How to Develop and Speed Up Your Hiring Strategy After a Round of Funding

While getting funded is one of the most exciting things for a startup, it still does take away some focus. It can take weeks, even months, to get funding, fill out the paperwork, and make sure everything is in place. However, if you are on a deadline (like most startups), you can’t afford to let that happen. You need to find a way to keep your workflow going while you are trying to get funded. Which often means bringing on new employees.

Startups in their infancy often face a problem when it comes to hiring. With high initial capital, they often face the challenge of finding the right candidate in a very short duration of time. This is a problem that most startups face when hiring. When you raise capital for your business you often need to grow the team and do it quickly. The quicker you can employ the quicker you can get new products or services up and running.

Raising capital can be a long and complicated process. One that sometimes doesn’t end in success. If you have raised the capital that you need, you need to hire quickly to execute your plans. The following blog will look at how to speed up the hiring process when you have to get new team members onboard quickly.

Questions to ask before hiring

Here are a few questions to ask yourself before you dive into the hiring process. 

Why is it taking so long to hire someone?

If it takes months for your company to hire someone, the process is evidently unstructured. Take a deeper look at all the stages of recruitment and make sure the operation is aimed at sourcing talent and not only at filling up an empty position. Here are some common hiring challenges that you should be aware of after you have raised your capital.

How to structure your hiring process?

To evaluate new hires, many traditional interview processes rely on obsolete behavioral questions such as “What are your greatest strengths and weaknesses?” However, most of the time, these types of questions fail to offer useful information about a candidate’s abilities. A better strategy is to immerse prospective candidates in unusual settings to learn the most about their critical-thinking ability, technological savvy, and interpersonal skills.

For example, if you want to measure their ability to prepare, let them know ahead of time what questions you’ll ask. Give them a real-time problem to tackle if you want to put their technological talents to the test. You can even escalate the questions or sample work you give them depending on the stage they’re in. That way you aren’t handing off lengthy homework assignments to candidates that aren’t making it through the first interview—which is respectful of their time as well as your own.

How much does it cost to hire the wrong person?

It is immensely critical to avoid hiring the wrong candidate as it can cost the company financially as well as ruin the morale of the team. It can affect the productivity of the staff and stain the reputation of your company. The screening, interview, and onboarding process has to take care of balancing the quality of the talent hired while advancing the process as much as possible.

Expedite the recruitment process with these 9 steps

1. Build an attractive employer brand

The current market is entirely driven by candidates. Effective recruitment marketing techniques have proven to be the key to attracting and retaining top personnel. Business owners who want to impress their prospective employees should investigate employer branding and social media recruitment strategies.

Developing a strong employer brand with a consistent mission, values, culture, and employee benefits will undoubtedly benefit your cause. This is due to the fact that candidates of all generations (68% Millennials, 54% Gen-Xers, and 48% Boomers) are expected to check an employer’s social media profiles before applying for a position. This is an excellent opportunity to positively promote your company culture and strengthen your position as a desirable employer.

Create interesting recruitment content and distribute it through all relevant social media networks. Passive job seekers account for 70% of candidates who are highly qualified for your available position. To pique the interest of such passive prospects, distribute recruitment-related content. Blogs, webinars, emails, videos, and ebooks are just a few of the types available. Convert your channel traction into an effective social recruiting platform by implementing social recruiting tips for businesses.

2. Create precise candidate profiles and job descriptions

When you don’t know what you’re searching for in a prospect, the recruitment process gets difficult. The first step in smart recruiting is to establish appropriate prospect profiles. It is a detailed description of the ideal candidate for a position available at your business.

Moving further in your path, candidate profiles provide you with a plethora of advantages. They provide value by:

• Assisting in the creation of the job description
• Filter prospects who may be a good fit for the organization.
• Improve your sourcing approach.
• Avoid unintentional bias

It is simple to create a candidate profile. You can investigate several areas of your business and put them in the final profile. Determine your company’s culture and make a list of the attributes that are valued within the corporation. Include the qualities required to work with the team they will be joining at the same time.

Consider all of the role’s requirements and responsibilities. These characteristics can be divided into three categories. First, let’s look at the attributes they must have for the role. Second, there are attributes that are not required but give the candidate extra points if they possess them. Finally, the final category of attributes is those that your organization can provide. For instance, knowledge of specific institutional software or industry procedures.

3. Look at the right places for candidate sourcing

In today’s recruiting market, most candidates find their way to a job through a variety of channels, both direct and indirect. The recruiting process begins with student job fairs and brand promotion then moves on to talent pools and, finally, hires. The days of knowing exactly where a company makes initial contact with a candidate, of simply publishing a job ad in the ads section of the local newspaper and receiving responses solely from those who saw it, are long gone. Points of contact are now more numerous and occur at various stages of the recruitment process.

Determining where candidates are finding your firm and job vacancies has grown more difficult than ever, making it difficult to determine which sources of recruiting you should spend more time and money on in order to reach the broadest talent pool. The answer, while not ideal or simple, is that you should continue to focus on the majority of them. Candidates are accessible in a variety of methods, and in order to remain competitive in the recruiting market, you must continue to approach them wherever they are.

A few recruitment sources are:

• Company website
• Job boards
• Social Media platforms: LinkedIn, Google+, Twitter
• Referrals
• Career fairs

4. Utilize your network for referrals

Employee recommendation programs are regarded as one of the most effective methods of sourcing applicants. This is because referred candidates are more likely to be hired, perform better, and stay in a position for a longer period of time.

Using employee referrals reduces recruiters’ effort and saves time. Employee referrals make it simple to connect with top prospects who aren’t actively looking for work but are open to new employment opportunities provided by friends or family. First take a look into examples of employee referral programs before adopting, because most of them are paid ones. 

5. Bank on the power of social media

Despite the ability to engage with and acquire millions of individuals as observed by 71% of employers, many businesses have yet to adopt social media recruiting, and those that have frequently lacked a unified plan. To use social media for recruitment requires some effort to master, but when done correctly, it may provide a significant competitive edge.

• Using LinkedIn to find suitable applicants
• Sending a direct message to a potential applicant on Facebook
• To foster long-term cohesion, tweet links to open positions and include relevant hashtags
• Post employee images to your organization’s Instagram account, along with a statement inviting people to join your team, apply for open positions (with links) or add their CV to your recruiting pool
• Creating videos to distribute on your organization’s YouTube, Facebook, or Instagram sites that highlight and outline its culture

6. Incorporate automation in the process

Candidate screening, one of the most critical processes in the hiring process, helps recruiters to exclude individuals who are inappropriate for a position and focus on those who best match the requirements.

However, this is one of the most difficult and time-consuming manual activities a recruiter can undertake. Given the typical number of applications received in each post, it is humanly impossible for your recruiting team to accurately screen every prospect and ensure that only the best candidates are retained in the process.

The ideal solution is to automate the screening process using AI. The right application tracking system can offer you an automated selection of prospects based on the job requirements that your recruiting team has defined. This feature expedites your hiring process while maintaining screening quality.

On the contrary, the algorithm that screens candidates does not get bored of looking at CVs and does not fall victim to the unconscious bias that we people do.

Another step that can be automated in the process of hiring is the stage of phone call interviews with applicants who have successfully passed the initial screening. Simply by automating your call center solution you are able to interview more potential candidates in the same period of time than usual.

7. Streamline the application process

The cornerstone of smart hiring processes in 2022 is the need to abandon time-consuming application processes. Once you’ve built an employer brand, think about how you may improve your application process. It lowers the bar for applying and allows more people to engage with your organization.

Candidates are unwilling to go through lengthy and tedious application processes. When it comes to application forms, they expect you to let them fill them out on their phones. And they’re counting on you to go through their resumes and limit the remaining fields to pertinent, application-related material that isn’t on their CVs.

Simplifying the method entails making the applications as brief as possible. Try to get rid of any unnecessary form fields. You can offer one-click application choices or allow them to link to their LinkedIn accounts or portfolios.

You may also make the forms and portals mobile-friendly. Make sure they don’t have to scroll through long forms on their phones and that they can submit resumes and cover letters via their phones.

Text messages have a 98% open rate, and more than 90% are read within three seconds. Use text messages to schedule interviews, remind candidates of important hiring process milestones, and provide application status updates. This way, keep your candidates engaged, So won’t have to play phone tag or risk having your email ignored.

8. Maintain a clear communication channel

Elaborate feedback provides context for the analytical data supplied by applicant tracking systems. Candidates who are satisfied with the overall interview process are 38% more likely to accept a job offer. You can learn why the candidate chose to withdraw from the process and whether they would recommend your organization as a place to work.

Gathering candidate feedback is critical for determining the strengths and flaws of your hiring processes. By learning from those on the other end of the hiring process, you can make the hiring process smarter. Understand their experience, the reasons they leave the process, and how you can improve the recruitment and selection process to better value their time. 

Candidate recruiting feedback can result in one of two consequences. First, long-term process changes that apply to all candidates, and second, quick steps that may alleviate the concerns of a specific application. By fixing concerns before they become serious issues, prevents strong applicants from dropping out.

9. Optimize for mobile application

We increasingly rely on our mobile devices for almost everything. We use them to browse and post on social media sites, buy food, book plane tickets, and watch the latest episodes of our favorite series on Netflix, among other things. might even hunt for other employment opportunities Indeed, according to Glassdoor, 58% of job seekers search for employment on their phones.

Mobile recruiting has two significant advantages. For starters, it enables recruiters and hiring teams to handle the process from anywhere they have access to a mobile device. Instead of trying these responsibilities to the office, they can be handled remotely, such as scheduling interviews, offering internal feedback, communicating with candidates, and more. Second, it enables the hiring team to reach out to prospects remotely and via mobile devices, which candidates are increasingly reliant on. Local recruitment can contact candidates directly over a voice call, and for international recruiters, many VoIP-based calling software available, such as DialPad, GoToConnect, and RingCentral at affordable calling rates. For audio/video interviews multiple options are Google Meet, Zoom, Skype, etc available for free. 

Final thoughts

The number of people looking for work right now is bigger than at any time in history. This gives you a lot of chances to identify your ideal applicant. Keeping this checklist on hand can aid in the evolution of your recruitment process, which can be aided by smart practices. Despite the fact that the employment market is competitive, good recruitment marketing methods will provide your company with talented prospects.