Winning the Hiring Race: How Automation Drastically Accelerates Recruitment

Recruitment is costly and time-consuming, a fact confirmed by a study from XING and forsa. In this survey, 200 HR heads from companies with over 200 employees participated. Over two-thirds of them stated they take more than three months to fill a leadership position. For half of the HR managers, this process can extend up to six months. Typically, companies spend between 20,000 and 50,000 euros on their recruitment processes.

The shortage of skilled workers increasingly becomes a financial burden on companies. While this presents opportunities for recruitment consultants to address these pain points, the challenge remains: find suitable candidates quickly. The potential savings are easy to calculate, and the added value is straightforward. Yet, as recruiters know, this task isn’t simple. Despite striving hard, your list of open vacancies doesn’t shrink; some positions simply remain unfilled. Why? Is your database lacking the right candidates? Is your search inefficient? Or do the problems lie within your internal processes?

Streamlined Processes for a Faster Hiring Race

HR managers are often forgiving if recruiters can deliver suitable candidates. But how quickly can you do this? The time-to-hire becomes the crucial performance indicator determining if an HR manager will continue working with you. Thus, optimizing the so-called hiring race—as the entire recruitment process involving the candidate and your HR contact—is essential. Accelerating every stage of this process helps you deliver rapid and excellent results for your clients. A reliable industry network and an appealing talent pool are crucial. However, the efficiency of your processes ultimately dictates the speed of reaching your goals.

Fortunately, recruitment processes tend to follow a similar structure. From the recruitment request, candidate identification, pre-selection, interview phase, contract negotiation, hiring, to onboarding: in each “stage” of the hiring race, you can eliminate time-wasters, standardize actions and automate them. This is where processes start gaining measurable speed. Let’s explore some practical examples:

1. Standardize Job Request Intake to Avoid Misunderstandings Often, new job mandates are sent unstructured via email or phone to recruiters. Frequently, the information is incomplete, causing internal processing delays. The result: questions, misunderstandings, waiting time, and other obstacles. It’s smarter for HR managers to post vacancies through a web interface with a standardized form provided by the recruiter. This ensures all necessary information is included, allowing recruiters to trigger further processes internally.

2. Intelligently Identify and Select Candidates The manual search for candidates and their pre-selection often takes up the most time in recruiters’ work schedules. Thus, this is where the biggest potential for time savings in the hiring race lies. Using recruitment software with smart search algorithms, possibly even Artificial Intelligence, helps find suitable candidates faster. This technology not only identifies technically qualified candidates, but also considers personality traits from standardized tests, leading to a better match more efficiently than human efforts alone.

3. Automatically Generate and Send Anonymized Candidate Profiles As a recruiter, when you’ve selected some interesting profiles to send to your client, it’s crucial the documents are complete and anonymized. With traditional tools like Word, creating such profiles can be time-consuming. It’s more efficient to employ recruitment software that helps combine, anonymize, and send preferred profiles to clients via a single PDF link.

4. Auto-Generate and Dispatch Work Contracts

   When a client decides on a candidate, especially for temporary positions, recruiters often handle the administrative tasks, including contract creation. This process is time-consuming and prone to errors. Instead, recruitment software can offer templates with placeholders (for salary, working hours, etc.) that can be customized and converted to a PDF, then easily sent to all parties involved.

5. Receive Auto-Feedback Are your clients satisfied with the recruitment process and the new employee’s performance? What about the candidate’s perspective? Normally, recruiters don’t receive this feedback unless requested. Yet, it’s vital to learn if the recruitment was successful. Thus, the feedback phase should be an integral and automated part of the hiring race. Both candidates and clients can submit their feedback via an app or in response to an automated email.