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It’s a common frustration among employers: your job ad isn’t attracting suitable candidates. Often, the knee-jerk reaction is to blame the career website you’re using and look for another or tolerate mixed results. However, the issue usually lies within the job ad itself or a company’s follow-up process. In other words, we must start by looking in the mirror and being honest with ourselves. Here, we will explore how you can refine your hiring process to land top talent for your company.
The best way to consider how well your process works is to look at it as “elapsed time since submission of application.”
Less than 1 business day: MAKE CONTACT AND SCHEDULE INTERVIEW!
Companies are well-intentioned but notoriously slow at making the first contact with potential employees. Great employees drive our business forward, yet it can be days or even weeks before a company contacts an applicant. What does this communicate to applicants? A lot and none of it is good! By the way, an autoresponder does not count! The goal is a personal email or phone call initiating your hiring process with the candidate.
Realistically, a company needs a point person to monitor the electronic candidate flow and quickly establish contact. The speed of first contact is critical in high-demand positions such as CDL drivers or diesel technicians.
Less than 3 business days: CONDUCT THE INTERVIEW
Hiring is a “contact sport,” and a company competes for talent. If you are slow, you will get the talent that is left over, unwanted, or minimally qualified. For positions in high demand, candidates have choices and make comparisons. A hiring manager who waits for his schedule to clear or until he returns from a long weekend will lose. Being “courteously aggressive” is the need. A diesel technician who was interviewing recently had no less than 5 offers from reputable companies within 6 days of putting his resume out. The same thing happens with CDL drivers! Remember this: it is not the big that eats the small; it is the fast that eats the slow!
Less than 3 business days, no more than 5 days: MAKE A HIRING DECISION
Companies need to refine their hiring processes! Your competition has already done this, and it has enabled them to make hiring decisions and establish start dates for their new recruits. This is especially true for highly qualified candidates applying for high-demand positions. Paperwork, testing, regulatory compliance, wage rates, benefits, and training must be streamlined and automated to maximize processing speed. The single best tool a company can develop is a conditional/contingent employment offer to the highly qualified candidate.
Less than 10 business days, more like 7: ONBOARD YOUR NEW EMPLOYEE
There are a variety of constraints that will make onboarding this quickly impossible many times. However, these constraints should be on the part of the candidate and not the company. Employed candidates should give two weeks’ notice, etc. That is honorable. However, a company should set a big, hairy, audacious goal to have the ability to onboard a new employee in 7 days. It is aggressive and may feel impossible, and that is the point: you must be better than your competition, or you lose!
Would you like to know more about how to HIRE FASTER, BETTER, AND MORE? Contact Transportation Consultants Group. We specialize in partnering with motorcoach companies that are struggling to hire drivers for their operations and staff for their organizations.