The efficiency of your company hiring process is more important than ever. Candidates go to websites like Glassdoor and others to share their experiences with any other potential candidate. Creating a positive candidate experience is crucial to attracting a quality pool of applicants as well as protecting your brand image. For a business that wants to hire the right employees, reducing time-to-hire is one way to improve the hiring experience. It's not necessary to cut corners to reduce the time from placing an ad to hiring an employee. 

How to reduce time-to-hire without putting your business at risk.

Streamline & Document Your Hiring Process

Typically the reason for a slow hiring process is because of duplicate or unnecessary steps. Creating a streamlined, documented hiring process, and including management training, can greatly shorten the amount of time needed to make a hiring decision.  The process could start as an overarching list of procedures that every department follows along with any specialty needs for certain types of jobs. For instance, the hiring procedures might be:

1. Identify a job need
2. Develop job description
3. Select where and how to recruit applicants
4. Place ads or other recruiting steps
5. Identify hiring manager and interview staff
6. Review applicants
7. Conduct interviews
8. Extend job offer
9. Run background checks
10. On board employee

Within the hiring process, there may be particular steps for jobs that require more security or screening. Your business may determine the background checks required for a financial position must be more stringent than one for a customer service position, as an example. Documenting all of this ahead of time will make the time-to-hire a more efficient process.

Make Your Hiring Paperless

One of the easiest way to streamline your process is to go paperless. The use of applicant tracking systems, electronic signatures or electronic screening can dramatically pare down the steps required to hire a quality candidate. A paperless process also reduces the errors that often slow down the candidate experience. By taking the application and paperwork online, the applicant directly enters their information into the portal. There is no need for someone else to decipher the applicant's handwriting and enter the data into another system for screening or onboarding. 

Within an electronic screening portal, which may be integrated as part of the applicant tracking system, forms can be standardized and adverse action notifications sent so that your business is in compliance with FCRA guidelines. 

Be More Effective with Background Checks

Your business can reduce the time-to-hire and still manage the risk to your business. The risk of hiring the wrong employee or falling out of FCRA compliance can be costly.  Streamlining the hiring process and using a paperless process are part of an effective and compliant hiring process.

The time spent waiting on background checks can also be reduced. Employers can save time and money by implementing a more efficient screening policy. Some best practices:

• Create a screening policy including a list of which screens will be run for each job
• Run a basic background check first
• Request a customized quote or volume discount from your background check vendor
• Make sure your background check partner is trained in FCRA compliance and PBSA accredited

Receive a free, personalized quote on background checks to minimize risk to your business. Click the green button below.