3 Common Challenges for Lean Recruiting Teams and How to Solve Them

Recruiting teams are increasingly feeling the pressure of working with less as a result of the current economic climate. Teams are getting leaner yet many recruiters and sourcers are still being asked to move fast and identify hard-to-find talent among hundreds of applicants—all within the same constraints of outdated, manual processes.

Improving your team’s inefficiencies is essential to meet your organization’s needs in today’s hiring environment. First, vocalize the challenges of slow, manual screening processes to your manager. This will set the stage for the need to adopt a modern talent acquisition (TA) platform that will introduce speed and empower your small team to focus on the human connections needed to fill a role quickly.

To get you started, we highlight three challenges that lean teams commonly face throughout the screening process along with TA platform features that can help you solve them.

Challenge 1: Your pipeline isn’t robust, and it’s affecting time-to-fill

One of the most valued metrics to recruiters is their time-to-fill: the number of days between a job requisition opening and the candidate accepting the offer. Essentially, how many days did it take your team to fill the role? Time-to-fill is a great way to understand the efficiency of your recruiting process and gain insight into improvement opportunities. Software can shorten the timeline by filling your pipeline faster, even when you’re working with fewer folks on your team.

Look for talent management software that has intuitive, AI-powered search functions. AI will speed up sourcing time and more accurately match candidates to the role. It will also save time by supplying your team with a healthy pipeline of candidates for future roles so you’re not starting from scratch.

A Boolean search will help you narrow candidates based on your specifications, using basic operators AND, OR, NOT, parentheses, and quotations. These operators let you build complex, customizable search strings for smarter and speedier screenings. To better learn how a Boolean search can help you target the best candidates, this on-demand video offers a beginner’s guide to Boolean techniques with SeekOut.

You can also look out for simpler search tools, like SeekOut’s Smart Match, to speed up your candidate screening. Smart Match provides recruiters with a streamlined sourcing experience so you can find relevant talent fast without having to write complex Boolean search strings or navigate a full menu of filters.

It’s also a great complement to Boolean search, helping recruiters go beyond super specific search results to casting a wider net. For example, recruiters can implement skills-based hiring, easily sourcing adjacent skills from their job description. And Smart Match helps you move quickly by suggesting related skills and titles you can add with a click.

Learn more about Smart Match here.

Challenge 2: Your evaluation process is bottlenecking your time-to-hire

Another important metric to track is your time-to-hire: the number of days your hired candidate spent being considered for the role to the day they accepted the offer. Manual processes drive up the time-to-hire timeline in a few ways.

For example, reviewing applicants by hand can swallow hours of time for a small team. If it takes someone about two minutes to review a resume, and the requisition received 250 applications (the average for corporate recruiters), you’ll have spent roughly eight hours just on the background reviews alone for a single role. Evaluating hundreds of resumes manually ultimately leaves less time for other high-value tasks, like ensuring speedy communication with your candidates.

Another slowdown to your time-to-hire is bouncing back and forth between the systems of your HR tech stack. By not having an integration with your Applicant Tracking System (ATS), your team is wasting time trying to gather the information they need from different sources. An integrated platform can keep all your candidate information synced, allowing you to message candidates and move people in and out of your recruiting funnel all from one place.

Tools like SeekOut’s Applicant Review offer a centralized and more nimble workflow with an intuitive interface that lets you reference job descriptions, edit job criteria, and review applicants—even advance or reject them with an integrated ATS—all from the same view.

Challenge 3: You introduce biases in the evaluation process

When you rely on a manual, human-led process to screen candidates, you inevitably risk introducing bias. And a larger volume of applications only increases that risk—you may unconsciously speed through resumes instead of ensuring a fair review of each candidate's qualifications. TA platforms come with features that can minimize or even remove risks of bias from the review process entirely.

Applicant Review directly addresses these common challenges by empowering you to easily, fairly, and efficiently review both large and small numbers of job applicants by matching skills and experience to job requirements. Applicant Review highlights the candidates that best satisfy skill requirements so that you can focus efforts on the most qualified candidates first, all while maintaining complete control of your applicant pipeline.

There's also SeekOut’s Bias Reducer that eliminates obvious indicators of race or gender with a simple toggle. Candidate photos are hidden, email addresses are partially obscured, and candidate names are replaced with initials.

Solve recruiting challenges for your team with SeekOut

If your recruiting team has too much to do and not enough people power to get through it all, adopting the right technology will save you so much time. You’ll have the bandwidth to move away from tedious tasks and focus on your candidate engagement experience to successfully fill roles.

Want to learn more about how your team can leverage the right technology stack to speed up processes? Request a demo with our team, or dive into these resources:

• On-demand webinar: How to Get More from Your Tech Stack Ahead of a Recession

• Buyer’s guide: How to Evaluate and Select the Right Diversity Recruiting Tool