The Successful Hiring Race: How automation speeds up your recruiting processes

Recruiting costs time and money, as a study by XING and forsa has now proven with figures. 200 HR managers from companies with more than 200 employees took part in the survey. More than two-thirds say they need longer than three months to fill a management position. Half of the HR managers need up to six months to do so. In most cases, companies spend between 20,000 and 50,000 euros on the recruiting process.

The shortage of skilled workers is increasingly becoming a financial burden for companies. For recruiters, this is initially good news, as they might be able to resolve these points for their clients. The challenge: find suitable candidates in a short period of time. The potential savings are easy to calculate, the added value quickly explained. It sounds simple, but as a recruiter, you know it’s not. Your list of open vacancies is not getting any smaller, some positions simply cannot be filled. Why? Does your database not yield suitable candidates? Is your candidate search inefficient? Or is it perhaps due to your internal processes?

Efficient processes for a fast hiring race

HR managers will be forgiving if you, as a recruiter, succeed in offering suitable candidates. The only question is, how fast will you be able to do it? The time to fill, the time-to-hire, will be the most important performance indicator for whether an HR manager will work with you in the long term. Your most important task is therefore to optimize the so-called Hiring Race. It describes the entire recruiting process that you as a recruiter follow with the candidate and your HR contact. The goal is to accelerate this process and its stages in order to generate fast and excellent results for your clients. A qualitatively resilient industry network and an attractive talent pool are an important basis for this. But the efficiency of your own processes ultimately determines the speed at which you cruise through the finish line.

Fortunately, recruiting processes usually proceed in a similar way. From the search request to candidate identification and pre-selection to the interview phase, contract negotiation, hiring and, if necessary, onboarding: In all “route sections” of the hiring race, they can eliminate wasting time, standardize and automate actions. This is where your processes start to become measurably faster. A few concrete examples will illustrate this:

1. Standardize job acquisition and avoid misunderstandings. New search mandates are often placed with recruiters in an unstructured manner either by e-mail or by telephone. Information is often incomplete and therefore cannot be processed internally. The consequence: queries, misunderstandings, waiting time and other obstacles. It is wiser when HR managers publish their vacancies via a web interface provided by the recruiter, including a standardized form. This ensures that the jobs contain all the necessary information and recruiters can use the data set to trigger further processes internally.

2. Identify and select candidates intelligently

   The manual search for candidates and the subsequent pre-selection certainly takes up most of the work of many recruiters. This is why the greatest potential for savings in the hiring race can be leveraged here. With appropriate recruiting software that has intelligent search algorithms, perhaps even artificial intelligence, suitable candidates can be found faster. The self-learning technology not only finds technically suitable candidates, but also takes into account personality traits derived from standardized personality tests. In this way, the technology generates a perfect match faster and more fruitfully than humans could manage.

3. Generate candidate exposé automatically and send anonymously

   As a recruiter, you selected some interesting profiles that you now want to send to your client. You have to make sure that the documents are complete and anonymized. With the usual tools like Word etc. the creation of such an exposé can be extremely time-consuming. It is more efficient if a recruiting software helps you combine your preferred profiles in a coherent pdf, anonymize them and send them via link to your customers.

4. Generate and send automatic employment contract

   The client has decided on a candidate. Especially in the case of temporary employment, the HR consultant is responsible for the commercial side of things. This includes the creation of the employment contract. This can consume a lot of time and is a major source of errors. It is more intelligent if a recruiting software provides templates with appropriate placeholders (salary, weekly working hours, etc.). The contract can now be customized in the appropriate places and generate a pdf from it, which can be sent to all contacts.

5. Receive auto-feedback

   Is your client satisfied with the recruiting process and the performance of the new employee? Is the candidate as well? Recruiters usually do not receive this information, or only upon request. Yet it is tremendously important to know whether the recruiter has actually recruited successfully or not. That’s why the feedback phase should be an integral part of the hiring race and take place automatically. Candidates as well as clients can give their feedback via an app or as a reply to an automatically sent email.