Using automated recruiting tools can help speed up the hiring process. Streamlining your recruiting and hiring processes will result in filling your company’s open positions more quickly and efficiently. This, in turn, leads to better productivity, as adequate staffing puts the right people in place at the right time to achieve your organizational objectives. Here are some ways to streamline and speed up the recruiting and hiring process. 1. Have a good first contact. The first person who talks to candidates, especially passive candidates, will largely determine whether those candidates stay with the process. Making sure the initial contact person is pleasant and knows how to direct the candidate forward in the process effectively will speed up hiring and eliminate having to chase preferred candidates down later (or start over when candidates drop out). 2. Know what you want. It will save a lot of time and money if your team and leadership can agree at the beginning on exactly what they want in a candidate. This streamlines the process by ensuring an accurate job description and a clear vision for the position and what it will accomplish within the company, which will make it more likely that the right person gets hired the first time. 3. Use referrals to go after passive candidates. Instead of spending time figuring out where passive candidates are, use both employee referrals and referrals from contacts and uninterested passive candidates to identify potential candidates to target. This technique draw out interested passive candidates much faster in case you have not yet built a talent pipeline (see #6). eBook: How to Attract Top Talent Using Inbound Recruiting – Find out how to harness the power of an inbound recruiting strategy in order to attract, hire, and retain top talent. 4. Be ready to explain why your company is worth joining. When you do get interested passive candidates (or even applicants), you want to have something really good to tell them about the company and the position. It helps to write this down, revise it until it sounds irresistible, and then practice it so you are ready. 5. Bring in fewer candidates for interviews. Most hiring managers will interview 5 to 10 applicants for a given position even though they have already narrowed it down to the top three in their heads. Why not simply interview the top three? Chances are, you will hire one of them, but if not, you can always go back and interview more people at that point. Most of the time you will likely find that you do not need to go back to the drawing board, and you will be able to hire faster. 6. Implement a long-term talent management strategy. Talent management starts with building a pipeline (think social media and email contact) and ends with career pathing and mentoring to retain valued employees longer so you do not have to hire as often. Having a long-term talent management strategy will eventually reduce your time to hire and speed up your process. 7. Eliminate bottlenecks to hiring. Analyzing your current recruiting process will show you which steps may not be needed or where you can speed up the process. Some elements, like resume screening or appointment scheduling, can be automated to save time. Others could be shortened by removing layers of bureaucracy or using a tool like Thrive TRM to track candidates through the process and keep everyone on the hiring team up to speed automatically. Contact us to see what Thrive TRM can do for your hiring process.