What’s the secret to great recruiting in today’s candidate-driven job market?
In order to land top talent, you need to make the most of your resources. This means optimizing the candidate experience, as well as measuring the effectiveness of your strategy.
Raise the Bar on Recruiting Etiquette
To ensure that you are consistently picking from the best candidates out there, make these adjustments to your hiring process as needed:
- Stay in touch. The importance of ongoing communication with candidates cannot be overemphasized. If you tell an individual you’ll be in touch by the end of the week, then do so, even if it’s only to let them know you need to extend your response until a specified future date. Reemphasize your interest in them as a prospective hire.
- Create an FAQ page on your careers site. This can be very helpful for candidates and for you. While keeping applicants informed, it also reduces the number of questions your staff will have to field. A few sample questions might be: “Will I receive a confirmation once I submit my application?” and “How long will it take before I can expect a call regarding an interview?”
- Proactively check in with previous candidates. If a person is not a fit for your immediate opening, they may be at some point in the future. Periodically reach out to them by emailing company newsletters and other updates, and make sure they are subscribers to your automated job alerts. Send top passive candidates a personal note every month or so to stay in touch.
Metrics to Watch
Identifying and reviewing key metrics is critical to the long-term success of your recruitment strategy. Review these measures regularly to ensure the speed and quality of your hiring process:
- Time to present and number of candidate slates. These two metrics are critical indicators of time-to-fill and hiring manager satisfaction. A general time to present target – the length of time between the opening of a job requisition and presentation of a qualified candidate slate – is 10 to 14 days. A slate is generally defined as three qualified candidates.
- Hiring manager feedback timeliness. Quick feedback from your managers regarding the quality of a submitted candidate slate should take about two days. Consider publishing a quarterly scorecard, by department, of time of feedback averages by manager. This may spark some healthy competition.
- Aging of requisitions. Generally, 10 to 20 percent of requisitions aged beyond 45 days is a reasonable expectation. Tracking this metric helps you to identify and solve small problems before they mushroom.
- Present-to-interview ratio. This is the ratio of candidates presented to a hiring manager to the number who are selected for interviews. Anything below 75 percent is cause for concern.
- Interview-to-offer ratio. This is a measure of how many candidates, on average, need to be interviewed before an offer is made. Ideally, the ratio should be no higher than 3:1.
- Offer acceptance rate. This is the percentage of offers that are accepted by candidates. The desired number varies based on type of position and industry. However, it usually ranges from 80 percent in more competitive areas to 95 percent in less competitive functions such as administrative roles.
Would you like to learn more about gauging and improving your recruiting process? Consider partnering with the talent management experts at PrideStaff Modesto. Read our related posts or contact us today, so we can tell you more.
