Every year, it seems, the task of recruiting becomes more challenging.
First of all, nearly three-quarters of your potential candidate pool consists of passive job seekers. These professionals are employed and not actively looking for a new job, but they’re open to hearing about a potential opportunity.
Then there are the 250 resumes on average that you get from active job seekers. Since those people represent only 27% of your true candidate pool, it means you’re selecting from among close to 1,000 professionals. What’s more, the cream of the crop will be off the market in 10 days, snapped up by a recruiter or a company that got to them sooner.
You can’t manage a process like that manually. There are too many tasks involved in today’s recruitment process, from resumé review to the tracking of an offer. In view of this, sometimes remote recruitment agency can be of great help. There are too many ways for a great candidate to fall through the cracks.
Still, many recruiters depend on tools that are barely one step above a pencil and paper. There’s certainly a place for solutions like these in the world—tools like email, spreadsheets, and cloud-hosted group to-do lists—but they don’t come anywhere close to solving the problems that today’s recruiters face.
HR Challenges in Recruitment and Selection
Recruiting is the kind of process that is structurally similar across organizations, even as it has elements and challenges that are unique to the hiring organization. The structure itself, the common elements, are where most recruiters get hung up.
Typical complaints include:
- Lack of a hiring process template: There’s no process continuity from one vacancy to the next and every hire leaves you reinventing the wheel
- Loss of information: As hiring information moves through the pipeline, whether it’s about a position or a candidate, some of it gets lost in transit
- Lack of visibility: In many HR teams, no one below upper management knows how decisions get made, which can lead to misunderstanding and miscommunication
- No inter-departmental integration: Your hiring team isn’t talking to the departments that need staff, beyond the initial request to hire someone
- Excessive task repetition: Team members are wasting time on manual tasks that don’t need to be manual
- Lack of control: Once a task leaves your desk, you can’t track who is performing it or how they’re going about it
- No centralized information: If you want information about a candidate or position, you have to wade through a trail of messages or search through spreadsheets
- Lengthy time-to-hire: By the time you’re ready to send offers, candidates have moved on
- Poor candidate communication: Applicants don’t get updates on the status of their application, so you drop off their radar
- A reactive recruitment strategy template: The traditional model in which you only recruit when there’s a vacancy is pressure-driven and too rushed to support smart decisions
Each roadblock along the recruitment journey might individually seem minor, but put together, they can mean serious problems for your business.
What Are the Consequencesof Hiring Challenges?
Hiring challenges don’t just affect your team: Each hurdle impacts the operations of the department who needs the candidate, and they affect your company’s bottom line. They even affect your company’s ability to attract great talent.
Frustrated Candidates
In today’s job market, the candidate experience matters. Nearly 80% of candidates believe that how a company handles job applicants shows how that company views its workforce. More than 85% believe that they as candidates should be treated with the same respect as employees, but only 49% feel like that happens.
The people you want on your team are those who have choices about where to work. You don’t want a bad applicant experience to leave them looking somewhere else. Not only could you lose the perfect candidate for a position—you could develop a bad reputation.
Frustrated Team Members
Think about a great, well-organized team that you’ve worked on. Then think of one that wasn’t so well-coordinated. You can tell the difference, and so can the rest of your hiring team.
You can be putting in countless hours to keep all the elements of your process tied together, but if it’s not truly integrated, the information will fall through the cracks and people will get frustrated looking for it. Worst case scenario, you could end up taking time away from recruiting to fill positions on your internal team when its members quit.
Higher Costs of Hiring
The longer you take to hire someone, the more it costs your company to onboard that person. All of your team members are getting paid and you’re spending money every day to list a position on job boards, but no one is filling that job and generating revenue.
Additionally, when you hire in a hurry or don’t have the information you need to make the best decision, you run the risk of making a bad hire. Each one of those could cost our company up to $15,000, according to a 2017 Harris Poll survey.
When you hire more efficiently, you spend less and the company earns more.
How Can You Improve the Recruitment and Selection Process?
If you didn’t have to do everything manually, you could land more of those previously elusive, top-choice candidates. You’d fill vacancies not just more quickly but more efficiently, reducing your cost-per-hire and reducing the turnover associated with poor hires. At the same time, by hiring proactively and building a talent pool to draw on when the need arises, you could fill vacancies more efficiently and boost revenue for your organization as a whole.
The only way to get there is by creating and sticking to a recruitment process flowchart. You need to automate as much as possible, and that means you need a recruitment template that can send notifications and emails as required.
Pipefy Solutions for Streamlined Recruiting
Pipefy is designed to be your HR recruitment process tracker. It allows you to create a straightforward, easy-to-follow workflow and recruitment process template that everyone can use, follow and understand.
Everything starts with a card. These digital index cards contain all of the information you have about an applicant. The card moves through what’s known as a pipe: a visual representation of the process of hiring. As you bring a candidate forward, their card progresses through each phase, collecting information that the system or team members add to it.
There is also an automation component. You can establish requirements and recommendations for a position, declining unqualified candidates automatically and sorting the rest into categories of likely fit. You can even notify members of your team when someone needs to take any action, such as approving an interview slot or authorizing an offer.
When you use a smart solution like this, you can solve nearly all of the problems associated with a disjointed hiring strategy.
Inter-Departmental Integration
Collaboration can make the recruitment and selection process faster or slower, depending on how you approach it. When your team is connected so that everything is in one place and tasks get done according to a known process, you can save money and get to qualified candidates faster.
The Solution: Centralized Information and Messaging
When all of your recruiting information is in the same place, you can be sure that everyone is using the same up-to-date candidate and vacancy files. No more using an old email address because someone else updated a duplicate candidate file on the same person.
Pipefy’s database lets you create a systematic way of storing information. Each candidate or vacancy gets a separate card, structured to your specifications. View them alone or look at the “360 views” of all associated cards.
Additionally, Pipefy gives you a centralized platform for sending and receiving emails. This feature makes it easy for you to search for details about a position or view the most recent message that a candidate received. It doesn’t just save you from chasing down old emails—it also saves you the embarrassment of sending repeat or incorrect information to a candidate or hiring department.
Candidate Tracking
Across industries, recruiters and hiring managers are starting to realize the importance of the applicant tracking system or ATS. They know that this kind of tool is necessary if they’re going to proactively build and cultivate a talent pool, not just grasp at straws every time a position opens up.
The Solution: Candidate Pool Organization and Sorting
Ideally, your ATS will go a step beyond organizing candidates to predict who will be a good fit for your company. That means creating a list that’s sorted beyond what spreadsheets like Excel can do. You need to be able to:
- Search for candidates by qualifications and skillsets
- Sort applicants based on potential fit
- Customize your applicant view to see all of the information for a particular candidate or all of the candidates with a particular quality
- View an analysis of your candidate pool
- Automatically update candidates on the status of their applications
The more information you can get out of your database, the better your hiring decisions will be. With Pipefy, you get a dynamic and integrated applicant database that responds to your needs. Using conditional “if/then” logic, you can categorize applicants based on the contents of their files.
For example:
- If an applicant indicates a lower level of experience, the form might hide follow-up questions and group that application with less-qualified candidates
- If an applicant has a certain required degree, the form would display more detailed questions to determine whether the person is very qualified or mostly qualified
- If an interviewer records responses that show a potential great fit, the system would move that person’s card forward; if not, the person would either be sent a decline email or be put into a “maybe later” pile
With Pipefy, you can see at a glance who is in which category.
Process Automation
The more you automate, the more time you save. That’s significant in the world of recruiting, which traditionally includes many steps that don’t have to be manual.
The Solution: Automated Candidate Progression and Messaging
“If/then” conditional logic can help you to automate all recruitment process steps, not just the organizational and candidate sorting aspects.
If a candidate isn’t qualified, an automated system can drop them out of the pipeline and send them an email informing them of that fact, without anyone having to take the time to do it manually.
Alternatively, perhaps a candidate fills out an application and checks off all of the skill sets you requested. In that case, the system sends them a request to schedule a phone interview.
Pipefy can handle other types of automatic messaging too.
When hiring, you end up sending almost as many “thanks, but no thanks” letters as you have applicants. For the most part, these emails go out in batches:
- One set after you’ve screened the first batch of resumés
- One set after your first phone screening
- One set after each phase of in-person interviewing
By the time you send out an offer, all of your applicants should have received one of these emails. If you automate the sending of these messages, they go out in a timely fashion and with certainty that no one will be missed.
A Final Word: Seamless Onboarding
Every hiring manager knows that offer acceptance isn’t the end of the story. If you don’t make sure that the onboarding process is smooth and user-friendly, you could lose that top candidate you worked so hard to get.
That’s why the integration and automation of your hiring process can’t stop with the signing of an offer. Your solution needs to link all aspects of your process, including the end stages when the hire becomes an employee.
With Pipefy, that’s as simple as transferring the card of your new hire to the correct HR department. That department gets all of the information you had, so no one has to message the new hire for information they’ve already given.
It’s simple for everyone involved. In the end, that’s how you want to start any new employee relationship.