How SMBs can speed up time to fill and accelerate recruitment

Of course, job applicant patience levels are position specific, which means that senior candidates may expect and therefore be able to tolerate longer hiring times. But, even the more measured C-Suite candidates have their limits and are more likely to abandon a tardy hiring process than junior candidates. The findings of a poll from reported on HRDive.com confirmed this: ‘Job applicants are frustrated by scheduling delays, but particularly those in the running for senior positions — and 62% of senior-level candidates surveyed left the process over such issues.’

You should be even more concerned about a tardy hiring process, if you are operating in certain high-demand sectors such as technology, banking and energy. This is because research shows that a massive ‘49% of candidates in these sectors are more likely to turn down a job if they have a poor recruiting experience’.

A faster hiring process will have a material impact on your crucial KPIs: increasing your candidate pool size/quality and offer acceptance rate, while at the same reducing dropouts and no-shows. This rapid filling of open positions can minimise production delays, reducing time-to-market, making you a more responsive and adaptable company.

Failure to deploy corrective strategies due to acute time pressurisation

Even though hiring teams are aware of acute shortcomings in their hiring process, due to being acutely time pressured many are  unable to make a continued strategic effort to reduce their average time to fill. It doesn’t have to be this way, as significant hiring process improvements are just a stone’s throw away. In fact, many firms are rapidly deploying game-changing and market-proven strategies to reduce their time to fill such as:

• Offering flexible working with surveys showing that’ 51% of people would forgo higher salaries for more flexibility’. In fact, Job seekers are willing to trade an average of ‘11.7% of their salary for training and flexibility—and that figure rises to 12.4% among those who work in in-demand fields like technology’.
• Allowing candidates to experience your work culture first-hand during the hiring process.
•   ‘Almost two-thirds of job seekers (63%) said they were more likely to apply for a role with a company if they had the opportunity to attend a social event to network with potential colleagues and learn about the organisation’.
• Research shows that ‘33% of C-suite-level candidates said they’d take a pay cut to work for a mission-driven company that aligns with their ideals’.

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Deploying an ATS is a proven and efficient way to reduce time to fill

While effective, these approaches can take time to organise and rely on the engagement of stakeholders within the organisation. However, one of the simplest ways to reduce time to fill is to adopt state-of-the-art applicant tracking software (ATS) offering cutting edge AI technology to automate the most time-consuming aspects of the hiring process.

How Ainscough Reduced Time to Fill with a Modern ATS System

It’s not rocket science, any size talent team can use an ATS to reduce their time to fill and here’s an example study of how one SMB company, Ainscough, did just that. They were labouring with a clunky piece of legacy HR software which was proving to be time-consuming and inefficient. The talent market had changed since they acquired this software becoming more complex and dynamic and this legacy software had failed to adapt and as a result had developed a catalogue of limitations, including but not limited to:

• Slow, bulky and difficult to use with lots of unnecessary functionality
• Labour intensive
• Poor user interface
• Lack of job posting outlets, all done manually
• Poor candidate and user experience

The result of this was a lengthy hiring process which required the HR department to manually filter through applications which was proving time-consuming due to the extremely niche roles they hired for and the very specific certifications that needed to be identified in each CV.

Occupop’s ATS offered 5 game-changing features to reduce Ainscough’s time to fill

Occupop’s ATS offered 5 game-changing features which when embedded within Ainscough’s process worked to enhance and streamline the hiring process at every stage.

1. Applications, candidate correspondence, and any internal hiring communications, are stored centrally in the Occupop system which means that deciding who to interview is now a much quicker process for Ainscough.
2.  Personalised, automated email templates make it easy to keep candidates in the loop, and candidates invited to the next stage of the process is done in one click. (This will help to keep Ainscough’s candidates engaged with the hiring process at it progresses)
3. The drag and drop feature means that moving candidates across each stage of the process is now a simple action for the whole hiring team, regardless of their experience with using candidate management tools.
4. Ainscough can now post jobs to multiple jobs boards with just a couple of clicks thanks to Occupop’s Jobs Board Integration.
5.  Ainscough were able to make use of Occupop's interview scorecards, smart questions and AI to automatically generate reliable and highly candidate shortlists according to unique skills and experience, in fraction of the time using the old system.

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Ainscough’s Time to Fill and other KPIs improved after deploying Occupop

After deploying Occupop, a modern, best-of-breed ATS with tools to help automate and simplify the talent attraction and management process, Ainscough were able to:

• Reduce their time-to-fill from just over a month to under 2 weeks
• Attract over 3.5 times more candidates per role.

“I have been so impressed with the system that I've recommended Occupop (and the team) to many others. It's dead easy to use, saves us a lot of time through improved processes and just makes my life easier as the HR lead.” says an Ainscough user of Occupop.

Read our entire Ainscough case study to learn more about how they managed to reduce their time to fill streamline their hiring process using our ATS.

Ready to invest in an ATS system but need to convince your leadership team? Download the ATS Business Case Template that will help you present a business case for an investment in an Applicant Tracking System for your organisation.

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‍Meet Occupop

Occupop is a beautifully simple recruitment software built for small and medium businesses. We empower our customers to become great at hiring through our smart hiring technology and suite of solutions that almost anyone can use. So whether you're a team of five or fifty, it only takes a few minutes to onboard your team members, set permissions, and start recruiting. If you think Occupop could be a good small business recruitment software solution for you, try it out today with a free 14-day trial.

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