Leading a talent acquisition team is arguably the most important position within an organization. Without great talent production halts, people are overworked, leadership is upset, and increased stress is felt through every employee. It’s the job of a Talent Acquisition leader to help great people find great people. That’s not the easiest thing in the world, but we think there are definitely some things that can help.
Set Your Candidate Experience For Success
Every year, candidates are increasingly expecting faster and more seamless experiences throughout their lives. Getting a job takes no exception to that as well. If anything, it’s more expected because job searching is generally a more emotional time for a candidate.
With that said, it’s imperative that talent leaders begin to consider the implications of a poor candidate experience. Since 57% of candidates will lose interest if a slow hiring process, this can really make or break it for a talent acquisition team. Imagine missing out on 50% of great candidates..
A few ways to improve the experience:
- Prioritize speed over everything else. This, above all things, is what the candidate desires. Think about your experience shopping on amazon, and try to make things that easy for candidates (when possible)
- Make your hiring process transparent and visible to the candidate before they start
- Shoot for a 10 minute application — People’s attention spans are really short so the smoother and easier it is the better. Note: Some of the most selective companies (ex. Google & Amazon) let candidates apply in 10 minutes or less.
Please don’t do this:
- Make an application that asks for the same information in different ways
- Take forever to get in touch with new applicants
- Take more than a week to get in touch with a candidate after any interview (Goal should be less than 2 days)
Craft The Recruiter Experience
A large part of being a talent acquisition leader is making sure the team feels empowered, energized, and prepared. When recruiters are equipped with a consistent process and great technology, the likelihood of success shoots way up!
There’s so many to-do’s in the recruiter’s world. A great set of processes and technology helps recruiters leverage their time better and do work that makes them feel impactful and engaged. Not to mention, they’re going to get more high quality candidates through the door.
A few ways to setup a better recruiter experience:
- Consider the most important tasks and leverage technology — Ex. streamline the screening process
- With just 20 open positions, a team of 4 could be spending over 100 hours a month on the phone screening process alone. If a team took that time back here’s some things they could do:
→ Discover new talent pools and increase their sourcing output
→ Build that employer brand they’ve been wanting
→ Find the next great way to enhance the hiring experience
- Get feedback from recruiters — they are willing and ready to help create the best possible process. They’re doing the work, so they should be able to showcase the flaws in a process
- Evaluate and reward great recruiting — Organizations are missing out on the opportunity to get better talent through the door simply because recruiters feel unengaged and undervalued
Get Serious About Inefficiencies
This is a big deal. It’s the leader’s job to find and eliminate problems hindering your team from being successful. There’s a multitude of problems, but the ones that we hear mostly are:
“Our process is okay but my hiring managers usually are the reason we lose great candidates”
“Our applicants are just not good”
“Everyone kind of puts their own spin on our recruiting process”
“We don’t really track any metrics, it’s just so busy and we’re trying to get people in the door”
These are all issues and they all have solutions. It just requires a step back and some intentionality to solve the issues any team is facing.
In short, we all know it’s tough to be a talent acquisition leader right now. So why not make life easier and optimize whenever possible? Try not to get so stuck in the daily work grind and never take 2 steps back to consider how things could be better.
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