Recruiting & Hiring Blog for HR Professionals

What is your current employee retention strategy? If you cannot immediately answer the question, or at least begin envisioning your current organizational approach to employee development, then we’ve already identified a core reason why you are continually hiring customer service representatives.

We know you want to find the best person for the job to fill your open position. But to do that, you have to make sure you are attracting (and not repelling) the best applicants. Mistakes at the start of the hiring process can leave you with a dismal applicant pool, and ultimately a bad hire for your team. So stop scaring off the best candidates by avoiding these 5 common mistakes:

Oversee the onboarding process. Manage employee relations. Maintain benefits programs. Ensure legal compliance. Make policy recommendations. Have you ever taken the time to list all that’s expected of you as an HR manager? Depending on the size of your company, your list could take up pages.  

With 2015 budget planning well underway, you’re probably in the midst of defining allocation requests and preparing to defend each line item to senior management. If applicant tracking software isn’t already one of the line items in your budget, you may want to revisit it in light of your overall company and HR strategy.

If you need to convince the people who hold the purse strings why an applicant tracking system is a “must have” item for 2015, consider these five reasons:

The job market has seen its ups and downs over the past few years and so have job seekers. As we explored in a recent blog, job seekers face plenty of obstacles as they search for work. Oftentimes, HR reps and recruiters can make it more difficult for job seekers to overcome those obstacles. For example, posting a job description that does not accurately describe an open position can leave job seekers unsure as to whether they’re a good fit for the position.

If you’ve ever been single, pursuing a relationship of some kind, then you know how unsettling the process can be. One person tries to impress the other, communication flies back and forth, and if, at any point, one person thinks he or she is doing well but the other does not, everything breaks down. The expectations of the eager person are crushed, and the other person moves on in pursuit of something better. 

Job seekers face similar perils when job hunting. There’s the anxiety of the unknown and the reality that rejection will probably happen before the search is over. But the responsibility of presenting well does not strictly fall upon the pursuing job applicant—companies have an obligation to attract the best candidates, too. And not all companies do a good job of putting their best foot forward.

Making snap judgments during the hiring process can lead recruiters and hiring managers to erroneously eliminate quality candidates, while selecting applicants who simply aren’t the best fit for the job qualifications or the company culture. Snap judgments are often the result of various interviewer biases, such as:

HR teams are understandably concerned with filling positions quickly while finding the best candidates possible. Delivering a positive applicant experience is a proven way to achieve these goals, as well as to reinforce the organization’s overall brand and create goodwill. But what does it take to create a positive applicant experience? 

No HR professional wants to sort through endless stacks of resumes for every open position, but a manual hiring process often leads to this common conundrum. You know the skills and qualifications that your candidate needs to have in order to be a top performer at your company, but searching through a resume database for that one candidate that meets all of these requirements can be a time consuming process.

To easily identify top candidates, pre-screening questions can be a powerful tool in the early stages of the hiring process. While it’s always important to clearly evaluate everything that a candidate can bring to the table, a few simple “Yes / No” questions at the very beginning can save you a lot of time and energy in the long run.

Applicant tracking systems (ATS) like Hyrell’s allow HR representatives and managers to tackle many of their biggest hiring and recruiting challenges. As a result, more professionals are ditching their manual methods, such as email and spreadsheets, and exploring their ATS purchase options.

According to ATS review firm Software Advice's recent survey, the percentage of those surveyed relying on manual hiring methods to track applicants decreased 6 percent from 2013. It is clear HR reps like you are increasingly searching for a hiring solution that will make their hiring and recruiting more efficient and organized. Professionals who previously purchased an ATS are also back in the market looking for a new solution that incorporates the latest and greatest features.