It’s been said throughout 2015 that we’re now in a candidate driven market and it’s a trend that is likely to continue. The ManpowerGroup’s ninth annual Talent Shortage Survey found 36 percent of employers report difficulty in filling jobs – the highest reported proportion since 2007, and this is on an upward trend across the UK and Europe.
Candidates are indeed in demand. Not only will candidates be harder to find, but it’s going to take employers longer too. This is before the difficulties of engaging these candidates, and meeting their salary expectations and counter offers.
Offers don’t always equal hires, and recruiters need a few extra skills to stay competitive and ensure their new hire arrives for work.
In order to adapt to the candidate-led market we’re in, in-house recruiters must acquire better sourcing skills, personalise the process for hard-to-fill roles, and use more intense on-boarding processes to ensure offers convert to hires. This, however, takes a lot of time and effort. So, how do we overcome these problems? The answer is ‘recruitment hacking’.
Recruitment hacking means using technology and innovation to automate or remove low value recruitment procedures, replacing them with more efficient tasks that will help you find the right person for your business.
In the e-book Recruitment Hacking: Hire the Best First, recruitment thought-leader Peter Gold provides practical techniques and tools to help the in-house recruiter be more successful at work.
Here’s my pick of Peter’s best recruitment hacking tips:
1) The love vs hate list
To ensure you’re making more time to focus on hiring, you need to hack your own work day and methodically remove things that stop you from being efficient.
This starts with a list. Think about all of the things you do in a typical work day or week, and which of those tasks you love and hate. File the tasks under the relevant column depending on your preference, and set yourself a time goal of completing 75 percent love-tasks and 25 percent hate-tasks.
Then, share this with your team and see if anyone loves doing certain tasks you hate – just because you don’t like it doesn’t mean they won’t. If someone or something else can do some of your hate tasks, delegate them accordingly. Eliminating the tasks you don’t like, where you are likely to perform inefficiently, will improve your happiness and improve your productivity.
2) Get some Pomodoro in your life
This style of working isn’t for everyone, but the Pomodoro technique can be a great way to improve work habits and make you more productive. The technique involves using a Pomodoro 25-minute timer to plan your day. You review your to-do list for the work day and decide how many 25-minute Pomodoro sessions plus breaks you can fit in that day, then go! Using this technique can help keep you on task and undistracted – though it helps to switch off things like email, social, mobile and as many other typical distractions that you can.
3) Rescue back your time
Do you have a bad habit of perusing Facebook or your other favourite websites a bit too long in your work day? If so, RescueTime is for you. This tool is a fantastic way to identify where hours in your day are escaping to and assess how distracted you are, even if you think you’re particularly productive. You can use this on both your desktop and mobile, and improve your productivity by blocking access to certain sites throughout particular times in the day, or having an alarm go off when you exceed your allotted time allowed on certain sites. It’s not a time saver per se, but it will keep you more focused.
4) Bring third party apps to your ATS
Tightly integrating third-party efficiency apps into your ATS can really improve efficiency. Some of the most popular include multi-posting of jobs to job boards, video interviewing and screening, and aggregated searches across multiple candidate bases such as LinkedIn and Monster. If you’re using an ATS with an open API, such as Cornerstone Edge, this integration is simple. The Platform-as-a-Service offering lets customers integrate their Cornerstone Unified Talent Management suite with other workforce systems to maximise human capital management investments. This provides flexibility to create new applications for customising user experience, extending talent data, or tailoring features for unique business needs.
Our recent research with a focus group of 53 in-house recruiters, we found that administrative tasks were the most time-intensive. Our respondents stated that they spent nearly two hours each day on administrative tasks, which is the equivalent to a day a week. These initiatives should go some way in reducing the admin burden in-house recruiters face every day.
Colette Wade is Regional VP, EMEA Marketing & Business Development at Cornerstone OnDemand.
Love the pomodoro method! Learned it from thesourcinginstitute.com, there’s no better place to improve your sourcing and recruiting skill.