Top Tips to Help You Streamline Your Recruitment Process

Many businesses, especially larger organisations that have to recruit often, might find that the time spent on talent acquisition is steadily increasing for their busy HR teams. Whether it’s through hours spent reviewing CVs or posting numerous job vacancies to various sites, many HR professionals have resigned themselves to the thought that a good job takes time to do, but this needn’t be the case.

When it comes to streamlining your company’s recruitment processes, from automation to applicant tracking systems, there are several proactive steps that you can take. So, let’s delve into five of the best to make your business’ recruitment efforts much more rewarding:

1. Track Your Applications

Ever searched for hours to come across a great candidate, only to find that they’d already applied for one of your job adverts six months earlier? This could all change if you set up time-saving processes to track applications more effectively.

This means that from once the job seeker applies, right through their candidate journey until they’ve either been placed in a new role or stored in your talent pool, you know who they are and at what stage of the application process they are at.

While this might sound like a lot of paperwork, HR tech such as an applicant tracking system (ATS) can do most of the busy work for you, saving your business lots of admin time. What is an ATS? Simply, it’s a piece of talent acquisition software that tracks applications for you.

A quality applicant tracking system will also help you in regards to GDPR compliance, which will assist you with keeping tabs on great candidates, while also ensuring you don’t breach the new data protection legislation.

2. Use Relevant Tags

Being able to define applicants is a must for HR teams, especially when it comes to online recruitment, yet many people may receive a CV, give it a quick glance, and then it’s placed in a pile or digital folder and won’t get looked at again. This is not the best way to streamline your recruitment processes.

Really, you should be tagging your applicants into specific groups or subsets, based on their skills, experience, and suitability for future roles, within your applicant tracking system. You may come across an otherwise great candidate who happens to have applied to a job that they’re not suitable for – or perhaps you already have more experienced applicants lined up but identify that there could be future potential for this applicant. In this situation, you could use applicant tracking software to ‘tag’ the candidate with a relevant term or phrase to make them easier to find next time.

By using relevant tags, you can help to make your talent pool a resource that you can turn to time and time again for speedy hires.

3. Set Up Automated Responses

An awful lot of communication goes into talent acquisition, and you may find yourself emailing or on the phone all day to candidates, with none of your routine tasks even getting touched. This can be frustrating but setting up automated responses to candidates can help to make the recruitment process so much easier.

Certain ATS systems will allow you to send personalised messages to applicants at every stage of the candidate journey via the click of a button. So, instead of taking ages crafting the perfect message to invite applicants to interview, inform them of other relevant job vacancies, confirm their success or reject them from the process, you can simply click a button and a tailored message can be sent to them right away.

Along with saving your busy HR team a lot of time, automated responses to candidates can also provide them with a much better view of your company, helping to build a positive brand image and give great customer service.

4. Have a Dedicated Careers Site

If you find yourself constantly on the lookout for new staff to join your organisation, having a dedicated careers site will provide you with a number of benefits. This includes being able to positively promote your brand image to candidates (and likely customers) when they’ll be at their most receptive to find out more, as well as the opportunity to offer a great candidate journey.

Having a dedicated careers site will also enable active recruiting, as applicants will know that you’re a growing company that can provide them with a rewarding career. So, instead of you taking to the numerous job boards to find talented professionals, they will be coming to your business directly.

Integrating the careers site with your ATS database will also mean that those applying are fed straight into your talent pool, making the whole process of talent acquisition that much easier.

5. Update your ATS

The best ATS will be able to assist you with all of the above, as well as providing a multi-poster to cut down on the time spent submitting job vacancies to job boards. Instead of having to post to each one, ATS recruitment packages should be able to get your adverts out to multiple sites at the push of a button. With an ATS, tracking applicants throughout their candidate journey should be extremely easy, so if your current applicant tracking system doesn’t do this (or even if you don’t have one at all), it is time to upgrade to a quality ATS that ensures GDPR compliance.