How to Increase Hiring Efficiency in Leaner Times

When you’re asked to do more with fewer resources because your company is tightening belts, your talent management strategy doesn’t need to suffer. It does, however, need to become more efficient so your hiring and retention efforts remain effective. 

Finding creative ways to improve your hiring efficiency and focus on company culture is essential—here’s what you need to know and do. 

1. Improve Hiring with Data

Finding candidates who will succeed—and stay—is critical to your hiring efficiency. Making hiring mistakes costs you and your organization precious time and resources.

What’s the best strategy for sourcing and extending offers to those candidates? There’s now a whole world of data open to help hiring teams make better decisions. 

For example, HR professionals can determine how new hires can contribute to your team or organization, based on how your current employees are performing (Harvard Business Review has a great breakdown of how to think about this). And Cangrade’s Pre-Hire Assessment helps you assess candidates on what’s essential to your unique business. 

Integrating data and analytics can take some time upfront as you sort through what’s truly important, but the time savings and improved accuracy will more than pay off for that effort going forward. 

2. Streamline the Hiring Process

Increased hiring efficiency will reduce the time and resources you and your team spend on talent acquisition. 

Streamlining the tasks that take up the most time in the hiring process can free up your resources for more important tasks. Scheduling interviews can be time-consuming. Consider replacing them with asynchronous options like video interviews to help your hiring process move faster while still screening candidates accurately. 

Pre-hire assessments can also help you narrow the pool of applicants down to the top performers so your team spends less time sorting through resumes and interviewing unqualified candidates. 

3. Focus on the Candidate Experience 

Spending time and resources on interviewing and wooing top candidates can be worth it if they actually accept your offer. But if your candidate experience is poor, you’re likely losing potentially successful hires in the process. A poor candidate experience costs you both time and top performers, which lowers both hiring efficiency and effectiveness. 

Measuring your candidate Net Promoter Score (cNPS) can help you determine how candidates feel about your hiring process right now and pinpoint areas for improvement. Most companies will want to focus on improving communication, speed, and responsiveness in the hiring process to create a better candidate experience. 

4. Consider Hiring Freelancers

An effective talent plan doesn’t need to encompass only full-time employees, though they’re certainly vital. You can also strategically add in freelancers and contractors as a supplementary talent source where they fit well to lower costs and shorten the hiring process, leading to increased hiring efficiency. 

If you have upcoming projects that need experienced hands but don’t have time or the budget to add an employee, this can be a good time to find an experienced freelancer to fill a specific need. You won’t pay benefits or taxes for contractors, and they can be brought in to work only for certain periods of time, so they offer flexibility and access to specialized skills. 

5. Don’t Ignore Retention 

Once your talented new hire is in the door, having a great retention strategy in place ensures they stay. Hiring a new employee costs from half to two times their annual salary on average. High levels of turnover can cost you employee morale and institutional knowledge in addition to the financial costs and drop in hiring efficiency as you turn your focus to rehiring. 

You don’t need to spend huge amounts on retention either—this can be an area where you get creative and curious to find what really works. Your strategy should be driven by exploring the current retention issues at your organization and taking action. 

You can even predict which of your job candidates is most likely to stay by using Cangrade’s Retention Forecast. Request a demo today to learn more.