How to overcome the administrative burden in recruitment

Posted by

Carolyne Burns

As a recruiter it's easy to get stuck sifting through paperwork and playing phone tag, rather than spending your time on the more important task of actually securing the best person for the job.

Hiring new employees is a critical role in any business, but unfortunately it often involves a frustrating number of touchpoints and manual processes, all of which chew up time and slow things down.

Time-to-hire blew out to an all-time high average of 44 days in 2023, according to HR consultant The Josh Bersin Company. That's a big deal, considering that a drawn out time-to-hire has a major impact on your business.

Of course, there's the lost productivity and extra strain of working short-staffed, which takes its toll on the entire team. Then there's the risk of missing out on the best candidates because they've been snapped up by rivals, while you were still flicking through a vast pile of resumes.

There's a lot to do when hiring people, by the time you write and place the job advertisement, wait for applications to come in, skim through resumes to make a short-list and then play phone tag in order to line up interviews.

Don't forget all the checks that employers need to make these days before bringing someone onboard. It's not just checking references, you've also got visa checks, work rights checks, police checks and maybe even working with children checks. They're all vital steps, but they can really drag things out.

All of that's often before you even get the chance to sit down with anyone face-to-face to see if it was worth all the trouble to get them in for an interview.

The good news is that Expr3ss! Predictive Hiring can handle a lot of this legwork in order to fast track the hiring process. You can slash your time-to-hire from weeks to days.

Expr3ss! doesn't decide who gets the job, that kind of important decision obviously still requires the human touch. Instead, Expr3ss! handles a lot of paperwork and helps you identify which candidates you should focus on when deciding to interview.

It even highlights who you should contact quickly, because they're likely to get snapped up by someone else if you drag your heels.

Traditionally, recruiters spend hours skimming through resumes, glancing at skills, to decide who makes the cut. This takes time, plus it often ends up singling out the wrong candidates, while overlooking hidden gems.

Using short surveys, Expr3ss! quickly and cost-effectively pinpoints job applicants with the right skills, attitudes, temperament and cultural fit.

The surveys typically take around six minutes, while ensuring that the best applicants make it through to the interview stage. Surveys can also include deal-breaker questions to ensure applicants have all the necessary qualifications and certifications before they are recommended for an interview.

As a result, many Expr3ss! users never look at a single resume. They can jump straight to drawing up their short list for interviews, safe in the knowledge that every applicant has been judged on their actual merits and not just the claims they made in their CV.

To help you hone your list, Expr3ss! lets you sort applicants by more than 60 Job Role Benchmarks so you can easily see which applicants are the best fit for a specific role.

You can also take advantage of Expr3ss! Checklist Surveys, Work Rights Checks, Online Referencing and other useful features which ensure you've done all your homework.

When you're ready to get people in, the Expr3ss! Interview Calendar lets you email candidates a link with which they can book their own interview time. This way you don't need to chase them all and juggle an interview schedule.

All of this frees up hours in your day, without taking the final decision out of your hands. That's valuable time you can spend on face-to-face interviews, along with other important tasks such as staff development, team-building and nurturing a great workplace culture.

The results from employers using Expr3ss! predictive hiring are impressive. Spendless Shoes reduced its time-to-hire to an average of 10 days. Meanwhile, LUXXE Outsourced Hotel Services slashed time-to-hire to an amazing 3.8 days, becoming a member of our ever-growing '7-day club'.

Along with reducing time-to-hire, Expr3ss! results in better hiring decisions which reduce turnover. Signature Hospitality Group operates 50 venues across Australia and New Zealand, including the Sporting Globe Bar, TGI Fridays and Varsity. It employs more than 2000 people and, thanks to Expr3ss!, it has an incredible 95 per cent staff retention rate – which is simply unheard of in the hospitality sector.

Of course, reducing employee turnover means you spend less time searching for new people, which also eases the administrative load so you can spend your time on more important things.

The administrative burden in recruitment can seem overwhelming, but streamlining your hiring processes with Expr3ss! reduces both your time and effort to hire, while ensuring you find great people who will stick around so you're not always on the hunt for replacements.