How to Boost Your Recruiting Efficiency: Top 8 Tips to Level Up

Almost all recruiting teams around the world are facing multi-dimensional challenges with sourcing and hiring quality talent. Especially, when the requirements are scaled up – recruiters struggle with the extensive competition and fast hiring expectations. A majority of hiring managers look for different strategies to pivot their recruitment approach - but is it always the solution? Well, changing the direction of your talent acquisition won’t assure you a smoother or faster drive. But when you deconstruct your hiring process to elevate recruitment efficiency –  the chances of success significantly increase.

The process followed by recruiting teams alongside the candidate experience contributes heavily to your hiring outcomes. If you have been in management meetings before, you would probably relate to stakeholders asking hiring managers to scale up the volume with limited resources. It can either be the budget or the recruitment team, but the requirements are rarely the same in volume or stagnant.

Contrary to popular opinion, measuring recruiting efficiency is not possible without diving into hiring metrics. While some might argue that efficiency is a qualitative analysis performed by experience – it cannot be enhanced unless accurately measured. You need to combine numerous metrics together to figure out the areas that need improvement. Consequently, these measurements also tell you if the recruitment team requires expansion.

It’s evident recruiting efficiency has to be consistently taken care of in order to optimize your talent acquisition. But how do you take the necessary steps to level up your recruiting efficiency? What are the data-driven actions that must follow for successfully recruiting top candidates? Let’s dive deep into answers to these along with the 8 most impactful strategies that you can implement right away for boosting recruiting efficiency.

What is Recruiting Efficiency?

Before we move on to the top tips for elevating recruitment efficiency, let’s quickly revisit what it refers to. You need to know what you’re dealing with inside out in order to solve something. 

Recruiting efficiency is the measure of how optimal your entire recruitment process is – right from the application stage to the onboarding of talent. The candidate experience, cost of recruitment, and return on invested resources is largely driven by the efficiency of recruiting. How? Let's first take a couple of statistics:

• 60% of job seekers quit in the middle of filling out online job applications because of their length or complexity
• 52% of candidates don’t receive any communication in the two to three (or more) months after applying.

Not only the quality of candidates you hire but the time and cost required to hire those candidates also depend on your recruiting efficiency. And you should know that a vacant position costs $500 a day to organizations on average. Surprised already? Well, take it as another huge reason why your hiring process needs revamping.

The reason why recruitment efficiency is a vital metric today is straightforward - it impacts all the stages and participants in the journey. 

• While in the application phase, you aim for getting CVs relevant to the position and company requirements. The more quality profiles you receive, the better candidates you would be interviewing and hiring. 

• Next comes the interview stage in which you want to check if enough candidates out of the interviewed ones are getting the offer letter or not. If the ratio is too low, it’s a clear sign you’re unable to attract quality candidates.

• Not to forget - the candidate experience which drives the success rate of your recruitment funnel’s bottom stage - onboarding. The ratio of people accepting your job offer defines how well the candidates have been engaged and tells you about their satisfaction level. 

Top 8 Tips To Increase Recruiting Efficiency 

1. Make Your Job Descriptions Precise

First things first, the job description is your prior interaction with the candidates and it sets the tone for your entire recruitment cycle. To optimize the hiring outcomes, your job posts need to be short, clear, and concise. You need to be very specific about the requirements and candidate responsibilities you state in the document. 

Adding too many non-primary candidate responsibilities and expectations might confuse your visitors and harm your application rate. Additionally, the more optimized your job description is for the required job role, the higher the relevancy of received applications and hence more profiles can be shortlisted in a shorter period of time. Here are the prior constituents you should have in job descriptions explained in a succinct way:

• Job overview
• Responsibilities
• Qualifications - skills and experience
• Company mission statement
• Relevant web page links - About us, culture pages, and recent Press Releases
• Links to company social media

Any non-essential requirements and information should be avoided and the focus should be on persuading the candidates for applying for the open roles.

2. Utilize an ATS

Most of the recruiting teams spend hours each day on maintaining the candidate applications database manually as a result – the efficiency of the recruitment process is not dedicatedly focused upon. Tracking, updating, and managing candidate databases is a hefty task and a large chunk of human resources in every company are invested in these operations. Utilizing an Applicant Tracking System (ATS) tool solves this at scale.

The capabilities of ATS tools are not limited to application tracking, some tools even help in automating the first round of screening. So whether you’re scaling up your recruiting or have just a few people in your recruitment team, ATS can be a very handy tool. Not only do you save enough time by automating repeated lengthy maintenance tasks, but it also boosts your recruitment team’s productivity by enabling collaborative hiring. The high-level view of your recruitment pipeline is particularly useful in continuously analyzing and improving your recruitment journey.

3. Amplify Your Referral Campaigns

If there’s one source of recruiting candidates you can always rely on no matter the scale of your company or the position you’re hiring for – is candidate referrals. Despite being one of the most effective ways of recruiting, numerous organizations put limited focus on referral campaigns. Amidst today’s intensely competitive landscape, leveraging your employees’ networks is a fantastic way to boost recruiting efficiency. 

In terms of all the primitive recruitment metrics - time, cost, and retention of hired candidates, referrals top the charts with the best metrics. Although on average only 7% of the total candidates are referred by employees, around 40% of them convert! Employers now need to amplify their referral campaigns through aggressive promotions and reward systems. A strategic combination of both internal and external referrals ensures you hire fast and at fast fewer costs as compared to other approaches.

4. Strategize Your Passive Talent Sourcing

Around 73% of all the candidates today are passive job seekers. While inbound recruiting and active sourcing of talent worked quite well earlier, the passive talent pool is a different challenge to track. When it comes to impact generation, passively sourced candidates are 120% more likely to establish a positive impact on organizations. That’s not all - passively sourced candidates are 17% less likely than active candidates to need further skill development efforts.

Passive talent sourcing also allows you to tailor your recruitment efforts to assess only qualified and skilled candidates. Building your talent pool has a huge role to play in your organization’s growth and hiring success, and the key to accomplishing that successfully is through passive sourcing. 

Recruiting teams and hiring managers need to go big on passive outbound recruitment to acquire quality skilled talent in the least amount of time. Continuously building your talent pool, engaging with candidates, and recruiting them is a lengthy process but the generated results are usually multifold of the same efforts spent in cracking inbound recruitment.  

5. Optimize Candidate Communication

If you have been in the recruitment space for quite some time, you would probably know why communication skills are prioritized for recruiters and are often trained around the same. While it’s a huge factor in defining the quality of recruitment followed at your organization, effective communication also leaves your candidates with a positive initial impression.

Recruiting efficiency depends on streamlined and timely communication with candidates and employees. From sourcing candidates to recruiting and keeping them effectively engaged throughout the funnel – the way you and the team communicate with talent defines their future decisions. 

Contrary to popular opinion, communication isn’t just about when you talk to them on the phone or via video call interviews, it’s much more beyond that. Even before a candidate applies to your role, it begins with your job promotion posts and sourcing emails. At each stage of the recruiting journey, quality communication aimed at solving candidates’ problems in the easiest way possible – helps you recruit better candidates quickly and efficiently.   

6. Simplify Your Interview Conduction

This is one of the most common challenges faced by organizations today. What’s even more surprising is – a number of employers don’t even consider this a problem. Not having a standardized approach towards interviewing candidates and allowing recruiting team members to conduct interviews based on experiences and experiments – severely affects your recruitment efforts. How? You not only lose out on top talent but also end up spending a lot of time and resources without positive results. 

Following a templatized interview structure along with regular training sessions for the recruiting teams help them conduct fair and streamlined interviews. Along with generic recruitment training, the hiring manager should also ensure sync between departmental heads and recruiting team members for role-specific requirements. This immensely helps in simplifying the interview process for recruiters and promises a consistent candidate experience. Better interviews directly mean more effective candidates being identified and recruiters getting to know candidates deeply. 

7. Consistently Focus on Employer Branding 

Working on recruiting efficiency doesn’t just mean setting up short-term goals and chasing them. In order to ensure you don’t always put extensive efforts in sourcing top-notch talent and establishing your organization as an employer of choice. Work consistently on your employer brand by prioritizing the superior candidate experience, aggressively running recruitment marketing campaigns, and promoting your company culture. 

Another great approach to boosting your employer brand is by leveraging your employees’ network. When you represent your brand subtly through personal social profiles, the awareness and thought leadership aspects elevate significantly. You make your company culture and experience clearly stand out among the huge crowd. As a result, your brand attracts and hires much better talent both via inbound and outbound efforts. Candidates have more than a few choices when it comes to choosing their employer today, what makes the difference is your employer brand. 

8. Automate Your Sourcing and Engagement

Let’s cut to the chase – recruiters already have a lot on their plate at any given point in time. Identifying, outreaching, engaging, sourcing, recruiting, promoting jobs, managing candidates and the list is truly endless. While a large chunk of companies has relatively small recruitment teams of 3-6 people, it becomes too hectic for recruiters to handle both analytical and mundane admin tasks of maintaining the recruitment pipeline. With scaled-up requirements, manual recruitment operations are nothing short of a nightmare and the effects are actually seen in the quality of talent acquired due to lack of time. Here’s where recruitment automation comes into the picture.

Modern recruitment is about racing against time and facing continuous competition for hiring top talent. In such a scenario, automating the most time-consuming repeated tasks of your recruitment – candidate sourcing and continuous engagement is the need of the hour. Using automated candidate sourcing, you can reach out to as many candidates, add them to your talent pipeline and nurture them continuously. As a result, you never run out of quality candidates and your hiring becomes 5x faster with an internal pool of engaged talent.

Elevate Your Recruiting Efficiency – Recruitment Automation with Nurturebox

No matter how big or small your recruitment team is, mundane admin tasks like maintaining the candidate pipeline and engaging with the masses harm your team’s productivity. And when you’re hiring for multiple roles and when the requirements scale up, escalation with manual efforts produces hectic recruiters, not sudden results. But now that you're here, you already have your solution at hand. 

Nurturebox enables talent teams to scale up their outbound recruitment efforts with a comprehensive sourcing and engagement solution. The tool also combines with your existing ATS to serve you a birds-eye view of your entire recruitment scenario. The Chrome extension plugs in with your LinkedIn and integrates with your tech stack to help you source candidates and engage them within seconds – all through a single dashboard.