From ensuring that recruiters give your hiring managers enough to create a healthy pipeline to figuring out if the interview panel is selected and ready for the upcoming interviews and then managing the candidate communication to reduce no-shows, a recruitment team and in turn, the recruitment head is always busy. There is hardly ever enough time to pause and introspect and look beyond the sprint cycle of currently open positions.
But in the loop of rinse and repeat, are you becoming increasingly redundant?
The ones listed below are some subtle signs which are actually strong indicators of the challenges you will face in the coming six months:
Time-to-Offer Takes Ages
Most companies have either the HR team acting as a compensation and benefits team in the absence of a dedicated team for the same. So every offer is eyeballed by at least three people before it is finally shared with the candidate. Set up processes to reduce this time. Candidates are already juggling with multiple offers in hand these days. Unless given a good reason to wait for the upcoming offer, good candidates perceive longer time to offer as a strong indicator of organizational inefficiency or utter disregard for candidate’s time.
Candidates Reject Second Round of Interviews
If a candidate has declined the second round of interview, there certainly is an issue. Your first round of interview was not impressive enough or perhaps the candidate left with a bad recruiting experience. At times, candidates abandon simply because they are tired of the long, time-consuming process of assessment and feedback. They would rather look at newer and more interesting job opportunities than waste time.
You Haven’t Updated Job Titles in a while
Job titles are a reflection of the role. Roles are changing, responsibilities are evolving and so should the job titles. For example, five years back no one really ventured beyond the stock titles in Marketing. With the onset of digital media, content, big data, mobile marketing have started gaining more importance. And in consonance, we see innovative titles such as Content Archivist, The Storyteller, Mobile Marketing Jedi or for that matter Community Manager. We also see newer titles such as “Head of Candidate Attraction and Engagement” in recruitment or “Fulfilment Manager” in HR. Reconsider the “legacy titles” and get ahead with the times, by doing a bit of a competitive research and following the industry standards.
Low Employee Referrals
Countless surveys, including the LinkedIn’s Global Recruiting Trends, show that the most effective source of hire is through the ‘word of mouth’. Low employee referrals could be a result of lower enthusiasm amongst employees. Encourage your employees to refer more with interesting campaigns that play on the on referral bonus or the USPs of your organization.
Complex and Lengthy Online Applications
As per a survey, almost 47% of candidates have dropped off a job application because it was “too lengthy or complicated.” Many companies still use longish, repetitive fill-in application forms that would make the candidate move on. Maintain your hiring process as short as possible! A survey taken by Society of Human Resource Management (SHRM) says that, if an application takes under 5 mins to complete, it could hike the application conversion rates by almost 365%! Watch out if you’re falling victim to any of these recruitment challenges. To respond to any of these subtle signs, one must keep track of data and look through it once in a while. If you are not doing that already, you will be falling a victim to the vicious cycle of inefficient processes.
