recruiting-strategy
How to maintain efficiency at the busiest time of the year
Orla Hodnett
HireHive
Orla Hodnett
HireHive
Orla Hodnett
HireHive
Orla Hodnett
HireHive
Maintaining efficiency and productivity at the busiest time of the year is daunting. For many of us doing the big shop or making small talk in a lift is daunting, so filling dozens of hard-to-fill positions in a very short window of time is no joke.
Instead of throwing the towel in and going to live in a cabin in the woods where no deadlines can intimidate you, embrace your inner organisational freak. All you need to do to ensure complete efficiency is get clever. It goes without saying that you should be using online recruiting software to manage reporting, job posting, communications and interviewing, but beyond that, here's a few things to consider.
Each member of your team, no matter how junior or senior, will have a contribution to make in the recruiting process
When you are busy, even when you are tremendously busy, it can be difficult to relinquish control of what you are doing. Simply delegating tasks can help you work more efficiently.
Furthermore, each member of your team, no matter how junior or senior, will have a contribution to make in the recruiting process. Collaboration can be made effortless, through the use of various tools. Messaging tools like slack, or even tools like Dropbox or Google Docs, which facilitate easy collaboration on projects, can be used to great effect here.
This is part of our Recruiting Strategy series
Setting goals and prioritising tasks can help you see the wood from the trees when you are facing your busiest period. Again, if you are extremely busy, it can be difficult to drop a certain task and take up another. We all try to do everything at once – and even though we know this is a terrible idea, but we do it anyway.
Making a plan, laying out your team's priorities and focusing on what you need to achieve will help you direct your strategy and resources. By setting deadlines on what you need to achieve, it can put structure to your general plans. Though strategy often has to be flexible, as things rarely go exactly to plan, knowing your objectives makes all the difference.
If you are up to your gills in work and have dozens of posts to fill, you have to find any shortcuts you can to get the work done
If you are up to your neck in work and have dozens of posts to fill, you have to find shortcuts to get the work done. This might include making use of work you have already done. When sourcing candidates for upcoming positions, consider getting in contact with candidates you screened before. You will have much of the leg work done already, so your time to hire will be greatly improved.
In the realm of efficiency and productivity, metrics and data are the best indicators of where you are at. They are one step short of someone slapping you across the face and saying “you need to fix this.” Two KPIs that get a lot of attention on recruiting are time to hire and cost per hire, both of which can give you insight on how to improve efficiency.
Having just discussed utilising work you've done already, recently collected data on recruiting should help you greatly. If you have been using an ATS or gathering metrics by other means, now is the time to crunch some numbers to see how you are performing.
“HireHive makes the team a lot more productive. We’d be lost without it. Team Leaders can do it all themselves if needed or jump in at the right time and know exactly where everything is and what’s happening.”
Hilary Dempsey Head of HR at Life Credit union
