The longer a good employee stays? Great. The longer it takes to find a good employee? Not so great. There’s a reason you put a job listing up, and it’s because your company has a need. This often means a function has been deprioritized or other employees are stretched too thin to compensate until the role can be filled. Of the HR metrics that matter, time to hire is definitely one that can easily be improved.  Time is of the essence, so we’ve listed five best practices for recruitment below that will help get your hiring going. 

1. Get Alignment On The Job Listing

There’s a saying that sometimes to speed up you have to slow down. It may seem counterintuitive, but there is truth to it—and in fact, it is a good practice when it comes to recruiting. Spending a little more time at the beginning of the recruitment process could help speed everything up down the line.

Many roles are cross-functional, with an employee working with more than just their immediate team. And many organizations are introducing dotted line managers. All this means that if a role affects many different teams, there are going to be multiple stakeholders who have opinions about getting the job description right. So our first best practice for recruitment to reduce time to hire? Getting alignment on the job listing.

2. Leverage Artificial Intelligence

This best practice for recruitment is all about making technology work for you. Once you’ve nailed the job description, it’s time to get it up on job boards—and get it up quickly. That’s where new recruitment technology can really come in handy, specifically artificial intelligence (AI). AI software can not only help in posting job descriptions across top job listing sites, but it can also help with tailoring and targeting audiences. With a robust AI recruiting solution, you can easily launch a programmatic job advertising campaign that is efficient in dollars and time. For example, PandoLogic’s programmatic job advertising platform, pandoIQ, automatically connects employers with the right candidates, at the right place, time, and price.

3. Consider Digital and Video Interviewing Software

Once you’ve got qualified candidates lined up, it’s time to interview them. There are plenty of best practices for recruiting to consider for interviewing—but if speed is your top concern, you should think about using tailor-made interviewing software. While the classic phone call can do a lot, dedicated interviewing software can do so much more. For example, many popular solutions offer a variety of options for interviewing, from recorded video responses a candidate does on their own to live interviews. 

Additionally, many of us are still dealing with remote work in one way or another. In fact, it’s probably not going away anytime soon. Digital and video interviewing software can help you adequately adapt to this new reality.

4. Checking References? Ask For Them In Advance

This best practice is one you can and should do in parallel with other parts of the interview process. If you plan on checking the references of your top candidate(s), make sure you ask for them early on in the interview process rather than as the last step before the offer. That way you don’t pad on any additional time to the process—a few days for the candidate to gather their references plus a few days for you to contact them can add over a week to the overall hiring time. In fact, finding other areas of the interview process you can do in parallel is always a good practice to keep in mind.

5. Improve Internal Communication

If you’ve already followed the best practice of getting everyone together to align on the job description at the beginning, then hopefully your internal communication channels are running effectively. Unfortunately, that’s not always the case. Taking too long to communicate between interviewers and come to a decision can be the difference between hiring the right candidate and losing out on the right candidate. This is also why technology that saves time in other areas is so useful. Sometimes it does take unanticipated time to discuss and debate whether a candidate is right for you. When that extra time is needed, you don’t want to have to cut it short because other areas of the recruitment process took too long. So this piece of advice is twofold: Keep internal communication efficient and adopt other best practices for recruitment to allow more time when necessary.

When it comes to efficient recruiting, there are always many factors to consider. But by following the above best practices for recruitment, you may just find yourself recruiting faster than ever. If you’re ready to up your recruiting game even more, be sure to check out more of our blog tips, and HR resources.