Recruitment may feel like a zero-sum game. When your team adds extra interview rounds, more candidates drop off. But if you remove some steps, you may get a flood of not-quite-right applicants.
An effective hiring process connects you with the best candidates with minimal uncertainty and friction. But how do you build one? Here’s some advice from top hiring leaders.
TL; DR—Key Takeaways
- Talent sourcing, candidate relationship management, and effective screening are the most problematic areas for businesses, leading to prolonged hiring times.
- Optimize your process one step at a time. First, improve your job descriptions to better reflect the role, compensation, and employee value proposition.
- Complement resume screening with skills assessments to gain more clarity and confidence in the applicants’ capabilities.
- Engage hiring managers early in the hiring cycle to create better job postings, avoid scheduling conflicts, and have a more structured interviewing process.
- Advertise open roles and your employee experience on social media to drive more candidates. Monitor your employer brand online and use feedback to improve the hiring process.
- Invest in the right recruitment software. Look for a scalable tool with customizable hiring tracks, candidate relationship management tools, robust analytics, and intelligent process automation.
At which stages in the recruitment process do businesses struggle most?
3 in 4 companies had trouble filling full-time positions in the last 12 months. According to the Society for Human Resource Management, some of the top challenges were:
- Low applicant numbers: 60%
- High talent competition: 55%
- Increased candidate ghosting: 46%
- Lack of required experience: 40%
- Non-competitive compensation: 39%
In other words, talent acquisition, competency assessments, and candidate management are the most troublesome elements of the hiring process. But they’re fixable with some decisive effort.
Tips for improving your hiring process
When we launched Toggl, hiring wasn’t our strength. We knew a lot about time tracking and project management but hiring…
“We spent a ridiculous amount of time gathering information on prospective employees but ended up with a lot of uncontrollable facts and no good way to make a rational decision that would be based on the candidate’s actual skills,” shared our Founder, Alari Aho.
Something had to change. For us, that was switching to skills-based hiring and building recruitment software to support our new strategy.
Along the way, we tested other strategies to streamline hiring, improving our approach to talent acquisition, candidate experience, and talent pool management.
Here’s what we recommend. 👇
Use the right applicant tracking system
An applicant tracking system (ATS) sifts through a medley of applications to find the perfect match in less time. The best systems do more than resume parsing. They also provide tools for:
- Candidate screening like keyword-based resume filtering, automatic applicant rankings, skills assessments, homework assignments, and more.
- Recruitment task automation like one-click posting to multiple job boards, interview scheduling, streamlined employee referrals, and career page building.
- Candidate management to ensure smooth communication throughout every stage of the application process and high candidate engagement.
- Analytics and reporting to quantify your efforts and track progress using reliable recruiting metrics.
- Employee onboarding to guide new hires through all admin formalities and get them into a productive groove fast.
An ATS helps you design an effective hiring process for your company by codifying various recruitment best practices into standard workflows.
This way, your recruitment team can focus more on things that matter (like creative candidate sourcing, fair screening, and data-based evaluations) and spend less time on mundane tasks like regulatory compliance or document management. And do so at blazing speeds.
Take it from Monese’s recruitment team, which had to hire over 100 new employees over five months. A manual hiring process couldn’t cut it, especially as the team needed qualified developers.
“Toggl Hire gives a pretty good first idea of the candidate’s skill level and knowledge. This saves our recruiters lots of time!” shared Triinu, HR Manager at Monese. With a new three-step hiring process, Monese gets to the job offer stage 72% faster with full confidence in the candidates’ qualifications.
Learn how to write a great job description
A job description is like a company’s personal ad, outlining who you’re looking for and what you offer. To write one, determine the candidate requirements first.
Talk to the hiring manager about the must-have (and nice-to) hard and soft skills, candidate seniority level (junior vs middle), specific qualifications or certifications, and traits for a good cultural fit.
Next, lay these out across three job description sections:
- Role details: A concise summary of responsibilities and expectations without unnecessary buzzwords.
- Things you look for: Preferred capabilities and past experiences, described in an engaging, inclusive language.
- Benefits you offer: Give a snapshot of company culture, perks, and opportunities.
Renee Beckman, founder of two recruitment agencies, has a great tip for nailing the language of your job description: Drop vague duty descriptions like “assist with projects” and “create process improvements” for language that brings the role to life.
“If you’re talking to seasoned professionals, they already know the drill. That’s why I tell the story behind the role instead—paint the picture of what life in that job really looks like,” she says.
And an extra tip from Toggl Hire: Apply the same rule when describing candidate requirements. Replace “years of experience” and a laundry list of “ideal qualifications” with explainers of what the role entails. You can also improve your job descriptions by avoiding these common mistakes:
❌ Not disclosing the salary
❌ Creating a super long description with no bullet points
❌ Being vague about the job’s responsibilites
❌ Not checking or correcting spelling or grammatical errors
❌ Not including a perks and benefits sectoin
❌ Using too many buzzwords (candidates can tell!)
Be transparent about salary from the start
Would you agree to buy a car knowing its tech specs but not the price? Nope, nor do job seekers feel thrilled going through three interview rounds before knowing the compensation package.
The lack of salary information deterred 44% of candidates from applying for a job last year. Among Gen Z, a whopping 85% will skip job postings without salary deets.
Pay transparency sets proper candidate expectations early on. No side will waste time on a conversation that falls apart over salary. You’re more likely to attract quality candidates who vibe with the paycheck.
Joel Gascoigne, CEO and co-founder of the social media management platform Buffer, explains that trust is the simple rationale behind the company’s approach to full salary transparency — a decision made more than 10 years ago.
“External transparency enables prospective candidates of Buffer to deeply understand our unique Salary System. This means people can enter our hiring process aware of very specific details of how we work. Leaning fully into external transparency in this way holds us to an even higher standard as we open ourselves up to public scrutiny on our approach to salaries. We believe trust is the foundation of great teamwork, and we’ve learned from over a decade of experience that transparency breeds trust.”
Trust is a powerful feeling. It creates loyalty among current employees (who are rewarded for merit and not penalized for tenure) and attracts top talent (who appreciate transparency) for open roles.
Focus on the candidate experience
Candidate experience is shaped by the sum of interactions (positive or otherwise) job seekers have from the application to the onboarding period.
The better the candidate experience, the likelier you are to attract and hire high-quality candidates. The opposite is also true. Job seekers will bail out when your hiring process is too complex, your communication is too faceless, or your employer branding is too cringy.
According to different sources:
- 78% of job seekers drop out of a recruitment process they find too long or complex.
- Only 18% of candidates find three interview rounds to be acceptable. The majority wants fewer rounds.
- 71% of Gen Z candidates quit the hiring process due to lack of or slow feedback.
- 67% of applicants feel annoyed when they must repeatedly fill in their details to arrange interviews after previously talking to the recruiter.
All these issues have a common theme: poor communication. The fix? Be more intentional about when and how you communicate with job applicants to analyze when most candidate drop-offs happen. Is it between a phone screen and a full interview? After sending a take-home assignment?
To know for sure, auto-apply to your company’s open job posting. How long does the process take? Are there redundant data entry requests? What information might candidates be missing?
By approaching the candidate experience design with empathy, you can better address job seekers’ concerns, smoothen the process bumps, and make every applicant feel valued regardless of the outcome.
Forget resumes…use skills assessments to identify qualified candidates
Resumes are like screenshots. They do provide some context but don’t always communicate the bigger picture of someone’s experience and abilities.
Due to some legacy applicant tracking systems, candidates focus on the wrong aspects, such as layout, keywords, or format.
At Toggl, we ditched resumes in 2013 in favor of skills-based hiring — and never regretted it because we started landing the right candidates. Serge Herkül was one of the first developers hired using skills testing and he’s now CEO of Toggl Track.
Other human resources teams share the sentiment. According to SHRM, three in four HRs say pre-employment assessment scores are just as important as or even more important than traditional criteria like degrees or experience.
Skills assessments provide a more objective baseline for hiring decisions. You can benchmark people based on their competence, not just credentials. Based on years of experience, Serge wouldn’t have landed a new job (and that would have been terrible for us!).
Finding ideal candidates used to be a problem for Luciano, a CTO at an environmental services firm. The recruitment team spent too much time on screening. Adding skills-based assessments at the beginning of the recruitment pipeline was a game-changer.
“After some iterations, we are really filtering the best candidates in minutes in a fully automated way based not on CVs but on abilities,” Luciano says. What’s more, “around 90% of candidates we get report a positive experience doing the test, even the ones that get disqualified.” This helps a lot with employer branding.
Resumes can still be the first element of your recruitment process. But grounding your decisions in extra data, from assessments and take-home assignments, dramatically reduces the risks of poor hires.
Lean into social media (where it makes sense)
Social media networks help with two things:
- Broaden the reach of your job postings
- Shape a better employer brand
Both should work together for your recruitment strategy — improving the quality and quantity of job applicants.
Employer branding campaigns on LinkedIn and Instagram showcase the company’s value propositions, employment incentives, and employee experiences. This results in potential candidates envisioning themselves as part of the team. In between, advertise your employee referral program and open positions.
Social media recruitment also helps engage passive candidates — people open to switching when the right opportunity comes up. Remember to set aside a budget for retargeting ads, which can really make a difference in drawing in the right hires.
Coach hiring managers on how to conduct better interviews
Interview coordination can get hectic, especially during mass hiring campaigns. The candidate meetings can be unproductive when the hiring manager uses canned interview questions or asks applicants to recite their resumes.
To avoid that, create a templated interview guide covering:
- Ways to introduce yourself and the company
- Role-specific interview questions
- Behavioral and personality interview questions
- Candidate scorecard for rankings
By following a structured interview process, your team can objectively compare candidates using response scores. This eliminates personal biases and helps identify each person’s strengths and weaknesses.
✨ Top tip: Involve hiring managers before interviews
At Toggl, hiring managers are involved at almost every stage of the recruitment process. Different people contribute at different stages — job description development, screening, test assignment preparation, and checking.
This collaborative approach saves time on coordination (everyone is looped in early) and improves the candidate experience. Managers come prepared with tech questions, while HR creates the optimal set of behavioral questions.
Automate the right parts of your talent pipeline
Hiring efforts often go haywire when recruitment teams are overloaded. Going through 500 resumes, coordinating 10+ interviews, and replying to a gazillion messages from candidates and company stakeholders — that’s the usual drill.
The better news is many of these workflows don’t have to be manual if you invest in recruitment automation.
Full-cycle recruitment platforms like Toggl Hire streamline a lot of the ‘busywork.’ You can duplicate hiring pipelines for similar roles to jump-start a new campaign.
With templates, you can save time creating career pages and interview feedback emails. You can also automate the early stage of your hiring funnel by adding skills tests with automatic grading and a custom pass score, transferring successful applicants to the next stage.
Schedule interviews by automatically finding an available slot on your calendar and distributing invites to all participants. Streamline team communication by organizing all candidates in a recruitment CRM, offering tools for candidate tagging, shortlisting, and team notes exchange.
By methodically removing mundane manual steps, you give your team more time to focus on what matters—creative talent sourcing and personalized communication with the most qualified applicants.
Monitor and invest in your employer brand
Three-quarters of job applicants research employer brands before applying. They look for Glassdoor scores from current employees and any public scoops on the work environment.
Beyond good pay and perks, employees also crave a connection with their employers through shared values, beliefs, and behaviors. In fact, for 77%, employee experience is a deciding factor in their job search.
Evaluate how your company comes across online:
- What types of cultural values do you emphasize in your HR communication?
- Do you solicit, monitor, and engage with public reviews on sites like Glassdoor or Indeed?
- How do you deal with negative or neutral candidate feedback on social media?
Chris Haslam, co-founder and talent advisor at MOVE, gives a solid tip for building an employer brand: “Start with your current team. Why did they join? What do they get from being here? Why do they stay?”
Run an internal survey to understand what factors impact employee retention and satisfaction. Then, consider how to communicate these better in your recruitment marketing campaigns. Internal surveys with employees and unsuccessful candidates also direct you towards the biggest gaps in your process, which you should ‘plug’ to improve your hiring efforts.
Use data to back hiring decisions
An intensive hiring process with multiple interview rounds doesn’t fully eliminate the odds of a bad hire.
“Back in 2013, the Toggl team managed to hire only one developer after an intense 6-month hiring period,” Alari recounts. “Once we did, we soon had to let him go because it turned out he lacked the skills needed for the job.”
A decade later, Toggl might have transformed its hiring culture, but other companies still lack confidence in hired candidates: 46% of newly hired employees prove to be a poor fit within 18 months.
What helped us (and many other companies we spoke to) was bringing more data into the hiring process. Rather than just tracking standard recruitment metrics like time-to-fill, source of hire, or average number of applicants per position, we focus on optimizing ‘quality of hire’ metrics like:
- Candidate test scores by channel
- Offer acceptance rate
- Hiring manager satisfaction
- Candidate experience scores
- Average time to productivity
- First-year attrition rates
With Toggl Hire’s recruitment analytics features, we can monitor which channels attract applicants with the best skills, how fast they progress through our recruitment funnel, and when they drop off. Combined with internal survey data from hiring managers, these scores help us shape a better recruitment strategy.
We can prioritize channels that work, eliminate redundant steps to accelerate time-to-offer, and improve the average cost-per-hire for repeatedly sourced roles.
Enjoy hassle-free hiring that boosts the candidate experience
The talent market is always on the move, often changing within a matter of weeks.
To escape this cycle of unpredictability, invest in both the right process and the right software. With Toggl Hire, you can add targeted improvements to the key stages of your hiring process — sourcing, screening, interviewing, and communication — without burning your teams with more work.
Instead, we:
- Provide data-based hiring frameworks to reduce tedious manual efforts and improve teams’ hiring confidence
- Replicate pre-made hiring pipelines to skip the lengthy setup
- Offer expert-made questions from our test library to create custom skills assessments,
- Enable you to interview people on your own timeline with async communication tools
- Deliver an exceptional candidate experience with timely feedback at every stage.
Sign up for a free Toggl Hire account to start building a more efficient hiring funnel.
Elena is a freelance writer, producing journalist-style content that doesn’t leave the reader asking “so what." From the future of work to the latest technology trends, she loves exploring new subjects to produce compelling and culturally relevant narratives for brands. In her corporate life, Elena successfully managed remote freelance teams and coached junior marketers.