11 recruitment time-saving tips for the overburdened recruiter

Your workload is mounting as a recruiter, especially as your company gains a windfall from a new funding round, operates in a high-turnover industry, or is about to enter a new market with a new product. All of these involve a lot more work on your part to find the right candidates to fill all the extra spots being opened up every month.

That’s not all. There’s the extra burden placed on your day-to-day with legal and moral expectations to meet diversity, equity and inclusion metrics, increased compliance obligations including data privacy, employee vs. contractor classifications, and wage regulations.

And all of that while working on the same hiring budget you’ve had on your desk since before the pandemic – but with one or two less people in your team. That’s a lot to ask of a hiring team – especially in terms of time.

So, to help you out, here are 11 recruitment time-saving tips to help you optimize your hiring process while working with a lean budget and lean team. Spoiler: Workable’s recruitment solution can help you with pretty much all of them.

11 recruitment time-saving tips to speed up hiring

1. Automate the process
2. Offer self-scheduling options for candidates
3. Take advantage of templates
4. Enable mobile-friendly recruitment
5. Introduce e-signatures
6. Utilize a user-friendly career page builder
7. Take advantage of AI
8. Clone the process
9. Post to multiple job boards with one click
10. Automate your reporting
11. Remote interviewing

1. Automate the process

When handling large numbers of applicants, it becomes nearly impossible to engage each and every one of them personally, even when shortlisted.

Luckily, there are tools available that allow you to automate different steps in the process. Steps that can be automated include:

• An initial thank-you email in response to an application
• A rejection message for those who are not the right fit
• Moving candidates through the pipeline based on assessment scores
• A calendar self-schedule link sent out to someone who’s been moved to the next stage (more on that later)

Remember, you’re still dealing with human beings in the process. An automated, impersonal, careless rejection email can be off-putting for the candidate and may even impact impressions of your company in their network. Ensure that the tone and style of the email is appropriate, and always prioritize that candidate experience!

Workable’s automated actions tool can help you preset emails and processes while providing the templates (more on that below) to help you get started on recruitment time-saving.

2. Offer self-scheduling options for candidates

Whether you’re a recruiter or hiring manager, you know how much time can be spent communicating back and forth when planning for a phone screen, a video interview, or an in-person interview at any stage in the process. Factor in the number of candidates involved, and you can see how you might be wasting time that’s better spent on other, more applicable tasks.

All of that can be eliminated, however, by giving the candidate the opportunity to reserve an available time slot right through a link to your calendar. Workable’s self-scheduling tool enables easy scheduling from start to finish – and is one of the leading recruitment time-saving tips in this list.

3. Take advantage of templates

Writing a job description or a series of interview questions from scratch for every job opening can be a time-consuming task, especially when you’re hiring en masse after a new funding round or expansion to a new market. It’s also potentially susceptible to bias in terms of the language used, job requirements listed, and questions asked.

Save your time by utilizing templates. Templates, of course, don’t need to be posted as is – rather, they provide a great foundation for you to start to customize to each job. Plus, they save you a lot of time in the workflow.

Workable has more than 700 job description templates, 390 interview question templates, dozens of company policy templates, checklists, emails and much more that can be imported right into your applicant tracking system.

4. Enable mobile-friendly recruitment

Recruiting is a full-time job for recruiters, but is an added workload for hiring managers and executives whose decisions are needed to move candidates through the pipeline. Bottlenecks will happen as a result.

You can alleviate those breakdowns by giving busy hiring managers and executives the option to sift through candidates on their smartphone. Think about it – they’ll be able to check in during their commute, while taking a break in their day, or when (ahem) taking care of other business. That’ll speed things along.

Workable’s mobile-friendly app enables all of that, and more. Ben O’Mahony, from Cytora, commented on why the mobile app is awesome for busy hiring managers:

“They don’t need to see the entire recruiting pipeline at all times. They just need to see who they’re interviewing. And this is quickly done through the Workable app.”

5. Introduce e-signatures

Getting candidates to sign that job offer so you can close the books on the process is easier said than done, especially when it’s a remote hire or a new employee from another location. Having contracts delivered to and from the new hire is a time-consuming process, and that piles up when you’re handling multiple hires at once.

E-signing can solve all of that hassle. Everything’s going digital now – especially as the work world becomes increasingly remote. That includes all the legal stuff, like contracts, in a fully secure online environment to boot.

Workable’s ATS comes ready-made with its own e-signature tool to meet those important signature needs and is a small but important recruitment time-saver.

6. Use a user-friendly career page builder

Careers pages, like anything else in your website, can involve a lot of design work involving a team that’s already busy working on marketing and sales materials day in and day out. Plus, there’s a lot of back-and-forth involved where you have a ‘perfect’ careers page in mind and you’re working with design to make that happen.

You can skip all of that by bringing in a feature that enables even the least tech-savvy HR manager to build an impressive careers page using click-and-drag options.

Workable has its own advanced careers page builder built into its software. And this tutorial can help you whip together an amazing careers page in a short time, putting your employer brand on a pedestal and attracting the very best candidates to your company.

7. Take advantage of AI

We’re now in a strange time where many companies are experiencing difficulty finding the right candidates – or even a satisfactory number of candidates – for specific job postings. This especially applies when you’re hiring in a hyper-competitive space, such as developers or software engineers, or when looking to fill a niche role – both situations that often result in a shortage of candidates. This can put the onus on the recruiter to seek out potential applicants – including passive candidates – which involves a lot of legwork and time invested.

But there are ways around that. Artificial intelligence, when used in the right way, can seek out and find great candidates for you based on your job description and other parameters that you set – including specific keywords, qualifications, and other directives.

Workable’s AI Recruiter was introduced specifically for this purpose. And it can come in especially useful for you right now.

8. Clone the process

When someone – especially one of your top employees – puts in their notice, it feels like you have to start all over again. Not only is it like capturing lightning in a bottle, it also takes time to set up a new job ad, put together a new series of interview questions, create a new assessment, etc., etc., etc.

What if you just went back to that original process that led to the hire of this amazing employee, and simply cloned it? Not only can you replicate what was successful before, you can skip those steps doing this for high-turnover roles such as in sales and hospitality.

9. Post to multiple job boards with one click

Your job description is approved and you’re ready to distribute. Next steps:

• Step 1: Post job ad to LinkedIn.
• Step 2: Post job ad to Facebook Jobs.
• Step 3: Post job to Indeed.
• Step 4: Post job ad to Glassdoor.
• Step 5: Post job ad to Monster.
• Step 6: ….

You get the point. Doing that over and over and over again can eat up all the hours in a day, and that’s just for a single job opportunity. Although it’s standard to expect an ATS to deliver job ads to numerous job sites automatically, you want to be sure you have the right ATS to post to not just the most job sites, but the right ones.

Check out the list of Workable’s existing job site integrations to get an idea of how many job sites you can post to with one click using our recruitment software.

10. Automate your reporting

Reporting on recruitment metrics is crucial to successful hiring, but it can take quite a bit of time to analyze data and then break it down into reports for the C-suite who are most interested in how your hiring process impacts the bottom line.

There are many different reasons you need reports in hiring, such as:

• Identifying breakdowns and bottlenecks in the process that can prolong time to hire and time to fill
• Understanding where your best candidates are coming from
• Tracking diversity metrics in your candidate pool
• Staying compliant with government-mandated requirements, including EEOC, CCPA, and GDPR protocols

All that data in your recruitment process can be automatically turned into reports to benefit all of the above, including having reports sent directly from your software. Workable’s software has reporting functions to meet each of the above needs.

11. Remote interviewing

While it’s not necessarily time taken out of your own work day, you’re asking a lot of a candidate when you schedule an in-person interview. Assuming the commute takes an hour each way door-to-door, you’re making the candidate spend three full hours – or more – for a one-hour interview. Not only that, it doesn’t bode well for candidate experience, especially in an increasingly digital work world. A recruitment time-saving tip here will be invaluable.

With a few exceptions – such as the more intensive later-stage interviews – do your candidates a favor and carry out your interviews via phone or, ideally, video. There’s a multitude of tools out there that can help you – including Workable’s one-way video interviewing tool which can take care of the screening stage and even that first “interview” stage in one step.

Optimize and grow

Of course, these time-saving recruitment tips won’t free up your entire day – but they can free up a good number of hours in your workflow that can be better spent on the more in-depth work.

You can now invest time and energy into branding yourself as an employer, meeting with hiring managers to best understand what they want and need in a new hire, and overseeing new employee onboarding.

Not only do these increase your profile within the company as someone who can do the job without fail, you can better participate in more high-level discussions around workforce planning. It’s a win-win all around – for yourself, for candidates, and the company as a whole.