With the national unemployment rate at just 3.6%, this is a candidate’s job market. While many employers deliberate and consider their hiring options, their candidate pools are dwindling. Often, the best candidates are off the market within 10 days while many employers still engage in a 2-4 week process. Whereas hiring faster during times of lower employment typically yields the highest quality hires, in this market, your best candidates are getting multiple offers while you wait.

Ready to step on the gas and take back your hiring power? Let’s consider 5 reasons to shorten your hiring process and 3 ways to do it:

Reasons to Shorten Your Hiring Timeframe

1. Quality hires: A lengthy interview process all but assures that high-end, in-demand candidates won’t be available when you’re ready to make a decision during a 2-4 week process. Limiting the timeframe to a week to 10 days reduces attrition of top candidates so they are still available to you when it comes time to make that call.
2. Higher “yes” rates: Assume that the longer your process, the more competition you’ll face from competitors. Your best-qualified candidates will get other offers as your interviews move along, which will either force your company into a bidding war or to settle on the remaining candidates that might say “yes.” Strong candidates also enjoy the luxury of weighing offers rather than the urgency of having to make a decision. Don’t give your best potential hires too much time to reconsider, or they just might.
3. Your recruiters will thank you: Nothing is more frustrating to your recruiters than doing all of the legwork to source top quality candidates and watching them fall out due to a lack of urgency in hiring. Shorter recruitment cycles make it easier for them to close requisitions and hit targets. If they aren’t achieving their numbers, you could lose your best recruiters to rivals, in addition to your best candidates. We see this happening every week in DFW, in 2022.

Ways to Speed Up Your Hiring Process

1. Prioritize the skills you need: Perfect candidates don’t exist, and they are in extremely scarce supply in this market. Skills-based hiring enables you to source from a much larger hiring pool, rather than working with a long list of requirements that gradually diminishes the available talent. List the most important skills you require in order, with tiers representing must-have, nice-to-have, and trainable skills. Talented candidates can be trained, and will likely become more loyal and easy to retain once you do invest resources into their development.
2. Promote from within: Internal candidates may not have all of the skills you might ordinarily find by hiring outside talent, but they do offer several significant advantages. Professionals who are promoted from within tend to stay in their roles much longer than people hired from outside, because your company has proven its loyalty and ability to develop their talents. Furthermore, these professionals know and appreciate your company’s culture and processes, and have shown they can be successful in your organization. This helps them to hit the ground running more quickly in their new roles, which also gives you more time to develop missing skills.
3. Work with a staffing agency in your field: Top staffing agencies like Imprimis Group that represent your industry have deep networks to source hard-to-find talent. They enable you to interview and potentially hire active and passive job candidates, and their pre-vetting (and testing) of candidates means you don’t have to incorporate these time-consuming steps into your process. The applicants you interview are ready to be hired, which means you can make quick offers that face less competition.

As you incorporate these ideas, test your new approach against your old approach if you need to make the case for a revamped, faster hiring process. Use the streamlined approach on your harder-to-fill positions to demonstrate to your top executives that these steps do indeed give you the ROI you seek. Then keep testing and making incremental improvements, so that you’re ready for the next candidate’s market.