Unlock the competitive edge with accelerated hiring for your agency

How to improve your recruitment speed and secure top candidates

Start to finish, how long does it take you to recruit a new candidate? Research by Josh Bersin Company and AMS put the average time-to-hire at an all-time high of 44 days.

How does your recruitment agency compare?

It’s increasingly challenging to land the right staff as competition among agencies and employers heats up for a smaller pool of candidates. Being able to recruit effectively at speed gives you the best chances of securing the top candidates, which is pivotal for your competitive edge and bottom line.

Here, we’ll look at how accelerated recruitment can improve your hiring processes. We’ll also give you a useful how-to for streamlining your own sourcing strategies.

How does the agency recruitment process work?

What is the recruitment process? Generally speaking, the process of recruiting new staff deals with how you identify, attract, and secure candidates.

Of course, it can vary significantly from sector to sector. Short-term placement staffing like gig and hospitality work will look very different to the process for medical staffing or manufacturing staffing, for instance.

In general, the recruitment process for most sectors will involve the same general stages:

• sourcing
• screening
• interviewing
• shortlisting
• selecting
• onboarding

That’s a lot of stages, and the traditional methods for each can make it time-consuming and inefficient. But times and technology have changed.

Traditional recruitment tends to be limited by location, and by a lack of targeting, reaching only those prospective candidates in your geographical catchment. What’s more, they don’t allow you to reach out to people directly.

Job ads in print media are static — you post them and wait for the right person to see them and take the initiative, but once that newspaper’s out of date, you’ve lost your reach until you pay to post another.

Publishing job postings, waiting for applications, manually filtering resumes, scheduling and conducting multiple rounds of interviews — it’s a procedure that can easily take weeks or even months before the new employee is successfully on board.

Traditional recruitment practices are not only slow and passive, they don’t come cheap. Neither job seekers nor recruiters have time to spare on such an inefficient and drawn-out process.

Benefits of accelerating the recruiting process

Recruitment can be a drawn-out, bureaucratic process, as companies strive to check all the boxes and avoid bad hires. Bad hires end up costing businesses time and money, reducing an agency’s competitive edge.

But if you’re too picky, you might end up with roles that remain unfilled for too long. Plus, too many rounds of interviews may make only a marginal difference to your certainty.

Cutting inefficiencies to make your recruiting processes more speedy and efficient can really pay dividends. For example:

• You can cut down on multiple rounds of interviews if you have a system where candidates can record and submit standard questions ahead of time. This helps ensure the live interview time is more targeted to the questions that really matter.
• Using automation and software to resumes and shortlisting candidates lets you maximize your resources and reduce your time-to-hire.
• Good gig staffing software enables you to re-onboard returning employees much more quickly.
• Reducing time-to-hire means making better use of HR time and resources.
• Faster candidate placement feeds into time-to-productivity, which ultimately improves your bottom line.

Let’s look at some key strategies for achieving this.

A top-notch digital platform can be your most vital tool for streamlining your hiring process. For instance, healthcare onboarding software can slash the time-to-hire for overstretched hospital recruiters by automating the administrative tasks that make healthcare recruitment one of the slowest. Gig worker onboarding can be much quicker if you have a platform that can keep their employment eligibility up-to-date from season to season.

Six key strategies to accelerate the recruiting process

If you’re keen to cut down on how long you’re spending on recruitment, here are five ways to streamline your staffing process:

1. Make use of digital technology

• Platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook and X are as essential to tap into as online job boards and professional networks. AI tools are also increasingly helpful for accelerating recruiting processes, from screening and sorting resumes to facilitating timely Form I-9 completion.

2. Optimize job listings and descriptions

• You want your job opportunities to appear attractive to potential applicants. More than half of job seekers indicate that the quality of a job description influences their decision to apply.
• At the same time, you also want to make sure that they attract people that are right for the job.
• What this means is that you should ensure that the job descriptions are clear and comprehensive, so that you don’t waste time working through applications and interviews that simply are not going to be suitable.
• Craft your ads and job descriptions carefully to appeal to your ideal candidate for each position, highlighting the essential qualifications and skills required. And don’t forget to include descriptive, SEO-friendly keywords, to get your listings to the top of the pile.

3. Pre-onboard your candidates

• The more admin and prep work you can get out of the way early in the process, the quicker the recruitment process and onboarding will be.
• For example, pre-screening assessments or questionnaires gives you a headstart, while conducting initial interviews online or by phone saves time and resources. These can also help to quickly weed out unsuitable candidates before you invest too much time and resources.
• And, with WorkBright’s embedded Smart I-9 platform, your new hires can complete Section 1 of their Form I-9 embedded into your own recruitment app, helping you speed up onboarding and reduce candidate drop-off.

4. Use employee referral programs

• If you’re in-house, then you can encourage existing employees to refer suitable applicants. If you’re a recruitment agency, then you can encourage your clients to add this to their staffing strategy.
• With rewards or incentives for any successful candidates they bring in, employee referral programs can not only help you get qualified people through the door with minimal outlay, but also foster a positive employee experience.

5. Leverage technology and automation

• Your recruitment tech stack is your most crucial tool for streamlining your recruitment processes, so be sure to put it to the best use.
• Applicant tracking systems (ATS) ensure that you can manage all your recruitment processes and data in the one place, while automating repetitive busywork makes for greater efficiency and less space for human error.
• With embedded I-9 technology, you can also get your new hires fully verified quickly and seamlessly, ensuring full compliance and increasing your onboarding speed.

6. Prioritize the candidate experience

• Just as the customer experience fosters stronger relationships and loyalty with your clients, the employee experience encourages job satisfaction, retention and a positive company culture. And you can start building that experience even with your potential employees, right from the recruitment phase.
• The more you can make the application and recruitment processes smooth and effortless, the more candidates will get a great first impression and get a sense of what it’s like to work for your company.
• There are lots of ways you can create an appealing candidate experience:
• Use inclusive language in your job descriptions and communications
• Make the online application process accessible and straightforward — and mobile-friendly.
• Respond quickly and keep in touch often — you don’t want your ideal candidates to get snapped up by the competition while they’re waiting for you.

How to streamline onboarding and integration of new hires

Seven in 10 new hires who had good onboarding plan to stay with their employers, while 8 in 10 who didn’t have good onboarding intend to leave. You want to make sure that you maintain that good first impression with a welcoming and engaging onboarding experience.

Clarity and simplicity are the name of the game. Develop a structured onboarding program that covers the necessary resources and training but without overwhelming new employees on day one. Connect new employees with their colleagues from the start, and don’t overwhelm them with red tape and presentations.

Again, your recruitment tech stack is invaluable here:

• Virtual onboarding can speed up the process, getting paperwork done easily and ahead of time.
• Employment eligibility documentation can be submitted digitally and verified quickly with tools like WorkBright’s remote I-9.
• HR tech can also be used to introduce new hires to their team before they start, and allow them to access training sessions as microlearning tasks in the flow of work.

Making your onboarding process a breeze will ensure a smooth transition into the organization, and enhance your employee experience, your work culture and your retention.

Measuring and improving the streamlined recruitment process

Whatever procedures you put in place to streamline your recruitment process, you need to be sure they are working for you.

You should establish clear goals you want to achieve, and define key performance indicators (KPIs) to capture your effectiveness. These might include:

• applicant numbers
• time-to-hire
• offer acceptance rate
• first-year turnover
• applicant net promoter score (NPS) — which shows how likely an applicant is to recommend the employer

Gathering the right data from candidates and hiring managers alike can give you valuable insights that feed into a practice of continual improvement and excellence. This way, your business can get better and better at attracting and retaining great talent.

Streamline your recruiting process with WorkBright

Speeding up your recruiting processes doesn’t mean making it a rushed job. Whether it’s improving the reach and targeting of your job listings, automating your hospitality candidate applications, or conducting healthcare employee onboarding, streamlining your recruiting process is key to staying competitive in the evolving job market.

More than that, it’s about creating a smooth candidate experience that makes your candidates excited about the job ahead and gets them into position quickly. Not only is that good for new employees, it’s vital for your bottom line too.

To discover how WorkBright’s applicant tracking system, onboarding software and Smart I-9 tool can help streamline your agency’s recruiting process, request a demo today.