When you’ve got lots of shoes to fill, and not a lot of time, squeezing down your time to hire is a really (really) good idea. It doesn’t just reduce your costs-per-hire, it also means you can snap up the best candidates before anyone else grabs them.
So cool, but how do you do that while making sure you get the right people in the right jobs? We’re glad you asked.
First, take a look at your candidate journey. Is it as efficient as it could be? Talk to your team about how long each stage tends to take. Can you see any major bottlenecks? Any steps that you could automate (or that you don’t need at all?) Maybe you just have too many CVs to look through, or getting interviews booked-in takes days of back and forth. Those bottlenecks are where you’ll get the biggest wins, but look at the rest of the funnel too – small improvements at each step will make the biggest overall impact.
A talent community is the evolution of a talent pool and can majorly speed up your time to hire. You turn a talent pool into a community by keeping in touch with candidates, rather than just letting those contacts go cold on a spreadsheet somewhere. By sending them useful and engaging content, you keep them warm until the next job pops up. No advertising or waiting for applications to come in – just a big bunch of pre-vetted candidates waiting to hear from you.
Sounds dreamy, but building a talent community is a long game – you’re keeping people engaged and feeling great about your brand, even when they don’t get the job. That must be based on great employer branding, exceptional candidate experiences and a desire to genuinely add value to your community. Purpose-built software helps – Target and John Holland are using *cough* Weirdly *cough* to build and nurture talent communities, for example.
Make no mistake, candidates are looking at your careers page. Your careers page needs to get the right kinds of candidates all excited about working with you, so they’ll apply for jobs with you in the first place and, crucially, so they’ll accept your job offer.
The wrong career page means sifting through more unsuitable candidates or starting the whole process over again when you find ‘the one’, but they don’t want to work for you after all.
Dry quizzes and questionnaires massively drag out a hiring process and are hardly the best part of the candidate experience. So it’s a good time to ask, ‘Are they the right assessments and do you need all of them?’
Go and collect some data – are there any links between assessment outcomes and quality of the candidate? Perhaps those that score a certain way on your personality test generally stay longer and are higher performers. Good. Keep that assessment. Or maybe you don’t see any link between your skills-test outcomes and those gold-standard employees. Time to ditch it.
What if you’re not finding any links? Might be time to broaden your HR tech-stack – look for assessments that can show direct links to good employee outcomes, make for pretty nice candidate experiences and help you get to a good long list faster. When Uber used us they were in it to give candidates a good first impression – they were pretty chuffed when they also saved 110 hours in just the screening process.
Setting up interviews between candidates and hiring managers isn’t what your team needs to be spending your days on. Automating your interview scheduling saves time and hassle for you and the candidate – wins across the board. Weirdly’s scheduler lets candidates book their own interview time – they get all the control, and you get to do other things.
We built Weirdly specifically to make life less painful for high-volume hiring teams. Time to hire is a big pain point, obviously, so it’s always been a focus. For some retail customers, Weirdly reduces time to hire down to 48 hours from application to offer. Using Weirdly, one client reported the time to shortlist is now 83% faster, and another has seen the quality of candidates improve by 150%.
That’s because it doesn’t just fast-track soft-skills assessment and make it easy to build and use a talent community, it’s also been built to be the forward guard of your employer brand – and your brand and marketing as a whole.
Looking to make your hiring process faster and more effective at finding quality candidates? Book a demo with Weirdly today.
