Everyone’s Hiring, but do you have a process?
by Erin Waltemate, HR Support Specialist
Our clients are typically high growth. Recently, I was working with one of our clients during a peak hiring time. We identified their hiring need had suddenly increased. Since we staff our retained clients, we needed to reevaluate the current recruitment process with the client. Our goal was to provide a process that was more efficient and used available technology to assist in the process. Believe it or not, some are still doing it without technology!
Our client had multiple roles open with both remote and onsite positions, which they needed to fill quickly. In the current process, we were conducting phone interviews which were not only time consuming but were also limited to the availability of the interviewer. This meant that there was a potential for us to lose a candidate’s interest because they found another position in the interim. Additionally, the internal process was different and inconsistent as it was dependent on the manager who was tasked to hire. For many reasons, it is important that all candidates are subject to the same process of evaluation. Our team began by clarifying the roles and then we identified the process by which to source candidates for the role in a consistent and streamlined manner. Honestly, we revamped the current process to clearly identify roles, as well as, implement technology to assist in the efficiency of the process.
The first step that we took was to identify an Applicant Tracking system (ATS) that would assist the company in streamlining their process better than the current ATS in use. Because of the company’s background in technology, we wanted to find a system that was more intuitive and advanced then their current system. Our team reviewed several options and found that JazzHR seemed to be the best fit. We put together a comparison presentation, comparing their current ATS platform with JazzHR, and highlighting the features that would really allow them to use this system to take their recruitment and hiring process to the next level with ease. Additionally, at this time we added in the use of SparkHire One Way Interviews as a substitute for phone interviews on a consistent basis. This had two added benefits, one, we could interview more candidates in less time and two, SparkHire directly integrated with JazzHR allowing us to initiate and review completed interviews within the platform. The last piece of technology we added was to introduce Indeed Assessments (a standardized question to filter candidates) to the process to help in the candidate selection process. Once all these pieces were in play, we then began to outline the finalized process and responsibilities for the recruiting and hiring process for our client. This process included us building out workflows, emails templates, offer templates, applications, job posting, interview guides, and training guides for each step of the process.
The outcome of this overall recruiting and hiring process change resulted in a complete overhaul of behaviors and responsibilities for each person involved in the process. Just like with any change, there is a period of transition; we took this time to provide live training to employees and provided process documentation and training guides to help employees adapt to the process. As a result, and with minor changes, we were able to successfully implement a process that is easy to execute, intuitive, and utilizes technology to make the process more efficient, thereby, allowing the company to fill open positions with qualified candidates faster.
