Here are four ways our most successful clients have improved their hiring processes.
1. Use a system that automatically ranks your candidates
Using an online applicant tracking system like iCIMS, Greenhouse, or the Optimize Hire system will help you keep track of which candidates you’re most excited about for your job openings and where they are in your application process.
With an applicant tracking system, you can quickly indicate whether a candidate should go to the next stage of the hiring process.
Candidates who take an Optimize Hire Pre-Employment Test are automatically ranked by that score in your Applicant Tracking System. Here’s what this looks like for our iCIMS customers:
2. Consider Pre-Employment Testing
Every time Optimize Hire has completed a validation study for a client, we’ve shown that a good pre-employment assessment saved that company a significant amount of money by successfully predicting which applicants will stay versus leave the job in the future.
According to decades of science, when hiring is left only up to human subjectivity, we don’t always make the most productive choices. When we use an unbiased pre-employment test to measure traits shown by psychological research to correlate with productivity, we consistently make better hiring choices than we would using our judgment alone.
Think of pre-employment testing like the SAT.
Universities use SAT scores to determine which students are most likely to excel at the university level. Like the SAT, pre-employment tests are effective as a helpful initial insight into a candidate, and best used in combination with resume-reviewing and interviewing. You can read more about what to look for in a pre-employment test here.
3. Use structured Interviews
Structured interviews are the fairest way to get a sense of an applicant’s fitness for a certain job and using one is very straightforward. Simply ask every interviewee the same interview questions, and use a consistent rating scale when deciding whether or not they meet your qualifications.
We get better results from a structured interview because every applicant has a fair chance to answer the same questions.
Consider if your eighth grade math teacher had given everyone a final exam with different questions in different formats, and then graded then without using an answer key. According to industrial psychological research, that’s essentially how you’re treating your candidates when you ask them different questions and give subjective rankings of them rather than using a specified scale.
4. Create an Outstanding Candidate Experience from Initial Outreach to Offer
As the unemployment rate continues to decline, every detail counts more and more in recruiting top talent. Your company is rarely your best candidate’s only option, and creating a positive candidate experience for them can go an extremely long way.
Here’s a quick outline from Recruiting.com of what you should be doing to make your recruitment process a positive experience for your applicants:
Communicate your employee value proposition clearly and concisely
Be forthcoming - give the candidate all of the employment details and resources they need to have a successful interview and make an informed decision
Offer an easy and mobile-friendly application process
Provide a pleasant, seamless and prompt interview experience