Welcome to episode 17 of Claire Shares. I’m so glad you’re here. Today’s talent attraction topic is hiring process timelines. Having timelines created internally and expectations set with all key stakeholders such as HR, the hiring manager, and interview team is so important for talent attraction and candidate engagement. What experience are you creating for candidates throughout the process? You want to maintain a strong employer brand in the market, receive referrals and eliminate candidate drop off from the hiring process being too long. Being decisive is key.
So let’s dive into hiring quality talent faster with an effective hiring timeline. You can find more information on this topic on our Lighthouse Technology Services resources web page, where our CEO Randy Harris wrote a fantastic article with a helpful template to start from. Finding and hiring the people you need for your organization can be incredibly challenging. At its worst, the process is time-consuming, frustrating, and costly. By taking a few simple steps to streamline your hiring process, you can gain a competitive advantage – one that allows you to attract and hire higher quality talent, in less time. In this episode, we’ll discuss how adopting smart strategies helps you optimize the recruit-to-hire process. Quickly identify the right-fit talent, and hire the best people faster and with more confidence than ever before.
When do you need this new hire to start?
First, whether this is a new position or replacement, establish a target date when you want the future employee to start work. This is likely even more relevant if it’s a contract position. You likely have a project in the works with an associated timeline that you need this employee for. Keep in mind current team members’ PTO time and availability to train – once you find the right person, you want their onboarding experience to be a positive one! From that target start date, we can schedule out our tasks and actions. If you want to go deeper on the new hire experience, episode 4 of Claire Shares on onboarding and orientation processes, and episode 5 on new hire communication, will be helpful!
Document the open position through a kick off meeting
Next, document your hiring needs. This typically happens during a kickoff meeting or intake meeting between the recruiter or HR partner, and the hiring manager. As you start the journey of expanding your team, it’s crucial to identify your work needs for the position you intend to hire for. Document the skills and experiences needed for someone to do the job. This should be less focused on the number of years of experience, and more on the work itself. Know this: A calendar does not indicate skill level. Some people with two years’ experience are more skilled than those who have 10 years of experience.
Budget should be discussed here as well. It’s helpful to have some information on supply and demand data, or gather input from your favorite agency recruiter on what they’re seeing in the market in terms of salaries for the skills and experience you’re looking for. You may need to lower the skills expectations and build in some more training time if your budget is set below market rate. You may be able to raise your budget if you’d rather have someone with less ramp up time or where niche knowledge and skills are needed right away.
If you need a kickoff meeting form template, reach out to me and I’d be happy to share mine. Getting everyone in the process on the same page before sourcing and screening starts ensures you can move quickly, limit rework, and provide a great candidate experience. Documenting your hiring needs and having the intake meeting tends to take around 1 hour.
Create the job description and job posting
Next, ensure you have a job description and a modern job posting. Be sure to check out episode 14 of Claire Shares, where I discuss creating an awesome job postings to attract your ideal candidates. The job posting is an incredible marketing asset, and provides potential applicants with the information they need to make an informed decision about whether the role is right for them to apply to.
In addition, a job description is an important piece of HR documentation for the employer. Here’s an overview of job descriptions from the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM):
“A job description is a useful, plain-language tool that explains the tasks, duties, function and responsibilities of a position. It details who performs a specific type of work, how that work is to be completed, and the frequency and the purpose of the work as it relates to the organization’s mission and goals. Job descriptions are used for a variety of reasons, such as determining salary levels, conducting performance reviews, clarifying missions, establishing titles and pay grades, and creating reasonable accommodation controls, and as a tool for recruiting. Job descriptions are useful in career planning, offering training exercises and establishing legal requirements for compliance purposes. A job description gives an employee a clear and concise resource to be used as a guide for job performance. Likewise, a supervisor can use a job description as a measuring tool to ensure that the employee is meeting job expectations.”
If you don’t already have a job description for the role, budget about 2 hours to create the job description and job posting. For help creating these, reach out to your favorite HR pro like myself, reference SHRM, or partner with your internal compensation department.
Promote the position
Now we want to promote the position! Last time on episode of 15 of Claire Shares, I talked about ways to promote and distribute your job posting. In summary, we want to encourage referrals, harness the power of digital communications and social media, utilize our employees as brand ambassadors to share job postings with their networks, and focus on the job boards/websites specific to the type of open role or industry. Get your posting up on the channels that works best for you all within a day to maintain your momentum. Once it’s out there, again given you have a great job posting, an appropriate salary range for the role and have spread the word, you should expect to have some candidates to review within a few days. For niche roles, or depending on supply and demand where more passive sourcing is needed, you may need to expand the timeframe as it may take longer to get candidates.
Considering candidates
Let’s continue on with our momentum! When a job posting goes up, as the recruiter, I am closely watching the position for qualified applicants during the first few days. In today’s job market, it is more critical than ever to review job applications and resumes promptly. Taking too long to review applications and resumes can lead to losing top candidates to competitors – a costly mistake.
Not only does swift action here demonstrate your enthusiasm and respect for potential employees, but it also signals that you are a responsive and efficient employer. Scheduling interviews quickly is equally important in showing that you value the candidate’s interest in your company and their employability. Technology and automation can help you speed up this process too. Here at Lighthouse we have email templates pre-built with our Calendly links, which connect to our recruiting team’s calendars and allow candidates to quickly book an interview time that works for them.
Today, talented individuals are in high demand and often have multiple job offers to consider. Not acting quickly will cost you the best candidates AND more of your valuable time! A delayed hiring process can impact your company’s productivity and lead to a more prolonged recruitment cycle. We aim to have between 2-5 screens with candidates set up within a week of the position opening.
Interview process
Now we’ll get into the interviewing process. This is key and where I see the most delay and candidate drop off taking place during the hiring process. Earlier in this episode, when we discussed doing the kickoff meeting, I work with my hiring manager to establish what the interview process will look like during that meeting. That way, when we have candidates ready for this step, we can quickly and confidently move them forward. For example, that may look like a 30 minute Teams video interview with the hiring manager, and then a 1 hour onsite interview with the hiring manager and another key team member. I always recommend a 30 minute video interview between the candidate and the hiring manager as a first step. In today’s remote work environment, conducting virtual interviews has become the norm. Hiring managers don’t want to waste their time with onsite interviews before knowing if the person is a good fit. Candidates don’t want to waste their time or money driving onsite either before getting to meet who they are working for and getting a good idea if they are still interested in the role. If at all possible, we recommend the hiring manager speak to a few candidates over these 30 minute teams video interviews over a 2-3 day period. This way we can continue to move the good candidate or candidates forward who we know will have competing interest, and we can let the folks we are passing on know timely as well so they can best proceed with their search!
If the role requires an onsite/in person interview, I highly recommend limiting this to 1 visit. You want to identify your hire as quickly as possible so you can get out of the hiring process, and you don’t want to risk candidates discovering another competitor that moves more efficiently. If you’re the only one interviewing the candidate, great. If you have multiple team members interviewing the candidate, which is a good best practice, then coordinate all these interviews to take place on the same day, in succession. Even better, group interviewers together, as each interview in this instance doesn’t need to be one-on-one. Having crafted a hiring needs list and a job description, you and your interviewing team should have a good understanding of what everyone is looking to learn in their interview time.
The main point here is to combine all your interviews into one successive series of interviews that take place on the same day, instead of conducting multiple interviews across multiple days, which expands the hiring timeline. Expanding the hiring timeline will only serve to increase the odds that you’ll lose a good candidate to a competitor company with a faster hiring process. A three-day period (or less) in which all your remaining candidates interview is what you’re striving for. This limits the amount of time the first candidate, who may be your best candidate, is waiting to receive a job offer. The longer people wait in between steps, the more likely you are to lose them.
Making an offer
Let’s make an offer! We aim to do this within 24 hours of the final interview.
When interviewing a candidate, the job of the interviewer is to come to one of two conclusions: “Heck Yes” or “No.” When those are the only two options, you eliminate decision paralysis – which trips up many hiring managers as they fall past deadlines, costing the company good candidates, more time, and more money. The best practice we recommend is to confer with your interviewing team right after each candidate interviews and identify if they are a “Heck Yes” or a “No.” That way, everyone is able to share feedback promptly and arrive at a decision, and keep the process moving if the answer is No. If at the end of all your interviews you have multiple “Heck Yes” candidates, that’s great! Pick one. Then extend the job offer right away.
If you’re moving with speed, you are extending an offer to your top candidate within hours of your final interview.
What Happens If You Don’t Identify a “Heck Yes” Candidate?
There are two potential pitfalls to watch out for when moving quickly: First, sometimes the timing is off and none of the candidates you interviewed qualify as a “Heck Yes.” This can happen. And if it does, you can certainly begin the process again, armed with the information you learned from the first pass through the process. Second, identify if one or more members of the interviewing team are looking for perfection. Perfection if your enemy. If a candidate is great, and has nine out of 10 skills, then hire them and move on. You can teach them that last skill. Perfection doesn’t exist, and interviewers can be just as much of an obstruction to the hiring process as candidates can. Don’t let this be you.
Great work! You’ve extended an offer to someone fabulous for your team. Don’t slow down now. Decide on a desired start date with your new hire, and move quickly according to that date. It’s such a bummer when start dates have to be pushed out, because equipment wasn’t ordered and shipped timely for example.
Wrap-up
You started with the end in mind. Hit that planned employee start date! You will increase your odds of saving the company time and money, reduce the odds of losing potential recruits to competitors, and establish an expectation of preparation and performance for new hires. Institute a hiring timeline for your hiring process and put yourself on the path to success with your next hire. This week, think about your hiring process timeline from the lens of talent attraction and candidate engagement, and think about technology that could improve efficiency and the experience for all involved.
This has been fun! Thank you for being here with me and joining me for these bite posts about all things talent attraction, talent acquisition and talent retention. These areas of HR and People Ops are my favorite and specialty, and I’m so excited to dive in with you. This work is what I do, if you need help with the tools, technology and process around how you attract, acquire and retain talent, reach out to me and let’s talk!
Claire is Coaching 