You may not be able to afford to hire like Apple or Google, but even the leanest HR teams can make a big impact by maximizing their most valuable resource: time. Here are 4 tips to help your team make every minute count.
1) Be smarter about hiring
If you’re working with a smaller team, an extended vacancy on it will only make your work harder. The longer a spot remains unfilled, the greater the pressure is to hire someone, anyone. This situation, sometimes referred to as “warm body syndrome,” leads some hiring teams to make quick decisions that can hurt the company in the long run.
Making a bad hire is always, well, bad. But hiring a mere warm body for an already lean team won’t help. If the pressure’s on, but you’re having trouble finding experienced candidates, shift your focus to look at candidate potential instead. You can also avoid falling prey to warm body syndrome in the future by proactively recruiting year-round and creating a talent pipeline to draw from when you need it.
2) Improve your onboarding process
The first few weeks of a new employee’s time at your company can define their entire experience—including how long their tenure will last. One study found that more than 40 percent of workers leave within the first month, and another 10 percent leave within a year.
Those are some startling numbers, especially for HR teams with limited budget and manpower. Luckily, studies also show that a formal onboarding program leads to lower turnover, more engaged employees and increases in morale and productivity. Plus, you’ll save future You the work of recruiting again in six months for a position you just filled.
3) Automate mundane tasks
Mundane, repetitive tasks aren’t just boring—they’re also time-consuming—and therefore costly. Luckily, thanks to recent developments in HR technology, many of the most tedious, time-intensive hiring tasks (like sending communications, scheduling interviews, searching third-party databases and archiving candidates) can be automated.
According to a CareerBuilder study, 93 percent of employers who automated part of their talent acquisition and management process reported that doing so saved them time and increased efficiency, allowing team members to focus on more important tasks that require a human touch.
4) Optimize tech purchases
If your recruiting and hiring tools come from several providers, the programs may have difficulty talking to each other, considerably slowing down your processes. Teams end up wasting valuable time switching back and forth between tools or browser windows, or manually reformatting data from one tool so another can read it. Even the seemingly trivial amount of time it takes to log into multiple accounts really adds up. And that’s assuming everyone remembers all their usernames and passwords.
Using tools that are designed to work together is one of the simplest, most effective ways to streamline your process—and greatly reduces daily frustration too. Did you know that CareerBuilder talent acquisition products integrate easily with dozens of ATSes? We can help your team get set up to increase ROI and reduce candidate drop-off in just weeks.
If your TA processes could benefit from an overhaul, implementing even one of the above solutions can help you reach your goals more quickly. And that’s good not just for your bottom line, but for your teams as well.
