you fill future positions as well.
Be Prepared to Manage Urgent Hiring Needs
We hope that you were able to learn something helpful from this piece on just a few of the important ways you can increase the chance that people will accept when you offer them jobs. At the end of the day, a business depends on the productivity of competent people. Being able to acquire the right employees for your needs is an essential that cannot be substituted for by anything else.
To learn more about how to find help when you have urgent hiring needs, check out our other article here!