Human Resources Blog - Spark Hire
Candidate Experience and Rapid Growth_ The Secrets Only Experts Know

Candidate Experience and Rapid Growth: The Secrets Only Experts Know

Congratulations! Your company is growing rapidly. This brings many new challenges and is an exciting time. But there’s one thing you can’t afford to ignore while expanding: your candidate experience.

Rushing through the hiring process negatively impacts the candidate experience. This creates a devastating ripple effect. When you find the right people, they’ll be less likely to accept your job offer. Without more talent, company growth will halt, stalling progress.

Luckily, you can maintain a great candidate experience while growing. It’s all about balancing your hiring needs with the expectations of job seekers.

Here are how three hiring experts have managed to grow their team with ease:

Define hiring criteria clearly

It’s sometimes easy to forget that managers aren’t hiring experts. The majority of their day is spent on managing productivity, not reviewing resumes. As a result, they tend to “follow their gut” when assessing candidates.

This becomes a much bigger problem when combined with vague job descriptions. Candidates are not able to learn anything of value about the company or position if job details are not specific and clear. In the end, they get their hopes up only to find out the job is nothing like they imagined.

Disappointed candidates are likely to turn down job offers and new hires are unlikely to stay on board. This draws out the hiring process and costs the company a great deal of time and money.

“Hiring managers go wrong by not putting the time in up front to really consider what they’re looking for in a replacement or a new hire,” said Barbara Mitchell, co-author of the The Big Book of HR. “If some work is just done before the hiring begins, it will go quicker.”

Take the time to walk hiring managers through the process of creating accurate job criteria. The act of writing job descriptions will help them verbalize and understand what they need to see in a candidate.

Streamline interviewing

There are a lot of moving parts in the hiring process. Each one needs to move smoothly and efficiently. Otherwise, candidates get bottlenecked. Then it takes weeks — or even months — to find the right candidate.

It’s important to use the right screening tools. These resources allow hiring managers to assess candidates without wasting time.

For instance, All Web Leads, a customer acquisition marketing business, needed to hire 100 employees each month. However, their phone interviews were wasting 45 minutes for each candidate. When they switched to using video interviews, they cut screening time to 15 minutes a person. Most importantly, it improved the candidate experience.

“The videos are completed by the candidate in their free time,” said All Web Leads recruiter Amy Hargrove. “This change has saved us and them countless hours in the screening process, and has also given us the insights to only focus our time on the best applicants.”

Control turnover

Hiring for rapid growth becomes ten times harder when there’s also high turnover. You’re trying to fill new positions while replacing employees who have quit. Then to top things off, disgruntled former employees create a negative impression of what it’s like to work for your company.

Candidates reach out to former or current employees to get a better picture of what the company is like. Finding that people are running from the organization will make them rethink completing the hiring process.

“The best way to avoid recruiting is to keep the people you have,” said Howard Bates, CEO of WorkHere. “Turnover is often caused by treating employees like they are disposable.”

From the first day of the hiring process to the day an employee retires, you should treat them as valuable and essential members of the team. This will keep them happy and loyal. It will also make them great ambassadors who attract other talented individuals.

Josh Tolan

Josh Tolan is the Founder and CEO of Spark Hire, a video interviewing platform used by 6,000+ customers in over 100 countries.