Top 3 Solutions to Your HR and Recruitment Department’s Redundant Processes

There is no question that the HR department is essential when running a growing or established business. In the workplace, the HR department doesn’t only handle issues that arise with employees and manage employee-employer relationships; they also help drive the workplace culture and hone an office’s general attitude towards work. Additionally, HR is fundamental because they are usually in charge of the recruitment process.

HR professionals are commonly tasked with internal recruitment — as well as recruiting new talent to a company. They, thus, have specialized knowledge about how to attract the right potential employees to a company and how to hone in on who is best suited for an open position.

Despite the specialized skills that most HR professionals have and the vital role they play in recruitment, many HR departments go wrong because they function inefficiently. With a smaller focused recruitment team within a larger HR team, it is very common for the employee recruitment process to have many redundant steps.

Redundant processes don’t only make the recruitment process at an organization take more time than necessary and create extra work for several people at your organization. They may also slow the entire hiring timeline down and cause a company to miss out on a potential available candidate—which means they are losing out on the chance to capitalize on the best talent available.

If you work in HR or recruitment, there are several steps you can take to fix the problem of inefficiency and remove redundant processes. By streamlining the way HR teams recruit and hire new team members, you can ensure the hiring process is as quick and efficient as possible and that you’re always able to reach and hire the best talent. Here are some of the most effective.

Audit Your Current Processes

To find out where the redundancies are in your current recruiting and hiring processes:

1. Sit down and do a thorough audit.
2. Create a detailed and specific outline of how recruiting and hiring work.
3. Write each step out, one by one, and delineate who in the department handles each.
4. Have the whole team with you when you complete the audit to ensure you include every step and team member. When you do a thorough audit, it will become very clear to you when steps are being repeated, as well as when people are doing tasks or completing work that is unnecessary and does not need to be done.

An audit is the first step to an efficient and streamlined recruiting process. 

Switch to Cloud-Based Software Solutions

In the past, the recruitment process was often managed and documented on paper. Today, your recruitment process should be managed digitally using the software. This is not only better for the environment but also ensures that everyone who has access to your recruitment software can see where a candidate is in the process.

To ensure you remove redundancies in the hiring process, try using cloud-based HR recruitment software when you work. Not only does cloud-based agency software allow you to free up room on your physical hard drives, but it also allows anyone to access and update that software no matter where they are located or working. This means that as long as someone has an Internet connection, they can always update the recruiting database and keep it accurate to the minute.

It also means that anyone can check and see a candidate’s status in real-time, so no one on the HR or recruiting team repeats interactions with the candidate multiple times or redoes administrative or record-keeping work tasks that have actually already been completed. 

Improve Your Job Description and Applicant Screening Process

Another way to remove redundant processes within recruitment is to improve the job descriptions you put out. This approach will automatically weed out potential candidates who aren’t a good fit for the job (but who may apply anyway because the description is vague or not quite up-to-date). This allows applicants who aren’t a fit for the position to weed themselves out of the process before you begin it, so they can do a step of the work for you.

Also, improve the way that you screen applicants. Create a team that carefully sets parameters for who will be interviewed and then narrow down potential interviewees based on essential factors (like experience, aspects of a personal statement, grades on a transcript, etc.). Also, rely on third-party systems that can help you screen and eliminate candidates who aren’t the right fit right away.

Using a background checking service on applicants first (with their permission) to immediately remove potential employees who could never be hired saves you the time you might have spent reviewing their materials and interviewing them, only to find out that they’re not a good fit for your company. Another third-party resource to consider is a recruitment service.

You can take recruitment out of your HR team’s hands entirely by handing it over to a service dedicated to finding, attracting, and hiring great candidates. A recruitment service doing the recruiting work allows HR to be free to better manage what needs attention in the office, like onboarding, employee training, professional development, promotions, managing internal conflicts, planning team morale-boosting events, and more.

The recruitment process is essential for building an unbeatable team — and the HR department must create a system for getting the right candidates into the right positions. While the task may seem daunting, there are, in reality, some simple steps recruiters can take to make hiring easy, efficient, and smooth. By relying on the right HR recruitment software, reviewing your processes closely, considering internal recruitment, and using the help of third-party services, you can create a recruitment process that not only works for your very busy department but also makes the process as straightforward and stress-free as possible for all job applicants seeking the position.