If you can't hire fast you lose! The best commercial staffing companies respond to candidate inquiries and replies within 3-5 minutes. The importance of the first 72 hours cannot be overemphasized. Take stock of your hiring timeline and do everything possible to eliminate inefficiencies, realizing that while your hiring team dawdles, another company offers and closes. In most cases, this will require a serious heart-to-heart with the HR specialists who tend to be process-oriented rather than mission-oriented. Remove as many up-front barriers for applicants as possible and recognize that the candidate pool is finite.
The world of recruitment is fast-paced at the best of times, but in the current climate, it is vital to be even quicker off the mark. It's estimated that top talent is being snapped up and off the market in just ten days – significantly lower than the previous 27.5 days!
In the GOVT staffing arena, we have clients who want to collect all the credentialing paperwork before they extend an offer! We have even dealt with clients who require an application – 59 pages long – before they will consider a candidate. These companies will lose the talent war.
Recently we spoke to a primary care physician who had just relocated to Colorado and received a job offer immediately over the phone, sight unseen. During the credentialing process for the new employer – note, they have not yet met her – they called to ask if she would accept a Medical Director Role. Not having been "on the market" recently, she was literally blown away! In her words, "it was even difficult looking for a new position because I get so many calls every day it is hard to figure out what is real."
In this competitive market, the race goes to the swift. If you cannot hire quickly you will lose candidate after candidate to employers who are more nimble. The company in the above story is not a small multi-specialty group, as you might think, but a billion-dollar provider in 36 states. However, they understand the concept of FAST.
With candidates entering and exiting the job market at a record pace, what can you do to ensure that you're recruiting the best candidate for the job? The answer is simply speed!
Most employers and HR departments will argue that in speeding up the hiring process, quality will suffer. Actually, just the opposite is true.
John Sullivan – PhD and Professor of Management at San Francisco State University – provides the following reasons that speedy hiring actually improves the quality of hire:
In a tight labor market, the race goes to the swift.
In the Government space, there are some things outside our control. However, we discover that many contractors do not understand the concept of FAST and have not streamlined their processes on the front end to lock candidates down quickly.
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