What is a hiring process? Why is a great hiring process so important? What are the 5 most common bottlenecks in the hiring process, and how can these be fixed?
Our latest article shares the practical tips and advice on the topic – crowdsourced from our team of expert Talent Partners who’ve been there and done it when it comes to shaping effective hiring processes for scaling companies globally.
What is a hiring process?
Simply put, the hiring process refers to the framework you have in place to find, select, and recruit new employees into your organisation. It comprises several important phases – including planning, attracting candidates and making a job offer – and it often involves various internal stakeholders at your company.
Why is a great hiring process so important?
A delayed or inefficient hiring process can cause significant issues for your company. Business growth and scaling success depends on building a high-performing team of skilled people in the right time frame to meet your goals.
This means that if you have issues across your hiring process, not only could you lose out on great talent but there will likely be a negative impact on productivity, revenue, employee engagement and brand reputation.
In short, a robust and sophisticated hiring process is fundamental to overall organisational success.
But creating or shaping a great hiring process can often be easier said than done.
How can issues in the hiring process be identified?
Data.
Data. Data. Data. Data.
Yes you might have a gut feel. But data trumps assumptions everytime.
Solid reporting on a regular basis should flag any issues as they arise – and occasionally you might need to do a deep deep dive or role diagnostic.
Here at Scede, we monitor data across the entire hiring funnel for our partners – from outreach to screen, to first interview, to skills assessment, to final interview, to offer made, to hire made. This allows us to pick up on any issues in real time and ensure we’re consistently hitting the benchmarks we set ourselves in order to deliver an exceptional service to our customers.
If hiring funnel reporting is something you could do with some quick advice on, get in touch. We’d be happy to help and share some of our own templates.
5 Common Bottlenecks in the Hiring Process and How to Fix Them
The phrase work smarter not harder shouldn’t be something we shy away from.
Especially in the present day, when Talent Acquisition teams are being asked to do more with less. Companies are striving to minimise cash burn and increase profitability right now. Some Talent teams have decreased in size and tools, and therefore have far less time and resources than before. Yet the focus remains on driving towards efficacy and output across teams.
The hiring process is one area that you can optimise – working smarter to remove bottlenecks that might seem like 1% gains, but overall surmount to significant improvements.
And in today’s climate, every little helps.
Our Talent Partners have helped to scale some hugely successful tech companies and games studios over the years, through many different stages of growth. They’ve been on the frontline of fixing faulty recruitment processes, so we asked them ““what are the common bottlenecks you see in the hiring process and how have you gone about fixing them”?
Below, we share some of the consistent themes that came from that.
Bottleneck 1 – Your hiring process is unstructured and there’s misalignment across the hiring community
The Problem
When you look at your data do your conversations between screen and first interview, or first interview to assessment seem off?
If so, this could be due to a lack of structure in your recruitment process and alignment in the hiring community.
Time pressures or excitement – or both – mean there can be a tendency to jump into hiring before clearly defining what it is you’re looking for and what role everybody involved in the recruitment process has to play.
What does the ideal candidate look like for the business?
Where can you find them?
What outreach will catch their attention?
How will you assess their skills and competencies?
Who do they need to meet with internally?
And what can you offer them that is within budget and competitive?
It can be tempting to go with the “we’ll wing it and work it out as we go” mindset but this will set you up to fail in the long run.
Skipping past the planning phase will lead to misalignment across the hiring community, and a messy route to the desired result. And it’ll likely be a sub-par result at that. It’ll also lead to a crappy experience for both your candidates and your hiring managers.
Worst case scenario you make a wrong hire, have to start again and tarnish your brand reputation. Yuck.
The Fix
The fix for this starts with a mindset shift. Gone are the days of recruiters being seen as order takers. Talent professionals should be true partners to their internal stakeholders; there to guide them and act as an advisor for hiring – in order to achieve the right outcomes for the business.
This starts with building strong stakeholder relationships, driving education across the hiring community and ultimately building trust. Our article here dives into that topic further.
Once the mindset around hiring is reset, there are a number of strategic and tactical measures to put in place to create a structured recruitment process and alignment throughout the hiring community.
Create a robust role sign-off and intake process – this gives you powerful context behind the reason for the hire, priority level, what flexibility can be offered, the structure of the team they’ll be joining, core responsibilities, what tech the candidate might be using, and other useful facts to equip you throughout candidate conversations. It also allows you and your hiring manager to be on the same page from day one. Using a template here ensures this is consistent and standardised.
Hiring community kick off meetings – this enables you to clearly define and confirm everyone’s understanding of the role requirements, any target companies they want to see candidates from, outline the part each person has to play in the hiring process, what you and they are assessing (as well as when and how), and be specific about expectations on feedback timeframes (even implementing SLAs if needed). Our Talent Partners also like to use this opportunity to go through 10 – 20 example candidates together with the hiring manager in real time. This allows us to calibrate on what “great” looks like quickly for the role in question.
Create and implement interview scorecards – doing this for each role ensures your approach to assessing candidates is consistent and fair across the entire hiring community. It also ensures that you are using your time and the candidates’ time effectively, removing any risk of repetition in the hiring process. A critical part of this is educating your hiring community on how to use these and ensuring each step of the interview process adheres to the prescribed structure.
Upskill your hiring committee on tools and technology – from making sure your internal team are comfortable with the likes of Google Meet and Zoom, to showing them where and how to leave feedback for candidates in your ATS. It might take a training session or two, but in the long-run it’ll absolutely be worth it.
Agree on communication cadences – whether it’s asynchronous methods of communication or otherwise, set expectations from the get go around how you and your hiring community will interact. Here at Scede we blend a mix of standups, Slack notices, weekly syncs and regular reporting to ensure continued alignment across our internal stakeholders, as well as giving us the chance to close any feedback loops, build strong relationships, and answer any questions.
Set expectations with candidates – once you’re aligned on the above internally, be transparent with candidates so that they know what to expect from the hiring process. This can include who they’ll speak to and when, what the nature of those conversations will be, how many steps there are in the recruitment process and the timelines you’re looking at for this as well.
Something our Talent Partners have found particularly impactful for our customers is creating an “Interviewer” onboarding program. This allows any new people that join the hiring community to be brought up to speed on the hiring process quickly and smoothly.
Bottleneck 2 – Your hiring process is cumbersome and there’s low engagement from the talent pool
The Problem
When you look at your data does your outreach to hire ratio seem out of whack? Are there a high number of candidates dropping out of your process part way through?
It sounds like your hiring process is too cumbersome and / or your talent pool is disengaged.
We understand. You want to attract and hire the best talent out there, so a rigorous process might seem apt. But a lengthy hiring process can lead to disengagement from both candidates AND hiring managers.
It’s a delicate tightrope to walk.
How many stages are you asking your candidates to go through?
How many people are they having to meet throughout the interview process?
Is your assessment appropriate for the level of seniority you’re hiring for?
If somebody meets with the recruiter, the hiring manager, two members of the team, the Founder, an external advisor and the office dog ( !! ) that could be a bit of a red flag. Is there a lack of trust in decision making at your organisation? Or a culture of death by consensus?
One particular step that tends to cause a roadblock in the hiring process is the take-home task. Often these require a large investment in time from both the candidate and the hiring manager – so need to be carefully considered as not to rub either side of the party up the wrong way.
The Fix
You’re an expert in your field. You know what “good” looks like when assessing whether a candidate is the right fit for a role. More often than not, there are shared practices on how this can be assessed effectively. Lean on this benchmarking information to challenge the existing approach, using data and market intel to show what the optimal steps look like for the role you’re hiring into.
Dig further into your data to identify the exact point of friction that is causing any candidate drop offs. Ask for feedback from candidates, monitor your task sent to task completed conversions, check what the average time is for candidates to be sat in certain stages of the process.
Ask yourself, is the take-home task as clear and aligned to the role as possible? Does it achieve what we need it to as quickly as possible, or are we asking for too much? Does the nature of the task put people off or is it misaligned to the level we’re hiring at?
One question worth asking is whether the take-home task has been sense checked or calibrated internally with any existing people in the role or a similar role. This will help you to determine whether it’s suitable, what time frames to complete it are realistic and ultimately whether your expectations from candidates are reasonable or not.
If disengagement from candidates is coming much earlier on in the process – during outreach, or screening – you should question whether what you’re offering is strong enough. If you’re sourcing proactively in a competitive market you need to sell your opportunity well in order to stand out.
This starts with deeply understanding the motivations of your talent pool and exactly how the role or company you’re hiring can meet these. What’s important to a sales person is likely very different to what’s important to an engineering manager so tailor your messaging using a multi-platform, hyper-personalised campaign.
Whatever you do, don’t be generic. Be genuine and knowledgeable – and feel free to get creative. Our Talent Partners use videos, voice notes, candidate information packs and personal hiring manager messages to catch the attention of candidates and resonate. Sometimes the odd gif can come in handy too!
Bottleneck 3: You lack timely communication and impactful feedback across the hiring process
The Problem
Does the candidate’s “time in stage” seem too long? Are candidates flagging issues with feedback and communication through your hiring process? This might indicate an issue with communication and feedback across the hiring process.
As a Talent Leader, how often have you heard the words “something just didn’t feel right” or “they’re just not the right fit” … * cue screaming into a pillow.
Vague, inconsistent, and impractical feedback can crush the effectiveness of your hiring process – not least because it lands on your lap to turn it into something actionable.
Sadly, it’s not uncommon and this, indecisiveness, or lack of use of the right tools to share feedback is something we often see hampering a successful recruitment process.
In fact, 54% of candidates have abandoned a recruitment process due to poor communication from the recruiter or employer – and feedback plays a massive part in this. The less tight your comms cadence is internally, the more friction that could cause for the candidate.
This can be caused by poor hiring manager training and capability (something we’ll come onto), the absence of formal interview scorecards and feedback methods, lack of a tight comms cadence, or not using an ATS correctly.
The Fix
Have a time-bound decision-making process to provide prompt feedback to candidates, upskill your hiring managers on how to interview candidates effectively, and show them how and where to leave their thoughts in your existing system or ATS.
Don’t be afraid to implement 24 – 48 hour timeframes that any feedback from interviews must be submitted by, and schedule debrief sessions with the hiring team following any final interviews. These should be 15-minute slots that enable you to ensure alignment in the hiring decision across the team and as a recruiter, course correct any interviewer behaviours that might be off.
Educate your hiring community on why timely and helpful feedback is important. It’s fundamental to the candidate experience, aids further calibration on what good looks like for the role, is key to a fair and unbiased interview process and ultimately makes a massive impact on the employer brand.
Ownership here is key, and being clear about who is responsible for sharing the feedback to the candidate and via what method is critical. Ensure that the feedback you give is SMART and helps them in their search for their next role. SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-Bound.
With platforms such as Glassdoor and Otta highlighting interview feedback publicly to prospective talent and allowing candidates to review their process with you, a poor experience delivered to one person could hamper you from securing your A* candidate in the future.
Even when you know the feedback isn’t quite ready for the candidate yet, keep in touch with them.
Overcommunicate on progress and where things are at, be transparent and continue to nurture that relationship with the individual from your side as a Talent Partner. This alone can be the difference between disengagement versus delight.
Bottleneck 4: You lack capacity in your hiring community, leading to poor candidate engagement and volume
The Problem
This is another bottleneck that can be indicated through lengthy “time in stage” data across your hiring funnel.
One of the biggest challenges we come across is the hiring process is not having the right level of capacity in the interviewing panel for the volume of hires needed in the timeframe specified.
Sometimes a hiring plan can be approved but the infrastructure isn’t in place from a hiring manager resource perspective – whether due to not enough people having the capability or training to conduct interviews, or competing business priorities.
The hiring process takes time and internal resources. And those that have been selected to be involved in the hiring process alongside their “day job” need the space in their calendars to commit to helping to scale the team.
Scheduling interviews can not only be a source of great frustration for your Talent team, but lack of availability can also result in a long and drawn-out process for both the candidate and the employer.
This can lead to candidate dropouts and a poor candidate experience.
The Fix
When you’re shaping your interview process or resourcing your talent acquisition team to meet hiring demand, you must consider interviewer capacity.
How much interviewer time is required to make the desired number of hires? You can gauge this by looking at your level of effort data.
Knowing this and planning for it upfront is critical to success, allowing you to expand your interviewer pool early, optimise your hiring process according to the resource available, conduct interviewer training and interview shadowing, implement agile methods of assessment if needed, and be clear with the candidate about interview process timelines.
For example if you’re recruiting for an Engineer, and the hiring committee has limited availability to review intensive technical tests, could they do a 1-hour paired coding session instead?
We also strongly advise putting placeholders in the calendars of your hiring committee, identifying a dedicated time for them to conduct interviews each week. This shows your hiring managers that you respect their time, and gives them space to continue with their own role responsibilities and deep work.
It also allows you to offer pre-determined time slots to your candidates, avoids the back and forth of coordinating calendars and streamlines the interview scheduling process overall.
You can use free tools such as Calendly to add a level of automation to this process. Many ATS’ have this functionality baked in – so it’s worth doing your research to decide which solution is most effective for you.
Our Talent Partners also suggest having hiring managers on rotation. This helps to avoid interview burnout and ensures continued levels of positive engagement amongst both hiring managers and the candidates they’re speaking to.
Bottleneck 5: You can’t seem to close candidates successfully
The Problem
Looking at your offer to hire ratio and wondering why it’s so low?
It’s gutting isn’t it – when you finally get the perfect candidate through the interview process, the hiring manager feedback is off the charts and you have the honour of extending an offer.
Only for them to decline it.
Ouch.
How can this be? They were right for you. They passed all of your assessments. They would’ve been a great addition to your team. They ticked ALL of your boxes.
But you clearly didn’t tick all of theirs. And if that came as a surprise to you, you’ve got a problem with your hiring process.
Either there’s a problem with the offer process, the salary and overall compensation and benefits package being offered, or candidate management.
Or worse – a combination of all three.
The Fix
When defining the requirements for a role, a budget should be established based on solid market research and benchmarking – and discussion should be had with your internal stakeholders as to whether there is any flexibility in this.
Once that’s set, be transparent with salary banding for the role upfront. According to Glassdoor, 45% of job seekers rank salary and compensation at the pinnacle of their job considerations. And yet many companies resist being open about it with candidates – which leads to time being wasted on both sides of the equation.
Where you can, include it in the job advert or at the very least as part of the initial application process. Again, the hiring process is a two-way street and you owe it to the candidates you’re speaking with to respect their time.
Something our Talent Partners find particularly effective is having a pre-close conversation with the candidate. Understanding the state of play on their side – their gut feel about the opportunity, comfortability with the potential package, any concerns or hesitations, if they’re relocating what questions do they still have surrounding this. Sometimes it can help to ask very openly “what would prevent you from taking an offer from us at this point”.
It’s also critical to know if the candidate is speaking with other companies.. This question should be asked early on in the hiring process, not just so that this doesn’t come as a surprise further down the line, but so that you can speed up timelines if and where needed.
If your offers are consistently coming out as low and not at market rate, illustrate this to your hiring manager with supporting data. You might need to recalibrate on the level or seniority being asked for in this role, or the experience that is required. If there’s no flex in this, then there can be an argument to push for more budget for the role internally. By showing qualitative data and sharing rejection reasons, you can speak about it objectively with your internal stakeholders and work towards a compromise that enables you all to move forwards.
Oh – and don’t let issues getting contracts out, or correct, impact the candidate experience right at this very last moment. Get all your ducks in a row with the HR team before extending the offer to the candidate, make sure candidates have the documents they need to review in a timely fashion and when an offer is accepted don’t let your relationship management with them stop there. They’re making a huge decision to join your team – why not nudge the hiring manager to send them a personal message of thanks and excitement to show further investment in them and appreciation of them taking part in the process.
To close
Hopefully from the advice we’ve shared above you feel equipped to take a closer look at your own hiring process and solve for some of the challenges that might be holding you back from making great hires in the timeframe you need to.
If not, we’re here to help. We recently optimised the DevOps hiring process for one of our FinTech partners, increasing their screen to first interview conversion from 33% to 56% and their first interview to onsite assessment conversion from 30% to 86%. This was achieved through a combination of the tactics outlined above, and some additional optimisations, tailored to our partners specific need.