Streamline Your Hiring Process to Realize Fast Results
By Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD
Have you ever offered a promising job candidate a position only for them to decline because they already accepted a job with another company? I have. I took too long. Even though they claim to have preferred to work for me, they grabbed the first job offer that came their way.
People today—including job seekers—have little patience. We live in a world that wants instant gratification, and we have little tolerance for waiting.
Unless you want to continue to lose qualified candidates, you need to optimize your hiring process. Look for ways to make it more efficient so you can hire the best applicants before someone else does.
Don’t continue to follow yesterday’s hiring practices, because they’re no longer appropriate for today’s workplace. What is the average time between a job seeker first expressing interest and you hiring them?
I hope your answer isn’t more than a week. Even a couple of days is too long. Can you get down to twenty-four hours? How about a same-day decision? Just how fast can you act?
Here is an idea to consider. Note that this isn’t a proven plan to follow but merely a possibility to spark your creativity:
Online Self-Assessment
Once you’ve captured a prospective employee’s attention, provide them with an online self-assessment tool that will allow them to determine if an answering service environment is a good fit for them. Present a series of questions that reflect work at your answering service.
The more questions they answer “yes” to, the better fit they are. Score their answers. Then tell them: “People who score between X and Y tend to like working for our company, whereas people with lower scores may struggle to succeed in this position. Do you want to apply?”
[Note: unless you take time to validate the outcome, don’t record their score or ask them their results. To avoid a legal quagmire, let them use this tool privately to determine if they want to move forward.]
This assessment occurs online and automatically without any involvement on your part.
Phone Screening Call
If they want to proceed after taking the online self-assessment, move them immediately to a prescreening evaluation over the phone.
This is a standardized set of questions to rule out candidates who don’t fit your criteria, such as people wanting full-time work when you’re hiring part-timers or candidates seeking a business-hours position when your openings are for evening and weekends.
You should script the call flow so that any of your operators can conduct the phone screen call. Anyone who passes should move on to a phone interview.
Same Day Phone Interview
For candidates who pass the phone screen, give them the option of an immediate phone interview, or let them schedule one. Yes, an immediate phone interview.
Connect them with your hiring manager or HR department. Again, this should be a structured process that will provide an instant pass/fail outcome.
Though you may prefer an in-person interview, remember that all their work at your answering service will take place over the phone, so a phone interview should be more indicative of their capabilities than an in-person meeting.
Make an Immediate Offer
For candidates who pass the phone interview, make an offer at that point. Don’t delay.
Desiring to compare a group of candidates who pass the phone interview will not only take more time, but it also increases the risk of your best candidate receiving a job offer from someone else before you make yours.
Once you’ve made the offer, don’t push them for an immediate yes/no answer. Though some people will accept right away, others will want to think about it. If that’s the case, schedule a follow-up phone call.
This idealized hiring process could take less than an hour. Though it will require effort to fine-tune each step and compress it into a sixty-minute procedure, you can do it.
Now your next task is to optimize your onboarding and training process to make it just as efficient.
Learn more in Peter Lyle DeHaan’s book, How to Start a Telephone Answering Service.
Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD, is the publisher and editor-in-chief of TAS Trader, covering the telephone answering service industry. Check out his books How to Start a Telephone Answering Service and Sticky Customer Service.
