It can take even the highest-performing recruiting teams 34 days to fill an open position. For ordinary teams, this number can go up to 91 days. 

The problem?

CNBC reports that 70% of applicants lose interest in a job prospect if they don’t hear back within a week.

With the tech that is now available to you, you don’t need an extensive hiring team or 34 days to fill an open position. With the right strategy, you can: 

• Optimize the hiring process
• Find the perfect employee
• Make hiring a pleasant experience for both you and the candidates
• Save the company some money and time while you’re at it. 

How? Let’s get into it.

Why work on improving the recruitment process?

Jacob Kaplan puts it this way, it takes about 100 hours to hire someone. Before we get to work on how to lower this number, it is important to understand why doing so is important. 

To avoid losing potential

A lengthy hiring process makes accepting offers from your competitors a no-brainer for your candidates. The top candidates receive multiple job offers and will not have to wait for a final decision that takes weeks. 

On the other hand, a disorganized process will cost you much more than great candidates — it’ll cost you your employer brand. Not being hired leaves candidates feeling drained — they’re only human. 

However,having to endure a process that is clunky and disrespectful of their time makes rejection even harder to handle. It’s important to remember that your employer brand is in the hands of the people who get hired and those who don’t. 

To repeat hiring success and improve speed

For you, a disorganized selection process makes hiring for just one role take forever, as we’ve detailed above. If you do manage to hire quickly, or even hire the perfect employee for that matter, how do you track down the source of that hire or create a repeatable system for similar success in the future? With a bad system, it is almost impossible. 

To set the right expectations 

Every aspect of the hiring process is important, even the job descriptions you write (we’ll tell you how to nail this later on in the article), because a poorly written one will convey the wrong expectations of the job, and 48% of employees leave when this happens. 

6 tips to improve your recruitment process

Improving your recruitment process doesn't have to involve a massive overhaul. By focusing on a few key areas, you can make your hiring more efficient, effective, and candidate-friendly. 

Here are six proven strategies to get started on this:

1. Use an applicant tracking system 

The basic necessity of any good system is the ability to take in a high-level view of the whole process with a glance. 

Your hiring process is a multi-stage funnel. 

All the candidates who apply are at the top of the funnel. At each stage, they either move forward to the next stage or exit the funnel entirely. 

A good ATS tracks this, so you always know the status of each candidate and how many you have at each stage. A great ATS automates this by:

• Moving candidates to the next stages based on tasks completed 
• Sending messages to keep candidates engaged
• Rejecting candidates 
• Moving them from phone screens to interviews 

It also shows you data about sourcing efficiency, especially which channels bring in the most and best candidates. This lets you see where you should focus more or less on your recruiting efforts. 

Kula ATS provides features for automating pipeline management. It moves candidates from stage to stage and performs other actions based on the custom rules you provided. It also gives you a customizable dashboard to analyze key metrics so you can optimize for the best results.

2. Differentiate must-have and nice-to-have requirements in job descriptions

When drafting your job descriptions, it is crucial to distinguish between which skills and qualifications a candidate must have and which are a bonus but not a deciding factor of whether you hire them. 

If your job descriptions contain a long list of requirements, much of which is not essential to doing a great job, you’ll narrow the pool unnecessarily and miss out on great applicants while you’re at it. 

They might think they do not qualify because they couldn’t check all the boxes, although they could learn other skills on the job. 

For example, if you’re hiring a marketing manager, leading successful marketing campaigns and strong analytical skills are requirements. 

Being proficient in a particular software (something you can train for) or industry-specific experience may not be as important. You might be limiting your pool of candidates if you include these as mandatory requirements.

As an all-in-one hiring automation platform for hypergrowth organizations, Kula ATS helps you quickly build clear, branded job description templates to attract the right candidates. With these templates, you can create accurate, on-brand job descriptions that attract the right candidates. 

It isn’t just what you include in your job description but also how you say it. 

Terms like “rockstar,” “ninja,” or “superstar” have become popular slang, but many people find them annoying or even off-putting. They also make your role vaguely defined and your organization seem desperate to be liked. 

Using clear, professional language that accurately describes your organization and its role is always better. 

Tip: Stick to concise, grown-up terms that clearly indicate what someone will be doing in the role and why you’ll be the best at it together.

3. Take your employee referral program seriously

Your existing employees likely have robust networks of skilled contacts in your industry. Incentivize them to tap into these networks and refer candidates they think would fit your team and culture well. A well-designed referral program can be one of your best sources of high-quality hires.

Kula ATS includes features to easily implement a gamified employee referral system that makes referring simple and rewarding for your staff. You can set rewards and rate referrals without leaving the platform. Your referees too can track their referrals on the same platform.

4. Promote from within when possible

When a position opens up, your first instinct might be to look for external candidates immediately. We’d like to reiterate that recruiting externally to fill an open position takes an average of 36 days. That’s more than a month’s worth of productivity and efforts put into recruiting and onboarding, without taking into account the time taken to train the hire.

On the contrary, if you promote internally, you reduce your time-to-hire tremendously because: 

• Your current employees already know your company and its culture and processes. 
• They have already demonstrated their work ethics and skills and can begin working in a new position much more quickly than an external candidate. 

However, there are other reasons for internal promotion than time-to-hire. Showing your employees that professional growth is a reality when working with you is crucial, effectively boosting morale and retention rates. The trickle-down effect of this is huge. 

Employees will see their fellow coworkers promoted to new roles and responsibilities and notice they have the same chances if they remain with your company. 

At the same time, if employees realize they must leave your workplace to progress, you’ll likely lose valuable staff. 

5. Perfect your interview process

Interviews are always going to be one of the most critical components of your hiring process. You need a well-crafted process to extract every last drop of value from the interview process.

Before you start interviewing, you need to know what your ideal candidate looks like for the role. What skills and experiences are most important? Having a solid idea of this makes identifying the best hires easier. 

For the process itself, here’s how you can get started:

• Prepare a list of identical questions for each candidate to make comparison easier.
• Prepare scorecards to give interviews a clear idea of what to look for.
• Once the interviews are over, make sure your team gets feedback to you fast. Set expectations that everyone must submit their feedback and detailed thoughts within 24 hours while things are still fresh. 

This is especially easy with Kula ATS’s note-taking and conversational analytics capabilities. The software automatically takes notes for you while you conduct the interview and helps you dissect what the human eye usually misses. 

Kula ATS also allows you to: 

• Easily create standardized candidate scorecards that interviewers can reference while filling out their feedback
• Centralizes all interview feedback in the candidate cards
• Automatically nudges interviewers to submit their feedback
• Schedule interviews easily by offering self-scheduling features for the candidates, as well as a side-by-side view of the interviewer’s calendars to avoid overlap

6. Emphasize your employer brand

Candidates are looking for more than a paycheck. 

What’s your mission? Your values? Part of your efforts to communicate this comes down to your employer value proposition, which is the unique set of benefits you offer employees. 

A positive way to showcase your employer brand is to focus on your employees with:

• Direct stories and testimonials from your team members about what they enjoy about working at your company will add to the credibility and validity of your employer brand. 
• Stories about employee profiles on your website or social media—have employees write brief descriptions of their career journeys, favorite projects, and what they like about your company. 

Potential candidates who see themselves in these narratives will feel excited about the opportunity to work at your company. 

You can also highlight your employer brand values by touting the awards your company has won. If you are on a third-party workplace list, showcase positive reviews on sites like Glassdoor or industry awards. 

Kula ATS can assist you with employer branding with an out-of-the-box career page, events page, and candidate portal builder. This reduces publishing time from 2-3 months to about a few days at best. 

Optimize your recruitment process with Kula ATS

Every little improvement you make adds up to a significant change in your hiring outcomes. 

• Speedy hiring means fewer productivity hours are lost to vacant positions. 
• A perfect candidate experience means greater talent will keep choosing your company. 
• A higher degree of recruiting quality results in better job performance and retention. 
• A stronger talent portfolio will ensure that you always have the ideal candidates ready when jobs open up. 

The trick is to begin with the low-hanging fruit — the quick wins. An applicant tracking system like Kula is a simple solution to become more organized and efficient immediately. 

As time goes on, you can focus on more strategic long-term changes. For example, you can make your interview procedure more structured and data-informed, create a comprehensive employment referral program, or fine-tune your employer branding message. While these efforts necessitate more planning and resources, they have a much bigger impact.