Tools to streamline your recruitment process and save time
It’s an exciting time when your business is hiring – but it also comes with a lot of pressure, extra admin, and mental energy. To make your life easier as an employer, it’s essential to have a streamlined recruitment process. But when your recruitment process is efficient and enjoyable for candidates, you’re also more likely to attract the best talent.
As a team of skilled VAs who regularly help top executives grow their teams, we’re sharing our best time-saving tools to streamline your recruitment process.
Benefits of an efficient recruitment process
There really aren’t any downsides to making your hiring process easier. But it is important to consider both sides of the coin:
- How can you make your life easier as an employer?
- How can you create a better experience for candidates?
The hiring process is notoriously long for most employers, so anywhere you can speed this up is a huge bonus – especially if you plan to hire multiple team members and grow your business. Leveraging technology to reduce time-consuming elements will heavily reduce hiring costs.
A seamless candidate experience helps you recruit stand-out employees who will drive your business growth. You’re selling your company to those potential candidates too, so the impression you make during the recruitment process will aid their decision if they receive multiple job offers.
Plus, you can build a strong brand identity and reputation for running a well-oiled, enjoyable process. Giving candidates a better experience means even unsuccessful recruits speak highly of your organisation – a win-win for everyone involved.
Consider the different stages of recruiting
To streamline efficiently, you need to identify areas for improvement during the different stages of the recruitment process, including:
- Sourcing candidates
- Tracking applicants
- Assessing applicants
- Interview scheduling
- Screening and selecting
- Employee onboarding
Recruitment strategy planning
But before any of that, the first stage is planning your recruitment strategy – aligning your overall business goals and current recruitment process so you know what to focus on.
You want to outline details such as:
- How hiring supports the wider business growth
- Defining company values, benefits, and culture
- Defining roles and responsibilities required
- What qualities make an ideal candidate
- Selection processes and guidelines
- Compliance and diversity considerations
Now let’s look at our recommended tools and systems to speed up each stage of the process, but remember to do your own research and choose systems that will enhance your specific recruitment strategy.
1. Tools for sourcing candidates
When it comes to looking for ideal candidates, LinkedIn is a great starting point. Put the feelers out to your own network, as you never know where that next introduction to or recommendation of a potential recruit will come from. You likely already have access to a wide range of people within your industry or closely associated industries.
As well as posting directly and sharing with your own network, you can use the job posting feature on LinkedIn to create a company ad for the role and handle applications.
The LinkedIn Recruiter platform allows you to do an advanced search for candidates based on location, industry, experience, and skills. You can then contact people directly, inviting them to apply for your job opening. There are two pricing tiers so check out the options carefully to see which is the best fit for your organisation.
You should also consider using online job boards relevant to your industry. General job boards can become noisy and it’s harder to attract the right candidates. Where possible, it’s best to find specialised sites such as:
- Consultancy.UK to find the right person to fill your consultant role
- Cyber Security Jobsite or Careers in Cyber for cyber security specialists
- Top Financial Jobs or eFinancial Careers for financial service candidates
You can easily find some suitable options for your industry with a quick Google search.
2. Applicant tracking systems
Before you share your vacancy with the world, you want to ensure you’re ready to handle a potential deluge of applications… Applicant tracking systems are a great way of reducing the time spent on the overall administration of hiring, also ensuring you run a fairer process.
We particularly like platforms such as BeApplied where diversity and fairness are embedded at every stage and applications are anonymised, so when you’re reviewing applications you know you’re making unbiased decisions.
3. Candidate assessment and testing tools
Refer back to your recruitment strategy to identify what data about the candidate you might need to measure, then find the right tool to support you. Some applicant tracking systems, including BeApplied, include assessment and testing tools within the same portal. This allows you to understand how candidates will perform in real-world scenarios, plus how they manage numeric and cognitive assessments.
Criteria is another comprehensive pre-employment platform which provides a broad selection of online testing services. Using their suite of assessments, you can measure areas such as cognitive aptitude, personality, emotional intelligence, and risk likelihood.
4. Interview scheduling & video interviewing tools
Once you’ve reviewed applications and carried out necessary assessments, you will have a shortlist of those you wish to progress to interview. Using a scheduling tool could save you hours, saving the pain of back-and-forth emails with candidates.
If you’ve used a recruitment platform such as those already mentioned, you’ll be able to handle the scheduling of interviews through that. If you’ve chosen to handle communications yourself so far, consider using a calendar tool such as Calendly, Acuity, or Microsoft Bookings.
Using a video conferencing tool such as Zoom or Microsoft Teams reduces the need for travel, facilitates flexibility for both parties and allows you to reach candidates in other geographic locations. So if your job vacancy is remote or hybrid, utilise these tools to save time when recruiting.
5. Candidate background check services
When you’ve decided to offer the job to your preferred candidate, you need to carry out certain background checks to verify their ID and history. This is an important part of your due diligence, and requirements vary widely depending on your industry and the specific role.
We can’t run through all the options here but the basic checks you should carry out include verifying a new candidate’s:
- Identity: We use TrustID for our ID verifications
- Employment history: We obtain references to confirm employment history.
- Right to work in the UK: The right-to-work check is essential if you’re in the UK as the Home Office can issue a fine of up to £20,000 for illegally employed workers. For British Citizens, it’s usually as simple as checking their passport (which can be done via TrustID). For non-citizens, you need confirmation that a valid work visa is in place.
Other background checks you might want to do (depending on the role you’re hiring for) include:
- Education history
- Criminal record search
- Social media usage
- Medical history
- Drug screening
- Financial records
- Driving licence
If you want more advanced screening tools, we recommend GoodHire which is great for small businesses, Sterling who are often the go-to for financial services and non-profit organisations, or HireRight if you need a global service.
6. Employee onboarding tools
The hard part is almost over… but you still need to onboard new employees, which takes time. Consider using HR software such as Personio or Breathe to seamlessly coordinate onboarding tasks and induction material from line managers, HR, and IT into one location.
Using these tools means your new recruits get a great experience, feel taken care of, and aren’t waiting for information as everything is available to them without your input. Not only will your new employees hit the ground running from day one, but your time spent on the final stage of the recruitment process is minimal.
Don’t forget about the admin involved in the recruitment process…
Although these tools will massively reduce your recruitment process time, there’s still plenty of admin involved. It’s important to consider who will handle the admin, so your team don’t get swamped with extra work they weren’t expecting.
If you can’t handle the recruitment admin internally, you could use a virtual assistant on a project basis to take those extra tasks off your hands. At Virtually Priceless, we do this regularly for clients who are scaling and need to hire great people quickly.
Get in touch to discuss how we can support your recruitment process so you can hire exceptional team members with less stress.