How Hiring Managers Can Optimize Their Recruitment Process

We all get stuck in a rut from time to time — but for organizations looking to add people to their team, this could have a detrimental effect on hiring and retention. Let’s look at the behavioural shifts that hiring managers can make to improve their hire and retention rates.

People have different demands for their ideal culture and job satisfaction than they did 10 years ago. Seasoned hiring managers can be slow to adapt to these changing demands from the workforce. With just a few minor behavioural shifts, hiring managers can refresh their approach to acquiring and retaining talent to improve retention rates significantly.

Having a great sense of what you are looking for is half the battle for recruiting and attracting quality, relevant candidates. Chat with your team, nail down the position profile and run with it. If you post the role online, be creative and have fun. Don’t forget to highlight what is great about working within your organization and culture is everything these days.

Candidates want to know your hiring process — including how long it’ll take to get hired. A sprawling hire period without set milestones means it’s easy for candidates to lose interest. Not only that, but they’ll also be looking elsewhere, so if there is a long break between interview rounds, you will likely lose them to another employer.

A lengthy interview process with multiple rounds can also be off-putting for many candidates. Each interview requires additional time off from their current job and means extra preparation time for presentations, video calls, or tasks.

Define your interview process – with set dates and milestones – before you open applications, allowing candidates to prepare for possible time off from their current job and expect how long they’ll have to wait to find out if they’ve got the job. Don’t have too many meetings with too many people, and if there are two meetings, try to clear people’s calendars so they can book back-to-back days.

Setting milestones also means you can lock in the relevant senior management team members for the time required during the interview process. We have often come across companies that struggle to hire because hiring managers or senior management crucial to the hiring process go on a vacation during the hiring period.

Missing hiring managers causes problems on both sides: candidates become frustrated with delays and pull out of the hiring process, and communication between hiring managers, senior management, and recruitment agencies lags.

Arranging set hiring periods around vacation times is one of the best ways to improve communication, speed up the hiring process, and keep candidates interested in their applications.

As an expert talent acquisition agency, we’ve seen it all — and one of the most common problems we’ve witnessed is companies low-balling on offered salaries.

Understandably, you want the best talent for your budget. However, offering noncompetitive salaries means you won’t attract the right talent to the role — and this frustrates everyone, not just candidates. It can seriously extend your hiring period for each vacancy, too — which means you’re spending time and money finding a candidate that could’ve been offered as part of a better remuneration package in the first place.

It’s a common misconception that recruitment agencies push for higher salaries because it increases their pay when placing a candidate. The reality is that a competitive salary allows you to pick from the best talent around. It also improves employee satisfaction and morale as your teammates feel valued when you’re paying the market rate for their work and, in turn, improves your total retention rate, so you’re spending less on hiring staff overall.

When candidates refuse a job offer or existing staff leave your company, it’s easy to write it off as a ‘them problem’ and not an internal culture issue.

However, listening to feedback from candidates who refuse the offer or staff leaving your company means you can identify what’s turning talent away. Company culture significantly impacts whether talent wants to take a job with you– and stays there — so try introducing post-offer or post-employment feedback as standard, which will help you recognize company culture trends that turn great talent away. When you know what’s going wrong, it’s much easier to set it right!

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