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Managers who’ve dealt with the pressure of replacing a valuable employee in the midst of a critical project, or struggled to get things done with limited resources know particularly well the importance of a quick and smooth hiring process.

Picking a new member of your family isn’t something that can be taken lightly, but yet, when speed is of the essence, a choice has to be made with the options on hand.

It goes without saying that even large, successful organizations have failed to crack the code on recruitment, and each year waste millions of man hours on evaluating, and selecting from a vast pool of candidates, only to end up with a bad hire. Recruitment in general is rife with inefficiencies, with a number of bottlenecks standing in the way of quickly onboarding new candidates to your team.

In this article, we cover some tips and techniques for a significantly faster hiring process, some of which might go against the prevailing norms that HR experts have pioneered over the years.

1. Be More Targeted

A significant source of inefficiency in the recruitment process is this notion of choosing the best among all available candidates. This often creates unnecessary friction, and prolongs the process, costing significant man hours, and occasionally even the loss of ideal candidates. When working against the clock, a much more nuanced, and targeted approach works best.

By this, we mean selecting just a handful of target avenues for sourcing candidates, for example, if you’re working with job sites, only place adverts on sites that predominantly work with your target candidates, instead of generic job boards such as Indeed. 

If you’re a charitable organization, you should find a charity recruitment service that will connect you with candidates who are passionate about your cause and have relevant experience. This specialized method of recruitment will save you time and effort in sorting through piles of irrelevant resumes. By focusing on a smaller pool of candidates from the get-go, you greatly reduce your time to hire.

Up-and-coming services such as FastTalent by Lensa stand to add substantial value in this regard, with a much more targeted approach.

This helps save precious time lost in sorting, filtering, and short-listing applicants, which often number in the 1,000s on such sites. Spam applications will still be an issue, but here filtering is a lot easier, and simpler, allowing for recruiters to deduct their way to the right candidate fairly quickly.

2. Emphasis On Referrals

When working on a project, your current team members who are well aware of the skills required and the challenges ahead, can often provide ideal references from within their networks. The overall recruitment will still proceed as usual, but narrowing down to a potential candidate can move a lot faster when it comes to referrals.

This not only works wonders for team morale, and cohesion, but the onboarding process can move significantly quicker with a familiar face ready to help the new hire get a hang of the ropes. Companies can try various means of making this work, with referral bonuses being a key motivator. 

There are in fact a number of tools, and plugins to help in tracking and implementing such referral systems.

3. Make The Team Responsible For Hiring

When hiring a candidate to join a particular team, a great way to ensure seamless recruitment, and onboarding is by making the entire process a team responsibility.

Afterall, it is with the team in question that the candidate will continue to work with, so it makes great sense to involve team members, both in the recruitment, and interviewing process, as well as training and onboarding to get candidates up to speed.

4. Go Easy On The Background & References

Another source of friction that continues to create roadblocks is the extensive background and reference checks. Although this remains a characteristic of only large companies, they are slowly seeping their way into startups, and small businesses. There is nothing that is more time consuming, than this unproductive activity of digging through a prospective candidate’s past.

Not doing an extensive background check definitely involves a risk, but this is all about understanding the right balance between risks, rewards, and effort. If a prospective candidate is qualified, and capable of getting the job done, then what is the worst harm that any undiscovered unsavory fact from his past can do to the project, and company? 

If it’s nothing major, then there is no justification for a comprehensive investigation into a candidate’s background.

5. Talent Curation & Pre-Screened Candidates

While these can be quite expensive, they often represent a great way to recruit candidates quickly, smoothly, and effortlessly, with any substantial effort on your part.

There are a number of services that provide a list of curated, or pre-screened candidates for recruiters, with verified information, so that all the recruiter has to do is schedule interviews, and select the one that best suits requirements.

Such services exist predominantly in the tech space, but are since making their way onto other sectors, and niches.

They are known for reducing time-to-hire metrics by an order of magnitude, along with significant improvements in the quality of the hire, and thus, remain a staple at fast growing venture backed startups, which still maintain a lean HR team.

Final Words

Recruitment as a process has undergone substantial changes in recent years, resulting in major efficiency gains at organizations across the world. For quick, smooth, and seamless hiring, the onus is on managers and business leaders to give up legacy methods, in favor of the bold new ways of doing things.