Speed to hire, or your hiring velocity, is critical to effectively growing your team with high-quality hires. Creating a structured interview process for your hiring team and empowering them with the most innovative and efficient hiring tools can cut your time to hire in half while boosting your quality of hire.
Table of contents
Speed to Hire
Key Takeaways
- Streamlined Evaluation and Interview Process: Clearly defining interview criteria and using structured questions can help ensure that your candidate experience is both fair and efficient, accelerating the evaluation process, and allowing hiring teams to focus on the most qualified candidates from the initial application stage.
- Utilize Video Interview Technology: Implementing one-way video interviews can significantly speed up the initial screening process, allowing candidates to self-select and enabling recruiters to more quickly review applications. Video interview software can also facilitate more team collaboration, reducing scheduling conflicts, enhancing decision-making, and improving the quality of hires.
- Enhance Your Candidate Experience with Transparency: Sharing culture videos, team testimonials, and video messages from your organization’s leaders can foster a more positive candidate experience and keep applicants engaged throughout the hiring process. This transparency not only helps candidates assess their fit with your company culture but also encourages timely communication and feedback, which can improve offer acceptance rates.
HR technology such as video interview software and applicant tracking systems enable hiring teams to make more collaborative, data-driven, and faster hiring decisions. But even the most innovative hiring tools cannot solve your hiring challenges without taking some practical and simple steps toward streamlining your hiring process.
Read on for our complete guide of expert tips for boosting your speed to hire!
Fine-tune Your Hiring Strategy Before the Interview
Identify interview evaluation criteria
You set your hiring team up for success by building a fair and accurate assessment of the skills and traits you need. It can slow evaluation processes when criteria aren’t clear and accurate before candidates apply. This is a critical time to poll team members to get insights into skills gaps, details about roles and responsibilities, and culture fit.
Use this information to build job requirements and qualifications into job detailed posts for each role. If you’re consistent when updating job descriptions each time you post, candidates who apply are more likely to fit your open roles. This saves your team time when filtering candidates right from the application stage because candidate skills and experiences match your team’s needs.
Create structured interview questions
Every assessment in your hiring process should offer equal opportunity to every candidate in addition to screening for the most essential requirements for the job effectively. Implementing a structured interview process ensures the talent you funnel into your hiring process is highly qualified for the role.
Engaging and inclusive job descriptions attract diverse candidates. It’s important you reduce bias and eliminate redundant or ineffective questions in the early stages of your hiring process. This helps to build a diverse and skilled workforce with unique and valuable backgrounds.
Structured interview questions – standard but specific questions you ask every candidate applying for the same role – even the playing field for talent. They also streamline your team’s evaluations and reduce the influence of unconscious bias.
Create lists of questions you can use to filter candidates accurately from the initial screening interviews through the final interviews. Build these questions from positive results from previous hiring processes. For example, identify the skills and traits of your top performers and determine ways to assess for similar qualities.
Ask applicants of the same role the same questions and use follow-up questions during live video and in-person interviews to determine which candidates truly stand out. Developing structured interview questions and a standard rating system to grade candidates early on helps mitigate delays caused by confusion or miscommunication between hiring collaborators.
Upload culture videos and team testimonials to your careers page
Another easy way to speed up candidate screening and improve hiring outcomes is to help candidates determine if they fit your culture before they apply. Being transparent about your culture by sharing brief branded videos and team testimonials on your careers page helps attract the right candidates to your open jobs.
Featuring engaging videos on your careers page and social media also shows talent your company is innovative and adaptive to modern technology. Candidate testimonials about their experience in your hiring process in addition to employee reviews can help new applicants understand what to expect.
This encourages more serious candidates to apply. In fact, more than half of candidates surveyed by Talentegy agreed videos about the company and culture would be valuable when deciding whether to apply for a job, and 73% said they value employee testimonials in the application process.
Sharing videos on your careers page also gives candidates a taste of the personal connections they can make in your virtual hiring process. They get access to insights about your company culture, employees and leadership, and the candidate experience before you invite them to interview.In turn, interactions through video make them more receptive and even excited about your video interview process. You gain candidate buy-in and a unique opportunity to show off how your speed to hire improves candidates’ experience.
Take Fast Action Following the Application Process
Invite candidates to submit one-way video interviews
Sending out one-way video interviews saves valuable time in the initial stages of screening. Talent can self-select in this stage by choosing to submit a video response. This narrows your candidate evaluations down to just the most serious candidates and reduces your chances of candidates dropping out in later in-person interviews.
Phone interviews (both scheduling and conducting) add as much as 6-8 days to your initial interview stage, according to research from Glassdoor. One-way video interviews can be reviewed and responded to in as little as 5 minutes, compared to 45+ minute phone calls.
Plus, there is no need to schedule time with the candidates. They can record on their own time. This is a critical step to speed up the hiring process because it’s during this interview stage your team is assessing the greatest number of candidates.
In fact, the average number of applicants is 118 per role (250+ for corporate jobs). It’s estimated roughly 20% will move on to initial screening interviews, meaning recruiters could have 30-40 candidates to follow up with (per job opening) to schedule interviews before top talent moves on to other opportunities.
One-way video interview invitations can be sent out to all qualifying candidates with the click of a button. With SMS invitation features, candidates receive the invitation on their mobile device and will even get reminders to submit their responses without HR or recruiters needing to block out time to keep early interviews on track.
And because candidates don’t have to create an account or download an app, they can just open their invitations and record their responses from any device, anywhere, any time. Your team is more likely to see interview completion rates improve fast, increasing your speed to hire.
In fact, Spark Hire customers report a 72% application to final interview completion rate. Your hiring team can move on to reviewing and collaborating over interviews to get back to top candidates sooner than with traditional interview models.
Share videos with hiring managers
Recruiters say their #1 conflict with scheduling interviews is finding a time that works for everyone. HR and hiring managers typically wear many hats and scheduling conflicts are the most common culprit of slow hiring processes. You avoid these costly delays by sharing video interview responses with hiring stakeholders.
Links to one-way video interviews can be shared with your whole team. You cut out the scheduling hassle of pulling collaborators in for additional interviews without sacrificing gaining valuable feedback from key stakeholders. Everyone with a link can review on their own time, rate candidates, and provide constructive feedback.
Even better, you improve your quality of hire while increasing the speed to hire by including more decision-makers in the process. You gain unique perspectives that lead to better-informed hiring decisions for your team. Ultimately, this reduces the likelihood of new hire attrition and gives team productivity a boost.
Send video messages to candidates
Candidates expect fast response times at every stage of the hiring process. In fact, 58% of candidates expect to hear back after their application in one week or less and 66% of job seekers said they would wait for only two weeks for a callback after an interview.
Video messages are the perfect way to connect with talent quickly and create unique updates to keep them engaged in your hiring process. Candidates don’t have to wait for your team to discuss their responses or for more evaluations to wrap up before they hear from leaders and hiring decision-makers on your team.
You can send out video messages to candidates with timely updates and additional information about your hiring processes, such as timelines and next steps. If they are advancing, you can send introduction videos of team members, and if they are not, you can send a personal rejection with valuable feedback to encourage them in their job search.
These messages can be pre-recorded or customized and sent out with a single click from your video interview software dashboard. You speed up communication time while making the experience feel more personal for candidates.
Streamline Hiring Collaboration and Communication
Conduct live video interviews
In-person interviews are unmatched in assessing candidates for fit into your company, but they can be a scheduling nightmare if your team is swamped, candidates are currently employed or live a long distance away. Live video interviews are a practical and effective solution if you need to replace an in-person interview or even if you plan to conduct a fully virtual hiring process for remote candidates.
Live video interviews are an effective step before final in-person interviews. They can reduce the number of interviews candidates need to commute for, reducing scheduling conflicts with talent as well. You can even use them to expand your talent pool by interviewing and hiring long-distance talent or remote employees quickly, efficiently, and confidently.
Collaborate and collect team feedback
Including more people in your hiring process gives you a greater perspective on the quality of each candidate. However, panel interviews consume significant time and resources. HR and manager burnout is already high with the majority citing reasons such as they have multiple competing priorities and they have a lot of interruptions at work, according to a study by Gallup.
You need a solution to involve stakeholders without the hassle of blocking more time out of their busy schedules.
Similar to one-way video interview collaboration, live video interviews can be shared to collect team feedback. Conducting a live video interview and sharing the automatically recorded interview with everyone who needs to weigh in delivers the same team collaboration results without interfering with multiple team members’ schedules.
Share video messages from leaders with candidates
You advance top candidates to offers faster by having team members weigh in on the same interview responses by the same evaluation criteria. Ensuring a positive candidate experience with a fast and efficient hiring process is critical to getting candidates to accept your offers. According to NACE data, the offer acceptance rate is just 66% on average.
Candidates who advance to this stage of the hiring process will meet with team leaders in the final round of hiring. Sharing video messages from company leaders helps candidates feel valued and connected with the company. These are essential factors associated with offer acceptance rates.
You might trickle in videos from leaders throughout the hiring process or you may choose to send out personal messages when final candidates are selected to advance. Having these videos ready to send out as soon as decisions are made enables your team to connect with candidates fast and make a powerful impression on top candidates.
The final step is extending your offer. Candidates are sure to be impressed with the speed of your hiring process from how quickly they receive follow-ups to how efficiently your team communicates information and makes meaningful connections. Moreover, your hiring team will be relieved to focus their attention and energy on other priorities, improving productivity and performance across their teams and departments.
The structure of your interview process is a critical framework for your company’s growth. But the hiring tools and technology you rely on to schedule interviews, accurately assess skills and fit, connect and communicate with candidates, and collaborate with your team can make or break your speed to hire.
Updating our hiring process and implementing modern hiring strategies that include video interview software builds an effective and efficient team upon that foundation so you can launch your organization toward success.
To learn more about how Spark Hire’s comprehensive talent acquisition solutions can help you take your hiring process to the next level, no matter where you are on your HR tech journey, book a demo and get connected to a team member today.
