This is a story how we at Toggl have sped up our hiring process and managed to still have only one full-time HR manager taking care of our 60+ team member company’s ongoing recruiting (spoiler alert: we don’t use robots, however, we do use a tool called Toggl Hire).
Here are our top five best tips on how to spend less time and money on recruiting:
1. Write a very clear job description
This is a no-brainer, but still worth mentioning. The number one thing to do before starting the recruitment process is to figure out who exactly you’re looking for and then write a clear job description. Your job description is your chance to attract and connect with potential candidates. It is something that every recruiter knows, yet I still see job descriptions that describe the job very poorly or – even worse – don’t describe it at all.
We often want to include as much information as possible while still sounding professional, so our job descriptions sometimes end up having sentences like “maintain a diverse and complex document filing system” or “provide high-level executive secretarial assistance”. What does it mean? What are the skills you’re looking for?
Not having a clear job description means you’ll end up with lots of non-qualified applicants who have no idea what you’re actually looking for. They just try their luck and they apply.
Remember that a poorly written job description pays you back as you’ll have to spend a lot of time (and money) figuring out which candidates are really interested and qualified for the job.
2. Put the salary range to your job ad
Unlike Toggl, most companies still don’t add the salary to their job opening ads. Why? Because they want to see what is the lowest price they could hire someone for, or they are afraid that adding a salary range means they’ll have to start paying more.
While I do understand why companies may not be so keen on publicly showing their salaries, I also believe that every proper job ad should state the salary range.
Excluding the salary from the job ad means you’ll get tons of candidates who may have higher salary expectations than what you can offer.
As a result, you (the employer) waste a lot of time and money on reviewing and interviewing applicants who will turn down your offer in the end, and the job seeker wastes a lot of time and nerves on applying to the position in the first place. In short, no one wins and nothing gets accomplished.
So how to turn this into a win-win situation? Put the salary range to your job ad! Simple as that. Mentioning the salary in the early stage of the recruiting process guarantees you’ll get applicants whose salary expectations fit your offer, and there won’t be any ‘bad surprises’ by the time you start signing the contract.
3.Screen skills instead of reading resumes
We at Toggl don’t use resumes and cover letters when recruiting. Instead, we use Toggl Hire, a tool that lets us easily screen applicant’s job skill. In resume-based hiring, you won’t really know the candidate’s real skills until it’s too late.
With Toggl Hire, we start the recruiting process by checking the candidates’ skills right away with simple tests.
The system then evaluates each and every answer, sums up the score and picks out the best performers. And from there on, we focus our energy only on that shortlist, while everyone else is handled and contacted automatically by the system.
Why this method? Mostly because we no longer need to manually separate skilled applicants from those who just try their luck. Starting the recruiting with Toggl Hire’s skill tests saves us around 25 hours per each hire — that’s a lot of time and money! Also, it helps us remove cognitive biases from the recruitment process and gives all candidates an equal opportunity to apply for a job. And most importantly, it helps us hire a strong, skillful candidate fast and with confidence.
Starting the recruiting with Toggl Hire’s skill tests saves us around 25 hours per each hire.
4. Keep the number of interviews low
Our hiring process is a bit different from most other companies. We start with short skill tests, we then invite top performers to the ‘test drive’ phase, from there we invite an even smaller talent pool to the interview. Just like we don’t read resumes, we also try not to interview too many candidates per position.
Although interviewing candidates is very important, it is also very time-consuming and costly. The average interview takes around 60 minutes and includes at least two interviewers. That’s simply just too many hours spent on interviews!
In traditional hiring, interviewing just a few candidates doesn’t really work. You can’t see candidate’s skill on a resume, so you’re trying to squeeze out as much information as possible during the interview phase. With Toggl Hire’s ‘test first, then interview’ approach, though, we see the applicants’ basic job skills right away.
The ‘test drive’ phase helps us easily dig deeper into candidates skill sets and way of working and thinking.
Therefore, by the time of interviewing, we’ve already narrowed the applicant pool down to just a few best-of-the-best candidates and we have a pretty good understanding of their strengths and weaknesses.
5. Promote your job ads on social media
What makes the traditional hiring slow is the time spent on collecting resumes, reading cover letters and CVs, and interviewing too many non-qualified applicants. Since I’ve already discussed the latter two, let’s focus on the first one.
One very simple ‘mistake’ that a lot of recruiters do is that after publishing the job ad on the company’s career page or on job boards, they breath out, sit down and wait. But simply waiting obviously slows down the process. In this phase, you should handle recruiting just like you handle marketing.
You have to promote your job ad, get traffic, make people talk about it and share it. The quicker you get high-quality applicants, the faster you can move on with your hiring process. Now, using a boring job ad or having a poorly-written job description obviously makes it difficult to attract talent and make people share your content. But using engaging job ad visuals, catchy headlines and making applying easy and fun makes people want to share your content with their friends. For example, this is how we normally promote our job ad:
Tl, dr: Make clear and engaging job ads, share your content, and most importantly, stop wasting time on reading resumes — use tools like Toggl Hire to test applicants skills, and focus only on the top performers.
