Don’t Lose Top Candidates to a Slow Hiring Process

The Financial Services sector is an incredibly competitive marketplace. As an employer in this industry, slow hiring can be hugely disruptive to securing high-calibre candidates. Today’s candidate-centric market means the best professionals have more choice than ever before. So, waiting a few more days before offering an interview or taking too long to come to a final decision, can cost your business that coveted candidate.

Whilst it’s not enough to be conscious of the damage slow hiring can cause, many managers often feel ‘trapped’ within their organisation’s processes and unable to change the speed at which they hire. However, there are several things that can be done, without having to overhaul your entire recruitment process.

Understand What You Need

Taking the time to make decisions is one of the largest, albeit most important, delays in the hiring process. Should we interview this candidate? Which interviewees should we progress to the next step? Out of these final candidates, who should we decide to hire? These are all critically important questions; however, it is possible to answer these quickly by preparing effectively. Every stage of the recruitment process can be made easier by understanding exactly what the business needs from any prospective employee. By knowing this before beginning the process, you can ensure only great professionals who align with your business needs are being interviewed.

Go Through Your Internal Hiring Processes First

It may appear logical to save time by going through with internal hiring processes and engaging the external candidate market simultaneously, but this approach could cost your business in the long run. Going through more candidates at once inevitably ends up with more time spent on screening, which means more time before a decision is made. A key benefit of a third-party recruitment agency is the speed in which they can generate a shortlist of applicable talent for you to review and potentially interview. However, this benefit can be rendered null and void if the recruitment process is paused to allow time for reviewing referrals from internal employees. Completing internal hiring processes before approaching the external candidate market can be a great way to circumvent this issue. This is because all ideal candidates, whether internally referred or externally sourced, can be progressed to the interview stage at the same time.

Streamline Your Interviews

Significant time and resources can be wasted throughout the interview process, and this is where your business is most likely to lose top candidates to other job offers. With that in mind, it will always be beneficial to periodically review where it is possible to make the interview processes more efficient. For example, ensuring that all people involved in the interviews are on the same page can ensure they deliver quick and confident consensuses on candidates. Other examples could include using group interviews or combining first and second round interviews to speed up the interview stage. There’s no one-size-fits-all solution to streamlining interviews and different approaches work for different organisations, so it’s important to test out various options to identify what will work best for your business and needs.

Invest in Technology

The advent of communication and collaboration technology has made everyone’s work life easier – except maybe your office IT person! Whether it’s something as simple as recording initial calls to applicants to listen back too and quickly and confidently decide who to progress to interviews, or using free tools like Skype to engage long-distance candidates without holding up the whole recruitment process, technology can remarkably improve your business’s hiring efforts when used correctly.

Communicate Post-Interview

Not hearing back after an interview can be incredibly discouraging for any candidate. If a high-calibre candidate is not engaged, then they could accept another job offer in the time it takes your business to come to a decision, even if they preferred your role. Keeping in contact with the prospective employee during the final stage of your hiring process, whether directly or through a third-party recruiter, can help to avoid this from happening. Once a decision has been made, start by providing a verbal offer as opposed to a written one so it’s immediately clear whether the candidate wants to progress forward.

Summary

Hiring a new employee is not something that should be rushed, but taking too long could cause your business to lose out on the best people and potentially require your entire hiring process to start all over again. If your business is struggling to keep candidates engaged during its recruitment processes, or finding it difficult to source these best-in-market professionals, find out how my team and I can help your company find and engage top talent today.