The Computer Merchant, Ltd. (Frank Anigbo)
An estimated 44% of potential new hires are lost because a company took too long to conclude the hiring process.
Jobseekers, if nothing else, need the assurance of a job offer with as few interviews as possible. In other words, all things being equal, the company that first makes an offer, wins.
But for some jobseekers, an offer of a job isn’t enough, a prospective employer must speed through the hiring process to avoid losing the jobseeker to a better offer.
For a company to secure the best candidates, it helps to make the hiring process – from interview to onboarding – as short as possible.
The following is a list of proven strategies to help you keep promising jobseekers from saying yes to someone else.
To Hire the Best, You Must First Attract the Most Qualified Candidates
Finding a manageable number of qualified candidates is a time-sapping and expensive process for companies whose core business is not staffing. The best thing a company can do here is to delegate the hiring process to a staffing agency. Good IT staffing companies are experts in winnowing a large pool of jobseekers down to the best two or three candidates for a given position. And they have the tools to do it much quicker than anyone else.
Another much-overlooked benefit of working with a staffing company is getting the benefit of their experience and expertise in creating an effective and accurate description of the position you want to hire for. A badly-written job description will not attract the kind of people you want to hire. Worse, it may get you applicants that are badly ill-suited to your position.
IT staffing agencies not only work with you to target the right jobseekers with a clearly-written job description and media campaign, they will often utilize automated tools that will match the job description to similar, previously-filled positions to immediately determine its effectiveness, and target the same proven talent that filled those previous positions.
In addition to nailing down the skills and work experience candidates must possess to meet your requirements, your staffing partner will help you screen for soft skills to ensure a good cultural fit for the successful candidate.
Don’t Delay Interviews
We can’t stress enough how critical setting up and conducting an interview is to getting the best-fit candidates. Look at it from the candidate’s point of view, a delayed invitation to interview will be taken to mean that someone else may have already been offered the position. Most active jobseekers will take a delayed invitation to interview as a sign to continue their search elsewhere.
We advise that once qualified candidates are identified, an interview should be scheduled as quickly as possible. This will send a very strong signal to the candidate that their application stands a real chance of landing them a job, thereby dissuading them from looking elsewhere.
Don’t Delay Making an Offer
While an invitation to interview will keep a hot candidate from looking elsewhere, the security it provides the jobseeker will quickly erode if a job offer does not materialize within a few days of concluding interviews.
It may be very tempting to continue interviewing other candidates in the hope of finding The One, doing so, however, will most assuredly cost you the best candidates who met all of your qualifications. No one wants to be strung along so we advise that you make an offer to the candidate who best met all of your key criteria for success.
The Computer Merchant, Ltd.
The Computer Merchant, Ltd. (TCM) is a veteran-owned, national provider of technology staffing solutions for commercial enterprise companies, systems integrators and public sector/government agencies. We’ve been deploying top-notch IT and engineering talent for our clients in 48 states and across many diverse industries and cutting-edge technologies since 1980.
At TCM, we learned early on that in order to compete against billion dollar companies with endless amounts of people and resources, we must always maintain a significant advantage in how we employ technology to scale, strengthen and customize our delivery for our clients. Today, we utilize a broad array of internally developed systems and integrated commercial 3rd party applications to optimize our talent sourcing and assignment management, onboarding and off boarding, strict client regulatory compliance, supplier vetting, and track real-time industry competitive rates by skillset and location.
