Recruitment can be complicated. Not just because sometimes it’s difficult to find the right person for your business, but because a messy recruitment process can bring you a lot of bad consequences. Therefore, it is extremely important, specially if you are a small company or a start-up, to work in having an efficient recruitment process from day one.
Consequences of an unorganised recruitment process
Having a non-efficient recruitment process could have a big list of consequences, that even if they don’t seem important for you right now, they will have a massive impact in your business in the future.
- The obvious one is losing efficiency and wasting the time that you could be spending in other tasks. How much does it cost your time to the company? What other projects could you be working on during that time?
- Not being able to respond to every single candidate. If you read your dashboard on LinkedIn lately, every single person is complaining about how companies don’t even respond to them to say “Hi, we have received your application”. In an ideal world, you would aim to be sending nice messages to every candidate who contacts your company. Have you thought about the marketing potential that a recruitment process has for your start up? People accessing your social media, subscribing to your newsletter, watching the videos about your product, and engaging with you on LinkedIn. However, this will only happen if you manage to engage with them.
- You could also be missing information from candidates, or questions that they might have, and the most important thing to keep up to date notes on the conversations and interviews that you have with every single candidate that goes through any of your recruitment processes. Imagine that you spent a week of your time hiring a salesperson for your company. Some candidates were good, some bad, some of them average. You do interviews, reject people… Today, you are facing the same situation, and you advertise in the same places… logic says that you will be receiving some of the same candidates… No, they are not insisting, they apply to every live posting that they can find online… so here you are, reviewing the same CVs again, and maybe even interviewing the same people… until the moment that you realise, in the middle of the interview, that you invited this guy a couple of months ago, that you didn’t like him/her for XYZ reasons… and you have wasted 30 minutes of your lives.
It seems that all of these reasons could be something minor not to have in consideration unless you are a big company.
However, I have lived situations where after recently joining a client, they start looking for profiles for some of their recruitment processes. I do all my work as a HR professional, believe that I have everything in place and there I was, facing the horrible situation of receiving a message from the candidate who is forwarding me messages with the previous HR person, or even the CEO about the same role and with me not knowing where to hide.
And that will happen to anyone who is not organised from their very first recruitment process.
It happens to everyone, if you are not organised, it will happen
Unfortunately, from the CEO to the hiring managers to the HR people that join your company, it will be hard to keep track by memory of those who have applied or gone through a recruitment process before with your company.
You can say that you are super organised, as you have spreadsheets…. Ok, so you have their names, their job title, and the role they applied for… you might even have some notes on the side and the stage they did go through.
Do you know the amount of emails that you exchange with that person? Do you know if you finally rejected them? Or if they withdrawn their application? Do you know which date did they meet with the CEO, or the hiring manager? And their comments about it? Did they do a test for the role? Where is that test? Can I call that person for another role?
Did everyone who was involved in the recruitment process wrote their notes in that spreadsheet? Is that spreadsheet the only one? Do you keep that data according to GDPR or your data protection legislation?
I hope the last 2 paragraphs gave you a closer look at all the complications that could come from not having an organised recruitment system.
Luckily there are plenty of Applicant Tracking System that can make your life easier and for free or at a very cheap price.
What an ATS could do for you?
It automates everything:
The email a candidate receives when they submit their application. It is obviously up to you to be creative with your recruitment and create a great first impression, but you will only write the message once.
It can send the invite message to those that you would like to interview just with moving them from one stage to the next one. Since there are plenty of tools that help you with the scheduling, that could also be automated.
It automates the rejection email. You can always do a personalised one for those that you have personally interviewed, but if you are looking for efficiency, set up this tool and save hours at the same time you increase your employer branding.
An ATS keeps information from one recruitment to the next one:
Something that nobody mentions, but it is extremely effective, saves time and improves the employer branding, is having an actual database of candidates.
There are not more thankful candidates that those who actually get contacted when a suitable position arises. Yes, it is a sentence that goes into every single rejection email. Unfortunately, few companies actually research in their databased for previous candidates.
When a candidate actually receives an invite email to another process, 80% of the times you will have a follower for life.
Having their records also helps with finding gaps into the information they give you. Month X you receive a CV that explains certain experience. Month Z you receive a completely different CV. We all evolve our CVS, but up to certain point. An applicant Tracking system will help you spotting those candidates that are not that sincere about their working life.
As a summary, an unorganised recruitment process could seem harmless while doing it, but it will bring you consequences for sure. Sometimes it is just about making sure that you set up a free system from the very beginning and keep it tidy and efficient.
