5 Key Steps to Cut Down Your Time To Hire

Going against the traditional ideas of hiring, look at long term goals to hire successfully.

Finding and hiring the right people for your business is one of the most important, and time consuming processes for any business.  The faster you fill open positions with the right people, the faster your business grows in the short and long term.

Despite years of being told to “Hire Slow, Fire Fast” the fact is there are many steps you can take and tools you can use to significantly cut down your time to find and hire better employees .

Below are five actions you can take right now to effectively find and hire successful employees quickly:

1) Define “Who” You Need for the Role

When you want to fill an open position quickly, the fastest and most efficient way to find the right person is to spend more time up front getting absolutely clear on who and what you need.  If there are multiple people who will be involved in the hiring decision, this step becomes even more critical.

Getting on the same page and developing a clearly thought out list of skills, requirements and duties will help the entire process go faster and ensure you won’t get bogged down with different or missed expectations along the way.

Many would argue that even more important than the skills, experience and duties is determining the personality, motivation, and cultural attributes you need. If you do this, you’ll be far more likely to end up with someone who will fit in with your company and succeed in the job role.

Aligning on the “who” up front will ensure you have absolute clarity on what a successful candidate looks like so you can move through your applicants with greater speed and confidence.

2) Draft a Well Thought-Out Job Description

While most of us dread creating job descriptions, getting yours right from the start makes a huge impact on the speed and quality of your hiring process. Why? A poorly thought-out job description increases the risk of missing the mark with the applicants you want to attract and increasing the changes of getting buried with weak applicants.   It’s a double whammy.

Invest in the time up front to clearly articulate what you need, the scope of the role, and the “must haves.”  This will have a dramatic impact on your ability to attract the right applicants, a strong list of more qualified applicants and less time muddling through those that clearly don’t fit.

3) Automate

There is no doubt that dealing with a high volume of applicants can be the biggest time drain for any hiring manager.  Depending on the type of role you are hiring for and the number of applicants, the process of printing, stacking, sorting, reviewing, and commenting can literally take days.  Worse still is it’s nearly impossible to tell who in the stack of applicants is most likely to succeed.

In situations like this, using a hiring tool designed to aggregate all of your applicants into one place online, rank and sort them based on who is most likely to succeed, can make a massive impact on both the speed and quality of your hire.  This is one of the fastest growing categories as more and more businesses are looking for services that go beyond sourcing applicants and help match applicants to job roles and requirements.  Being able to quickly identify who has the skills you need and is going to thrive in that role makes a big impact on your ability to move quickly and with confidence.

4) Quickly Identify Hits and Misses With Phone Screening

Using a 20 minute phone screen can be one of the most effective streamlining techniques. One of the biggest time wasters is having someone come in for an interview and know ten seconds in that they’re not an appropriate fit.

You can bang through several phone screens in few hours and quickly weed out those who would never cut it. Screens also give you early insights into who may be a star, so you can move faster with them in case you’re competing with another company to hire them.

Phone screens are best used to quickly assess how motivated someone is for the role and the company and also gives you insights into their personality.  It can also help you understand what their job acceptance criteria is.  If it sounds like they want the job and are someone that you connect with, bring them in!

5) Interview In Bunches

When evaluating candidates, having a head-to-head comparison can really help highlight relative strengths and weaknesses.  That’s why you’ll want to pre-screen and interview in waves.  It will save you time and help you make sharper decisions.  Many businesses go in waves of three.  It’s just enough to give you a good comparative sample without breaking your back to get it all coordinated and done.  Clear stand-outs become more evident when there are direct and immediate comparisons.

So when it’s time to hire, use these five steps to streamline the process to find employees that succeed faster.

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Ben Baldwin is the Founder and Co-CEO of ClearFit, a hiring tool that makes it easy for small and medium-sized businesses to find and hire employees that succeed.  He’s a patent holder, Wall Street Journal Startup Mentor, and business advisor.