HireHive Team
HireHive
Sourcing top talent, evaluating candidates, and making placements are not fast or easy processes. Whether you’re the company CEO responsible for everything in the organization, including recruitment, or a dedicated recruiter, it’s essential that you know how to optimize your time and meet your deadlines. Here are time management tips you can implement today.
HireHive Team
HireHive
With the current employee shortage, recruiters are becoming increasingly more important. The labor shortage is affecting recruiters but also making the industry soar.
In the UK, nearly 3 times more recruiter jobs were advertised on LinkedIn in April 2022 compared to January 2019. Germany is seeing that number at almost 6 times, France at 4.3 times, and Spain at 4.2 times more recruiting jobs. Fewer recruiters and more job openings mean recruiters need to focus more on time management as we round out 2022.
The first step for recruiters is to customize their time management process. What works for one professional may not work for someone else, so look at your specific work style and the needs of your clients to develop the right time management tools.
This time management strategy can come from the top down or be customized for each recruiter based on various factors.
Almost everyone will agree that starting with the most important tasks is always the best approach. Why? It’s normal to want to handle the most manageable tasks first because it makes you feel accomplished. However, doing that leaves you with more stress as your mind might be more exhausted than when you started.
According to a study conducted by a time management company in the UK in 2021, 82% of people use a dedicated time management system. 33% of people use To-Do lists, and 24% of people rely on their email inbox to dictate what they have to do during the day. Organizing your tasks and accomplishing the most difficult first makes you less likely to see things fall through the cracks.
It’s also important to assign urgency to tasks, especially in recruiting. You’ll want to prioritize tasks to keep you from treating every function as an emergency. This also helps you to know when to set aside a low urgency task to pick up a more urgent one and complete it before returning to other work.
There are several methods for prioritizing:
If you collaborate with other recruiters, you can find a method that helps facilitate teamwork.
It’s also okay to know what you’re good at and play into your strengths. Maybe you’re a morning person, and you can put the pedal to the metal first thing in the morning but start to flag after lunch. Then work with your internal schedule to accomplish as much as possible early and take care of administrative tasks in the afternoon.
But make sure that your strength isn’t procrastination. Everyone has bad habits, and the key is not to allow your weaknesses two overshadow your strengths. If you’re a superstar at sourcing candidates, focus your prioritization on that, not on assessments. Don’t forget to focus on tasks that make the most difference. Administrative work is not necessarily as important as sourcing talent and placing employees, even though it’s still required.
It can be easy to get into a time suck with tasks that aren’t revenue-generating. The average worker spends 28 days simply searching for documents. This startling statistic shows how workplaces are created around functions that take time rather than move the business forward.
Even the shift from office work to working from home has changed how we waste time. In 2018, the average UK worker spent 58 minutes commuting to and from work. Companies that embraced remote work during the pandemic saw increased productivity when workers didn’t have to spend so much time commuting daily.
It’s also critical to control the minutia that often turns into time wasters. For example, email can be a severe time drain, but it’s also essential for business. Emails take up as much mental space as they do data.
Just glancing at your inbox for a minute can reduce your cognitive capacity for several minutes as you try to refocus on the work. Setting aside times of the day to check and respond to email seems to be the most universally accepted way of reducing this distraction.
One great way to enhance your attention span and manage your time is to use timeboxing. This is a strategy of assigning specific tasks at 20-minute intervals. The key is to time yourself and take a break between each interval.
It works well with prioritization techniques and other time management strategies that may also work for your workflow.
One of the most important things to help recruiters with time management is to have the right tools. As we’ve seen, even searching for a single document can affect your workflow. Using an applicant tracking system and AI-assisted hiring software will reduce time wasted and help you be more effective.
You can use technology to assess top talent for every placement. An applicant tracking system can provide you with additional insights as you search for candidates who match the skills and background of each job.
With more competition for top talent, it pays for companies to consider all their advantages and the use of tools to assist in the quest to find talent. HireHive helps busy people hire great people. You can post jobs, streamline your online application process, improve the candidate experience, and tap into vast global networks by having your entire recruitment process all in one place.
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Hilary Dempsey Head of HR at Life Credit union
