10 Tips to Streamline Your Hiring Process

Hiring new headcount or backfilling existing roles within your organization can be a big undertaking that takes a lot of planning, buy-in, and resources of its own. Sometimes it can feel impossible to streamline the hiring process.

Human Resources (HR) are tasked with some of the duties related to hiring, but managers and peers must often step in as well. This may take time away from those employees’ day-to-day tasks, which can sometimes put projects behind.

At the same time, for many job seekers, there seems to be an ever-increasing number of interviews to go through before receiving a job offer (if one is extended at all). This is frustrating not only for candidates but also for the existing employees who take time out of their busy schedules for these interviews.

A typical interview process consists of anywhere between two and five interviews. It often looks like this:

1. Pre-screening with recruiter
2. Initial interview with hiring manager
3. Interview with the whole team or team representatives
4. Culture fit interview
5. Recap meeting with hiring manager or meeting with a member of senior leadership
6. Job offer

At the end of the day, you’re vetting someone to see if they have the skills to do the job well and the personality to be enjoyable to work with. But keep in mind that the interview process isn’t always perfect. Someone could perform well in an interview and end up not being a good fit for the role after all.

The key to minimizing frustration from both sides with the interview process is to make it as efficient as possible. Here are 10 ways to streamline hiring processes, even if you’ve recently downsized your recruiting team.

1. Collaborate on the Needs

From a high level, everyone in leadership must be aligned on the organization’s resource needs. If you need to hire new headcount, you must have buy-in or approval for each new resource. If you need to backfill roles, ensure everyone is on the same page about it.

Once everyone is clear on the need for a position to be filled, it’s time to collaborate on what skills are required for the role.

2. Write a Clear and Detailed Job Description

Next, gather information about the skills required for the role. If it’s a role you’re unfamiliar with, make sure to research the position so your requirements are achievable. For example, if you’re hiring a new software engineer, don’t require five years of experience with a new coding language that’s only been around for two years.

Think about all the duties you’d like the person in the role to execute, then work backward from there. What skills will be necessary to complete their daily tasks?

Put all of this together to write the job description.

3. Plan Ahead

Now is a good time to decide on a few logistical items:

• Where will interviews be held?
• Will they be virtual or in person?
• Who will be involved in the interview process?
• How will you find candidates?
• How will you determine which candidates are worth interviewing?

Once you have decided on all these items, you can move on to the next step.

4. Ask Screening Questions in the Application

The job application is the perfect place to begin narrowing down your pool of candidates. Include some basic screening questions as part of the application to weed out the people who don’t possess the skills you need.

5. Standardize Interview Questions

To be fair when comparing candidates, ask the same set of strategic interview questions to each candidate. This levels the playing field and helps you be more objective in your decision.

6. Create Criteria

Based on your list of required skills and interview questions, think back to your college years and create grading criteria. For example, maybe each interview question is worth 1-5 points. If someone answers the question perfectly, that person gets a five. Then, whichever candidate has the highest score all around gets offered the role.

7. Identify Necessary Soft Skills

Make sure that you have outlined the soft skills needed to be successful on your team. And your requirements should be more fleshed out than a simple “must have good written and verbal communication skills.” Focus on the specific personality traits a person might need to do the job well.

8. Use Recruitment Software

Many organizations use applicant tracking software (ATS) to keep applicants organized and easy to reference. ATS can free up valuable time by automating tasks like resume screening, scheduling interviews, and sending follow-up emails.

9. Schedule Interviews Early

Everyone in your organization likely has a lot on their plate. When you do find a promising candidate, try to get interviews on everyone’s schedule as soon as possible. Last-minute interview requests can end up taking more time than they should.

10. Gather All Feedback

Ensure every interviewer has a copy of the grading criteria and the standardized list of questions. While diverse interviewers will have unique takeaways from the interview process, they should all use the same criteria and format to evaluate candidates. This contributes to a fair and efficient process.

Streamline Your Hiring Process with Insight Global

Hiring a new employee for your organization is a big undertaking, but if you follow these tips, you’ll save time, energy, and resources in your search for the perfect person for the job.

You can also work with a staffing agency like Insight Global to streamline your hiring process. We’re the experts at finding experts, and we can help you hire in as little as two days.

Interested in working with our hiring partners? Reach out to us to learn more!