Smart companies are finally making it fun and easy for job candidates to apply and interview. Here’s how simple tweaks to your hiring process can have a major impact on recruitment performance.
Your business is only as great as its people. If you want to stay competitive, you need to move fast to secure the best candidates out there (and as a major bonus, become your org’s biggest hiring hero in the process).
Fed up with 30-day hiring timelines and painfully inefficient interview panels, some recruiters have come up with smart ways to remove the stuffiest steps in their hiring process and quickly get the right candidates on board.
1. Home Depot’s smart, focused approach
In 2017, Home Depot accelerated its online application process by 80% and filled more than 80,000 positions in stores.
How’d they pull it off? By eliminating the fluff.
The home improvement retailer cut their application form down to meat-and-potato questions that matter. They also added 5 core questions to their career page to help potential applicants self-screen.
- Do you love helping customers?
- Are you a team player?
- Do you enjoy selling?
- Do you have respect for all people?
- Do you want to build something?
Between the shorter job app, the values-based self-screening Q’s and the awesome interview tips on their website, it’s no wonder hiring managers at Home Depot complete their interviews in just 15 minutes.
But Home Depot’s efficiency gurus didn’t stop there. In 2018, they introduced a smartphone tool allowing applicants to self-schedule in-person interviews. When we talk about simplifying the hiring process, we can’t not talk about group email chains. 🙄
Scheduling is a small thing that makes a BIG difference in terms of how a candidate perceives your brand — and rest assured, your candidates hate tedious email chains just as much as you do.
2. Hilton’s time-saving video interviews
In today’s tight talent market, it’s crucial to give candidates what they really want in a recruitment experience. And they definitely want video.
From FaceTiming with our friends and family to the insane amount of time we spend on YouTube, video is how we communicate. By introducing video interviews into their day-to-day hiring operations, hiring execs at Hilton reduced their time to hire from 42 days, to 5.
Not only that, video proved to be a better way to evaluate candidates and leverage their talent pool across the organization. Here’s how it works.
- Candidates can interview from anywhere by logging into Hilton’s platform from any device and answering a quick list of questions.
- After the recruiters watch a video, they can then share the video with colleagues from other departments, in case the candidate might more suited for another open position within the company.
- Leaders from other offices around the world can easily hop on for remote panel interviews.
Recruiters at Hilton conducted more than 12,000 video interviews in the past year, saving a ton of time and money on things like interdepartmental emailing and travel costs. 👌
3. Unilever’s gamified hiring process
In an effort to match the expectations of millennial candidates, Unilever has digitized its entire hiring process and added gamification as part of it.
This giant consumer goods corporation decided to pitch fresh graduates in their recent effort to attract the best young talent to the business: “Good news for new grads — that time you spent on Minecraft and World of Warcraft may have actually been time well spent,” says the new digital hiring campaign. 😍
“From the CV, to the candidate search, to the interview, we’re using technology to create a truly interactive experience allowing us to get a more meaningful connection with applicants,” explains Chief HR Officer Leena Nair. The application process is divided into 4 interactive rounds which create a “faster and more fun” experience for candidates.
- Applicants register on the company’s career profile using an online form (which can also be submitted via Linkedin, no need to create CV).
- Then comes the fun part, applicants get to play 12 games that will take 20 minutes max. The games are designed to assess whether they have the skills needed to be a rockstar member of the team.
- Candidates receive gameplay feedback within 48 hours and those that made it through that round, are then asked to record a video to be reviewed by recruiters.
- If they’re selected, the candidate is invited for an onsite visit to see for themselves what it’s really like to work at Unilever.
In a world where the demands of your business seem to change overnight, it can sometimes feel impossible to keep up. Many talent pros feel like they simply don’t have the time to rethink their hiring process and give candidates the experience they deserve.
That’s where Breezy can help! With Breezy, it’s fast and simple to create an efficient hiring process applicants love — from self-scheduling, to video interviews, and more.
