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Filling the Holes in Your Hiring ProcessA Guide for Recruiters and Hiring Managers

Direct2013

Founded in Boston in 2004, HRM Direct provides more than 300 companies with solutions for Talent Acquisition and Onboarding. Our clients come from organizations small (30 employees) to large (10,000 employees) and represent a

variety of industries including higher ed., social services, high tech, manufacturing, defense, civic, retail and healthcare. Each year, many thousands of openings and millions of applications and forms are processed through our platform.

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Executive SummaryWhile recruiting top-quality employees is universally-recognized as a precondition for success, many companies have not applied the sort of systematic approaches to improving efficiency that have proven effective in numerous other business functions. This paper lays out some of the important trends that are influencing recruiting and recruiting tools today, and then analyzes how these relate to the typical process of white-collar hiring in business today. From this analysis a set of 12 basic rules are extrapolated to help guide recruiters and hiring managers towards attainable improvements in cost, time, and quality. Finally, this paper examines the role played by technology in driving process improvements.

Table of Contents

Background! 3A Call to Action! 3When Good Isn’t Good Enough! 3The Emergence of Third-Generation Applicant Tracking Systems! 4

Metrics—and Their Shortcomings! 5The Importance of Process Insight! 5

Where Do You Stand Today?! 6

A Generalized Approach to the Hiring Lifecycle! 6

Preparing a Self-Assessment! 6Time-to-Hire! 7Cost-to-Hire! 7Quality of Hire! 8

Optimization Strategies for the Hiring Lifecycle! 9Sourcing! 9Screening! 10Interviewing! 11Offering! 12General Considerations! 13

12 Rules for a Smoother, Better Recruiting Process! 14

The Role for Applicant-Tracking Systems! 15Administrative Automation! 15Instant Pre-Screening of Applicants ! 15Integrated Resume Database! 15Escape from the Email Inbox! 15Delivering the Metrics You Need! 15









BackgroundThe broad economic recovery will present companies with several key staffing challenges as the widely- discussed “jobless recovery” of 2011-2012 gives way to a thriving market for employees in 2013 and beyond. With most companies expecting to grow their headcount to meet earnings goals in a growing market, increased recruiting targets will run up against competition for talent in the marketplace. Further complicating the situation will be a temporary explosion in turnover as employees frustrated by the moribund 2008-2012 job market emigrate en masse as opportunities expand in the year ahead. With most companies operating at exceptionally-lean staffing levels, the combination of these three factors will have the power to precipitate a full-fledged crisis—complete with threats to the bottom line.

A Call to ActionYet within even relatively successful companies, recruiting is likely to be the least proactively-managed of the strategic functions (if it is even recognized as such). Problems are identified only in crude outline fashion and solved by liberal applications of money often paid to staffing consultants or third-party recruiters. While these approaches often succeed in addressing an immediate emergency, they do nothing to prevent the next. As anyone who has tried losing weight knows all too well, changing habits over the long term is the real challenge. While most companies do care about recruiting, they have not made the effort to bring to it the kind of discipline that has made them successful in other areas.

An old management saying holds that “out of faster, cheaper, and better, you can choose only two.” However, the past decade has witnessed a revolution in productivity defying this seemingly iron-clad rule. IT systems capable of driving previously-unseen levels of automation and transparency in the performance of complex processes have played a decisive role in this transformation. Automation of increasingly-intricate tasks yields dramatic and permanent increases in both speed and accuracy, while the availability of detailed metrics enables process breakdowns to be identified rapidly and addressed at the source. Recent advances in recruiting technology now allow a greater range of companies than ever before access to tools capable of enabling significant increases in productivity.

When Good Isn’t Good EnoughIt is by now near-universally acknowledged that “a company’s most important asset is its people.” But not all companies are equally adept at winning the recruiting race. If simply doing things the same way as last year is clearly a recipe for disaster, the chart to the right illustrates that even modest improvement is in many cases still not enough. A company which manages to improve its recruiting capability by 5% annually will after five years have become roughly 20% better. Meanwhile, a competitor who manages to sustain a 15% annual improvement will quite nearly double. In fact, after only three years the gap between the two will be sizable enough that the modest improver will find catching up quite difficult. And over time, consistently better recruiting will undoubtedly lead to consistently better results at the end of each quarter. Can you afford to pass up that kind of advantage?









The Emergence of Third-Generation Applicant Tracking SystemsThe application of Information Technology systems to recruiting is not new. First-generation systems (mostly resume databases) began appearing in the 1980s but were rarely seen outside of Fortune 500- level companies hiring many thousands of people each year.

By the mid-90s, second-generation systems delivering modestly-increased functionality and significantly lower cost began to enter the market. These tools combined the storage and searching of a resume database with workflow-management tools to ensure that recruiters and hiring managers followed corporate procedures for controlling and ensuring compliance with state and federal law. But while many of these tools sought to embrace the whole hiring lifecycle from requisition approval to employee onboarding, the increased functionality came at the price of complexity. As a result, most 2nd-generation ATSs are rarely used by people other than internal or third-party recruiters, significantly limiting the benefits they are capable of providing.

Owing largely to the moribund job market, ATS evolution in the past five years has been almost entirely incremental. The move towards web-based rather than client-server architecture began early in the mid-2000s, and a growing number of vendors are offering their systems on Software as a Service (SaaS)-type plans. But with the functionality they provide largely unchanged, these products still provide only second-generation capabilities, albeit at marginally-reduced cost of ownership.

It is only in late 2008 that a consensus began to form around the emergence of true 3rd-generation ATSs. These products were conceived from the start to be deployed over the Web in a SaaS model, not as a web client layered on top of a 1998-vintage system sitting in a rack at the manufacturer’s office. Superior architecture has thus allowed a dramatic reduction in the cost of such systems, particularly for companies of 500 or fewer employees. The accompanying improvements in speed and reliability immediately improved the user experience, but more importantly, the design of these systems benefit from the lessons learned in the widespread deployment of ATSs that began in the 2000s. The needs of hiring managers have received greater attention, promising much wider adoption and its attendant benefits throughout the enterprise.

Last, and perhaps most importantly, true 3rd-generation ATSs are the first to incorporate sophisticated automation capabilities to bring about truly dramatic increases in recruiting productivity. The best available today are capable of intelligently processing resumes as they arrive, routing applicants into prioritized queues so that even a single recruiter can immediately zoom in to any position and within minutes locate the most-qualified candidates out of a stream of hundreds of resumes, with no human data input required. While some older tools have offered conceptually-similar features, 3rd-generation ATSs are the first to offer this level of productivity at a broadly-acceptable price and simplicity-of-use.









Metrics—and Their ShortcomingsThe first and most important step that a company can take is to commit to keeping track of the basic performance metrics in the hiring process. Metrics form the basis of an objective, goal-oriented approach to management and play a foundational role in all of the popular quality-management methodologies such as Six Sigma that are now gaining wide popularity.

While it is easy to say, for instance, that “hiring good salespeople takes too long,” it is far more challenging to say precisely why that is the case in the absence of detailed statistics on the individual steps in the process. The diagram on the right illustrates the three principal axes of measurement for any business process. In recruiting, these are reflected in Time-to-Hire, Cost-to-Hire, and Quality of Hire.

For most organizations, these three statistics are the beginning andthe end of the measurement of the recruiting process, and even then are rarely well-understood. It is easy to compute the number of days from the opening of a new job requisition to the date when a new employee starts working, but this statistic is of only limited utility. The fact that it takes a company 10 days to hire a receptionist reveals little about how to reduce the 45 days needed to hire an account executive. Basic time-to-hire is therefore too coarse a measurement to be of significant use. Likewise, while it is easy to identify direct hiring costs such as advertising and placement fees or the amortized burden of an internal recruiter, this misses many indirect costs which can over time exceed the direct costs, often by a substantial amount. And while all parties agree upon the importance of quality of hire, first-year turnover is as deep as most companies manage to get in estimating the underlying quality of recruiting. Simply managing to survive one year is hardly the measure of excellence.

The Importance of Process InsightUsing an ATS, organizations are able to obtain much more detailed information on what is occurring on the “inside” of their hiring cycles. The chart to the right shows the average time spent in each of four stages of the hiring process for three types of positions. Looking at this, we can immediately identify that it is taking too long to source good sales candidates, and too much time to screen and interview prospective IT staff. There might be good reasons for these things, but at least they are now quantifiable.

Most 3rd-generation ATSs will permit recruiters to zoom in even more closely, for instance to see similar statistics for both individual positions and hiring managers. With this level of detail, recruiters can over time accurately predict the time needed to fill positions, and also identify specific ways to remedy current shortcomings that consume unnecessary time and compromise the quality and cost associated with hiring. The next section will examine the hiring process in more detail and illustrate how the use of such a system can drive reductions of 20% or more in real time-to-hire without dramatic shifts in your current processes.









Where Do You Stand Today?The remainder of this paper examines the hiring process in detail and identifies specific points of potential failure and inefficiency. From this, we will derive twelve simple, no-nonsense rules that can be applied in any organization to drive meaningful improvements in the hiring process. Finally, we will examine the role a 3rd-generation ATS can play in supporting and driving a sustained process of optimization in your organization.

A Generalized Approach to the Hiring LifecycleWhile every hiring cycle is as unique as the individual eventually chosen to fill the position, we can effectively break the process down into four principal tasks common to nearly any hiring process in any organization. By looking at what is involved in each step we can identify sources of inefficiency and error to target for improvement.

Sourcing is the process by which the recruiter builds a pool of applicants for the position. The sourcing may be done actively, such as by soliciting on a public job board, or passively, for instance by using a resume database. In either case, the process may either be seen as inbound or outbound based on whether the initial contact is made by the recruiter or by the applicant.

Screening is employed in all but the least-demanding positions to identify a short list of possible candidates for the position. Many methods are used, ranging from reading and sorting resumes into piles, to use of online assessments which ask applicants to answer a series of questions, to telephone or in-person interviews. This is often, and ideally, carried out as a series of narrowing “screens” in which the large applicant pool is whittled down to no more than a dozen people worthy of serious attention.

Interviewing of these final candidates is done by the hiring manager and/or peer- level employees to identify one or more persons who have the best chances of thriving in the position and the larger organization. Reference and/or background checks may be carried out at this stage as well.

Offering is the culmination of the process and varies widely depending on the urgency of filling the position and the state of the hiring market. Ideally the best candidate found will accept the first offer made to him or her by the company, but typically the more demanding the position to fill, the more complicated this final stage of the process becomes.

Preparing a Self-AssessmentThe first step to calculating your potential gains is to determine where your process stands today. A simple way to do this is to focus on a small sample of recent requisitions and top candidates for those positions. Start by building a list of the most recent openings filled in several different key departments. Then, identify the hiring managers and top three or four candidates (including the person eventually hired) for each position. This will provide your working sample for the assessment.









Time-to-HireStart by creating a spreadsheet such as the one shown below, which covers just one job requisition. The “Approved” and “Posted” dates are for the job itself, and all the other dates indicate when a particular event occurred for a specific candidate. Do feel free to add or remove important steps in your process not included below. The “Total Days” are computed by looking at the amount of time each stage spanned. For instance, the “Screening” time is calculated as the difference between when the first resume was received (1/13) and when the last interview was scheduled (1/21). By searching through your email and calendar, it should be possible to identify most of these dates for several candidates.

Cost-to-HireWorking with the same requisition(s) used in the time-to-hire exercise, start by tallying direct costs including advertising costs, placement fees, and reimbursed travel expenses if applicable. If your company has dedicated recruiting staff, add in a percentage of their annual cost as well. If any expenses were incurred multiple times, such as paying to renew job postings left open for more than 30 days, note this separately, as in the table to the right.

Indirect costs are less obvious but as the table to the right shows, they are typically quite significant. This example assumes that the hiring manager in question earns $85,000 per year, and will spend 15 minutes reviewing each candidate, one hour on each interview, and four hours choosing a candidate and making an offer. Note that these are totals which include time spent preparing for, conducting, and recording the results of each event.

However, indirect costs include more than just the time hiring managers or department staff spend reviewing candidates. There is also a cost associated with having an empty seat. Since salary presumably reflects the value of an employee’s financial contribution to the company, this table includes an indirect cost based on the loss of 30 working days by an employee making $55,000 per year. Since this assumes the employee only contributes $1 in value for each dollar in salary, this estimate is probably a little low. In any case, we thus arrive at a total cost-to-hire of about $11,000, of which the majority is simply the cost of having the position unfilled. We thus arrive at the illuminating conclusion that the primary variable in determining cost-to-hire is in fact the time-to-hire!









Quality of HireEstablishing a baseline for quality-of-hire statistics is generally more challenging. Unlike time and cost, it is in many cases not so easily quantified, and a larger sample of at least a dozen (preferably 30 or more) recent recruits is required in order to obtain meaningful numbers. If you do not have time to compile detailed research, or have recruited fewer than several dozen employees in the past two years, baselining your quality-of-hire will be more a matter of establishing general issues and themes rather than concrete statistics, but the exercise can still be revealing.

Starting at the bottom, perhaps the most commonly-applied criterion of quality is the turnover rate measured over 12, 18, or 24 months. Simple in principle, this metric suffers from some complications in use. In the very hot job market of the late 2006-2007, turnover surged as good employees received outlandish job offers well in excess of reality, while in recent years many excellent employees stayed in positions far longer than they wanted to for lack of alternatives. Thus, a brand-new recruiter who started work in 2008 would in most cases appear far superior to one who started in 2006. Nor does limiting the survey group to employees who were terminated for cause solve the problem. This approach excludes employees who, though capable of surviving, perhaps should not have taken the job. Tracking this is important because it can potentially reveal ways to better identify what the “right stuff” really looks like.

Some additional metrics to consider for evaluating hire quality include:

1. 12-Month performance review scores: If these are uniform and easily accessible, they can provide a variety of useful statistics. If they have not been maintained well, a survey of hiring managers can provide limited but useful input. This is generally the most reliable and substantive measure of quality.

2. Poaching Ratios: The number of recruits who leave a competing firm to join you compared to the number who leave you to join them. This ratio reflects strongly on the perceived value of your employment “brand identity” which is central to your ability to recruit true leaders.

3. Training/Certification program scores: If new employees are required to go through a structured training program, their performance in it can provide an early indicator of quality.

4. First-Choice Success Rate: This reflects the percentage of recruiting cycles in which you were able to sign your first-choice candidate.

Ideally, your study of quality should focus on a dozen or more filled requisitions in one department. By taking a larger sample within a narrow area, you will increase the reliability of the statistics that you derive.









Optimization Strategies for the Hiring LifecycleEach stage of the hiring process carries with it different pitfalls and opportunities. This section will discuss how to use the metrics in your self-assessment to identify and address these issues. Strategies will also be presented to assign costs to these to support calculation of Return On Investment figures that such optimizations can provide.

SourcingBecause the entire hiring process begins with a stack of applicants, the effectiveness of your sourcing techniques is directly related to your ultimate time, cost, and quality of recruiting.

Are your sourcing channels choosing you?A decade ago, sourcing was fairly simple: you had local newspapers and job fairs for line positions, headhunters and trade magazines for senior roles, and perhaps a college recruiting program as well. Since then, the full-spectrum job boards like Monster that largely supplanted newspapers and job fairs now find themselves challenged by niche sites catering to an audience that is narrower but often deeper. Today, many companies continue to simply “do it the way it’s always been done,” potentially missing an opportunity to reach a more select group of candidates, often at lower cost.

Spending too much on third-party recruiters?TPRs make many promises, but if you strip the marketing away they are basically providing a Sourcing service. You send a job description; they produce a stack of candidates. There are three basic ways they do this:

1. Advertising the job on public job boards 2. Searching an in-house resume database 3. Cold-calling “passive job seekers” occupying similar positions at competitive or related firms

Out of these, the third is really the only one that TPRs can lay a truly exclusive claim to. Obviously anyone can post a job to Monster, and the availability of low-cost ATSs means anyone can start building their own database. The value of reaching “passive” candidates is largely market-dependent: there is nothing inherently magically different about them, and if you are able to source a sufficient number of good-quality active candidates, then it is debatable what this gains you besides more resumes to look at.

More importantly, while recruiters may help you to build a stack of screened candidates quickly, this is hardly the only (or even most time-consuming) step in the hiring process. Look at the time it takes you to get through each stage in your hiring process—in many cases it is the screening, interviewing, and final selection that consumes the lion’s share of time and resources. If you can make these other parts work more efficiently, then you may be able to more than make up the time a recruiter saves you, and save the money by doing it yourself instead.

Suggested Metrics• Applicant Source/Quality: What is the average quality level of applicants from each channel? • Time to Source: How long does it take for each channel to provide a sufficient number of

qualified candidates? • Internal vs. External Sourcing: What proportion of candidates are sourced from your resume

database, referrals, and in-house passive recruiting, versus job boards and TPRs?









ScreeningWhile logically distinct from the sourcing process, screening often goes on in parallel; as applicants’ resumes arrive, they are read and sorted into groups.

Who’s reading resumes?The traditional approach to screening is to simply read every single resume that comes in. In small companies this is often done by hiring managers themselves. A hiring manager making an $85,000 annual salary is costing the company close to $60 an hour. At this rate, reading resumes quickly becomes an expensive pastime. To be sure, it’s also an activity the managers themselves often dread, with the result that the stack of resumes often gets pushed farther and farther away from the center of the desk, effectively stopping the hiring process in its tracks. At larger companies, this process is often handled by a junior or assistant recruiter who does little else, with the attendant full burden likely in excess of $40,000. Automating all or a portion of this process can provide a significant savings in both money and time spent.

Online Tests and the Problem of Adverse SelectionIn recent years a growing number of companies have deployed screening tools that require applicants to answer a series of questions as part of the application process. Sometimes these drive simple thumbs- up/thumbs-down screens, in other cases applicants are segregated into multiple groups based on test scores. While there is much to support the use of online testing as part of a recruitment optimization strategy, using them as part of an initial screening process can prove highly problematic.

Studies suggest that the most popular time for currently-employed job seekers to browse the web for new opportunities is during lunch—at the office, naturally. The busier and more qualified a person is, the less likely they are to go through a lengthy survey to apply for a job. So in the quest to reduce the number of unqualified applicants you have to review, you run the very real risk of discouraging the best candidates from applying in the first case. But as the number and complexity of questions are reduced to avoid scaring the best people off, the ability of less-qualified applicants to “game” the test increases until it becomes utterly useless. Therefore, it is important to consider the impact of automated screening tools on the applicant’s experience.

Suggested Metrics• Turnaround Time: How long does it take each hiring manager to review resumes sent to them for

consideration? Often certain managers respond much more slowly, and quantifying this can either help cajole them into moving faster or at least take the heat off the recruiting team.

• Cutoff Ratio: What percentages of applicants are successfully sorted out by each screen?

The following metrics are useful in evaluating the capabilities of automated screening tools • Time-to-Apply: How long does it take someone to apply for an average job? • Cutoff Performance: Compared to hand-screening, what percentages of applicants are

successfully sorted out without introducing substantial error (filtering out good candidates)? 100% is functionally equal to hand-screening, for example.









InterviewingSurveys show that interviewing is the number one source of frustration and mistakes in the hiring process for managers. While so much depends on it, most companies approach it in an ad-hoc manner that unnecessarily increases the hassle and risk of preventable errors.

The Five-Minute Interview

Many hiring managers tell stories of knowing within five minutes of the start of the interview that the candidate was not even close to being the right person. This situation is not bad in and of itself: many characteristics of personality that are central to whether a candidate has the potential to succeed in a certain position cannot be assessed without a face-to-face meeting. This indeed is precisely why we do interviews.

But when this starts to happen more regularly, an intensive review is in order. A good place to start is to sit down with the hiring manager and go through the job description, making sure it specifies more than just the number of years of experience and education expected. If this is in order, the next step is to take a sample of all the applicants received and have the hiring manager “grade” each into piles and explain the thought process behind each decision. This can help to identify “latent requirements” that the hiring manager feels strongly about but has for whatever reason failed to express clearly to the recruiter. If this identifies a different group of candidates than the original screening process, bring them in for an interview and see what happens. If the hiring manager ends up identifying the same people as the standouts, then you clearly have a sourcing problem.

Déjà vu All Over Again

It is often during an interview that it is realized that a particular candidate has been considered for a position before. This is awfully late to discover what may be the most time-saving piece of information possible. In some cases, a good candidate may have made it to the final round, and was simply edged out by someone slightly better. Others remind you why the first interview didn’t last more than five minutes either. Regardless, knowing what happened the last time provides invaluable information and can help make the decision to interview a candidate immediately or rule them out despite a good-looking resume.

Time for Testing?

While using complicated tests during the application process can discourage the best people from applying, using properly-specified assessment tools as part of the interviewing process actually makes excellent sense. Research and anecdotal experience both agree that many candidates are better at looking good than they are at actually doing the job, while others who do not perform well in the stressful setting of an interview eventually become top performers. Good assessment tools can help to make the selection process less subject to biases that favor brassy show-offs over quiet stars.

Suggested Metrics• Interviews cycles to hire: While repeated rounds of interviews are often needed, the time entailed raises

the risk that your top choice will be scooped up before the process is over.• Interviews per hire: The total number of interviews you conduct to hire one person can indicate whether

you’re not screening enough people out earlier • Avg. quality of interviewees: Get feedback from managers on each interviewee’s strengths & weaknesses









OfferingIt all comes down to this: you have a handful of candidates, and you must make a decision. If you’re lucky, your top pick accepts your first offer. As the job market tightens, employers often find their luck running thin as fourth- or fifth-choice candidates tell them the first offer isn’t good enough. To the extent that every person who gets fired had to at some point get hired, this is where the worst mistakes are made.

How many candidates?

People take longer to choose an entrée from a ten-page menu than one with just six choices, but they aren’t necessarily happier with the result. If you have reached this point with more than a half-dozen candidates then it is high time to consider whether you really know what kind of person you are looking for. If so, you may end up hiring someone who is a very good candidate, just not for this job.

Who’s number one?

In an ideal setting, managers can look at past performance reviews and attach real value to each employee’s characteristics. Making hiring decisions based on “gut instinct” often leads to indigestion. Try compiling a set of key characteristics both positive and negative, and score your existing employees in similar roles based on these criteria. This will help you to understand whether you’re looking at the right variables.

Bidding wars—the cost of hire no one thinks about

You’ve made what you consider an excellent offer to your favorite candidate, and she responds that a competitor has beaten yours by a significant amount. Now what? With the clock ticking, the decision to up the offer is made hastily and with little thought given to alternatives. And even if you win, having an employee—even a good one—paid 25% more than her peers can lead to personnel problems down the road. But how much choice do you have?

In fact, the answer for most companies is probably, “we don’t know.” It takes two to make a bidding war, and if you have at your fingertips good metrics that show what is really happening in your hiring process, you’ll have a much better idea of when “no” is the right answer to a candidate inviting you to increase your offer. While the market sometimes offers you little choice, the better you understand your hiring process, the better decisions you will make.

Suggested Metrics• Total number of candidates considered for making an offer• Percentage of candidates who refuse the first offer they are given• Average percentage increase in second offers









General ConsiderationsThe following are a sample of significant issues that can arise not just in one stage, but at any point in your hiring process.

The One That Got Away

Time doesn’t just cost money, it can also cost quality. In tight hiring markets, good candidates may stay on the market a matter of days rather than months. By moving quickly, you don’t just save the cost of an empty seat, you increase the odds of landing your first-choice candidate.

Hiring Managers’ Involvement

Most managers dread hiring as a time-draining activity fraught with risk. A bad hire can ruin a reputation. In smaller companies with very little support from recruiters, managers have no choice but to play a hands-on role, but in larger organizations, busy managers are happy to leave most of the decision- making up to HR. While recruiters sometimes see this as a sign of trust and responsibility, the result for the company is not always so positive. Many hiring mistakes begin with an unnoticed misunderstanding early in the process. By getting hiring managers more involved, for instance by asking them to evaluate a dozen or so applicants’ resumes as they arrive before doing your screening, you increase the level of dialogue and understanding of requirements between you. And if that isn’t enough, this also helps prevent the recruiter from taking the blame when a manager complains that “so-and-so had me interview a dozen people and none of them were any good.”

The Strategic Opportunity for HR Professionals

It’s no secret that the combination of the economic downturn and the rise of outsourcing and off-shoring hit human resources professionals especially hard over the past four years. Many newer companies are growing into the low hundreds of employees before hiring even a single HR person. While seemingly cost-effective, this ignores the important strategic role that HR can play, especially in a growing company. Developing internal expertise in the art of recruiting, in terms of sourcing, passive recruiting, and interviewing and assessment of candidates, is one of several key areas where a skilled professional can make a strategic contribution recognizable on the company’s bottom line. True job security comes from making yourself invaluable, not invisible.









12 Rules for a Smoother, Better Recruiting ProcessTo summarize this white paper, we present the following dozen Dos and Don’ts to help heal the causes of pain in your hiring process.

1. Don’t post jobs on the same boards or rely on recruiters to provide candidates every time just because “that’s the way it’s always been done.”

2. Do track the quality of applicants from each source and see which produce the most new hires

3. Don’t expect hiring managers to read stacks of resumes quickly. Hiring managers fear stacks of resumes and will avoid them like an eight year-old avoids Brussels sprouts.

4. Do ask them to review samples to determine what they’re looking for and whether your sourcing techniques are working well early.

5. Don’t force candidates to jump through hoops to apply for a position. Applying should be quick and easy to encourage the maximum number of responses.

6. Do use screening tools to sort applicants based on objective criteria. Use the time you save to review the candidates who remain more closely.

7. Do try to find out whether you have previously considered a candidate before interviewing him or her.

8. Don’t let candidates stew for a week or more after conducting an initial interview. A good candidate may delay accepting another offer if they think they have a chance with your company.

9. Do use tests and assessment tools to support the interviewing process to identify true performers.

10. Don’t just select your first choice and make an offer. Select two or three in order and choose what to offer each. If your first choice declines or requests an increase, you won’t make a hasty decision.

11. Do maintain detailed metrics about each step of the process and how it ties to the key performance measures of time, cost, and quality. You cannot improve what you can’t measure.

12. Do become a thought leader for recruiting in your company by developing expertise in interviewing techniques, passive recruiting, and sourcing channels. You are your own best job security.









The Role for Applicant-Tracking SystemsWhile it is certainly possible to recruit excellent people with nothing but email and a telephone, even relatively small (50-500 full-time employees) companies stand to benefit significantly from the application of a 3rd-generation ATS. Even one-person businesses now use specialized software for accounting. By 2015, using Outlook to recruit will be as obsolete as a pencil and ledger.

Administrative AutomationA large portion of the effort in the hiring process is purely administrative in nature. Making sure resumes are received and forwarded to the right people, scheduling interviews, and answering candidates’ questions quickly consumes much of the day when dealing with multiple openings. An ATS can either simplify or completely automate many of these tasks, effortlessly freeing up an hour or more of time each day to focus on more challenging and rewarding projects.

Instant Pre-Screening of ApplicantsSifting stacks of resumes to determine which applicants meet a set of basic criteria has long been among the most tedious and dreaded tasks any recruiter or hiring manager faces. 3rd-generation ATSs such as HRM Direct feature automated resume screening capabilities that significantly reduce the time needed to pre-screen hundreds or thousands of applicants.

Integrated Resume DatabaseWhen was the last time you checked the [email protected] email address? Before you pay recruiters thousands of dollars or post ads on the job boards, think about all the resumes you received the last time you hired for this position. Large corporations and professional recruiters have long used databases to create an internal source of instant candidates for frequently-filled positions. The low cost of such tools today means they are now available to anyone.

Escape from the Email InboxA key source of friction in hiring is the need to solicit, obtain, and review feedback from hiring managers, recruiters, and interviewers throughout the process. Quite often recruiters will send an email with a candidate’s resume to a manager, only to have it molder in the manager’s inbox for days before any action is taken. ATSs like HRM Direct provide a clean and structured environment for hiring managers and recruiters to collaborate. Managers need only login once per day to review the progress of their openings and quickly complete tasks assigned to them. The bottom line is that nothing falls through the cracks, and a week or more can be trimmed from the process while simultaneously making it less painful to participate in.

Delivering the Metrics You NeedThere is nothing magical about metrics, but collecting them by hand is a time-consuming and min- numbing process if you want to do it in any level of detail. By using an ATS, process data is automatically captured and compiled whenever you need it. If you’re generating good metrics today, you will save hours every week by doing it automatically. And if you’re not measuring your process, how can you hope to improve it?



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About HRM Direct

Founded in Boston in 2004, HRM Direct has helped hundreds of companies nationwide with solutions for Talent Acquisition and Onboarding.

Our clients come from organizations with dozens to tens of thousands of employees, and represent diverse industries including high tech, retail, education, manufacturing, defense, government, and healthcare.

Each year, thousands of openings are filled and millions of applications and forms are processed through our platform.



HRM is located one block from Copley Square in Boston.

HRM Direct Inc.Worldwide Headquarters715 Boylston St. 4th FloorBoston, MA [email protected]

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HRM Direct Whitepaper - Filling the Holes in Your Hiring ... › hub › 212972 ›...

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