This year’s Tech Nation report is out, and it reveals some exciting statistics. It cites the UK as being the top scaling tech nation and Manchester as the fastest-growing tech cluster in Europe. Of course, this is fantastic news! Although, it does mean that demand for tech professionals in the North West is likely to increase. So how can you speed up the process of making hiring decisions? We explore what holds businesses back and share our top tips for speeding up your hiring process.

Why Is Time To Hire Important?

From our experience, it takes on average, six weeks to fill a tech job opening. Although, the best quality job seekers get snapped up within a few weeks of embarking on a job search. In fact, particularly well-qualified candidates often accept job offers within 24 hours of starting their job hunt. Ergo, the longer hiring managers take to make hiring decisions, the less chance they have of snapping up top talent.

The longer your role remains unfilled, the more likely your business is to make bad hiring decisions. Making a bad hire can cost a company untold amounts of money and hours of wasted time. Instead, pondering over the below questions that will help identify your bottlenecks and speed up your recruitment decision-making process.

These few simple questions can help identify where the bottlenecks are within your recruitment process and speed up your hiring decisions.

FIVE Questions To Ask That Will Speed Up Your Recruitment Process

1 — How strong is your employer brand?

New tech start-ups and small businesses with limited advertising budgets, find it hard to compete with larger companies. That’s because larger companies have seemingly endless budgets for advertising and promoting their employer brand. Consequently, they need to spend very little on advertising to attract the best available talent. Job seekers are always on the lookout for positions becoming available with larger companies and will often even apply speculatively.

The simplest way around this issue is to hire the services of a reputable recruitment agency. Choosing an agency who have a strong market presence enables you to piggyback off their reputation to increase your reach. Of course, hiring through an agency will cost your company a recruitment fee. Although this is often cheaper than paying for job board subscriptions and other marketing or advertising costs to promote your brand.

2 — Are you choosing the right words?

There is quite an art to crafting a job description that will speak to candidates in a way that makes them want to apply for your role. For a start, your advert must be SEO friendly in order to stand out. Additionally, it must use the kind of language that resonates with your ideal applicants.

If you’re not getting many applications for the roles you advertise, it’s worth checking a couple of things. Firstly, if you search for your role, does it appear in Google search results? If it doesn’t, your job advert is probably not SEO friendly. Or maybe it does but you’re not getting many applicants? If so, try showing it to people and ask them if they might feel compelled to apply for your role. If not, why not? There are a few fundamentals your job advert must contain:

• Salary — job adverts lacking salary details receive 60% fewer submissions
• Benefits — salary alone is not enough to make candidates apply these days. If your job advertises a salary of £45,000 with no mention of benefits and another offering the same salary does, which one do you think applicants will apply for?
• Plain language that a candidate at this level will understand
• 50/50 — your job ad should be as much about what your company can offer prospective employees as it expects from them in return
• A clear call to action telling them how to apply for the role

Words are powerful. Choose yours carefully.

3 — Are you maximising your digital capability?

Job hunting is extremely time-consuming. Indeed, tailoring CVs for each application, telephone interviews and attending face to face interviews can almost become a full-time job. Therefore, applicants expect a smooth candidate experience when they apply for jobs. If they can’t click a button to send their CV, it’s unlikely they will waste time applying for the role.

Video interviewing is another easy way to speed up your screening process. Hiring managers often waste valuable time in face to face interviews with unsuitable candidates. Conversely, video interviewing saves time for all. It allows interviewers to compile a set of questions which the candidate answers in their own time and returns to the interviewer by email. The interviewer can review it, leave notes and forward onto other stakeholders for their approval. By using this method for our clients, we have reduced their time to hire by around 40%.

4 — Are you asking the right questions?

If you don’t ask the right interview questions, you won’t get the information you’re looking for from your interviewees. Without this information, it is impossible to make sound decisions.

Asking the right interview questions will enable you to make better hiring decisions.

3 — How long do post-interview decisions take to make?

Candidates rarely apply for just one role. So if they have to take a day off work, the savviest job seekers schedule several interviews in one day. This enables them to make the most of any days off. Hiring managers, therefore, need to be quick to make an offer as soon as possible after the interview takes place.

This is where companies most often lose out on the candidates they are interested in. Unfortunately, post-interview hiring decisions take too long in many organisations. If this sounds familiar, it’s worth considering how your company can streamline its decision-making process.

For example, the opinions of several key people are often necessary and it’s difficult to get everyone together to have that discussion. If this is the case, how about scheduling time into their diaries straight after the interview? That way, the discussion takes place while thoughts are still fresh in everyone’s minds.

Time is ticking… If your company wants to compete in the race for tech talent, you need to speed up your hiring decisions.

A Few Final Thoughts on How to Speed up Hiring Decisions

To compete for IT talent in today’s recruitment market, decisions must be made as quickly as possible. Candidates don’t waste time in applying for other roles if they think you’re company is not interested. You will almost certainly lose them if you don’t make hiring decisions quickly enough.

If your business is struggling to make hiring decisions quickly enough and losing candidates as a result, our team are on hand to help with any of the above.

We hope you found this article useful. If so, please feel free to share it on social media where others can benefit from it too.