All work and no play is never a good idea — but when you’re wearing a million and one hats trying to find, nurture and hire great candidates for a small business, it can sometimes feel like there’s no other choice.
The problem is: trying to do too much, too fast, can lead to lost productivity, a very messy recruitment system, and some seriously regrettable hires.
If there’s one area you want to keep far out of burnout’s reach, it’s hiring. Because the quality of your employees tends to be a direct reflection of the quality of your recruitment process.
If employers want to flip the script on the 91% of people who feel chronically burnt out, they need to take action today to protect their employees and their business tomorrow.
But how can small businesses help teams avoid burnout when the hiring wheels are in full motion? What about the roles that bring in an avalanche of applicants? And what about the roles that bring in zero applicants?
Here’s how some of our best (and busiest) customers consistently hire top-quality candidates, without getting burnt out.
How to avoid burnout like these 5 Breezy customers
Step #1: Proactively fill your talent pools (so you don’t have to scramble later)
Finding great candidates is one of HR’s biggest challenges — but as boutique copywriting agency Pointed Copywriting found out, if it’s always on your radar, it never gets out of hand.
When wecaught up with founder Brittany Ryan, she told us how Pointed’s small (but powerful) team uses Breezy to proactively find great talent — goodbye stressful last-minute talent hunts, hello intentionally filled candidate pools.
“We’re always on the lookout for top talent. We hit LinkedIn and Google, and when we find diverse talent we love, we add their details to our candidate pools on Breezy and ping them an automatic email to gush about their work,” she says.
Here’s how it works in Breezy:
- Create a candidate pool to view and nurture top talent until you open your next role
- From here, you can bulk email candidates, schedule automatic messages, and view, search and filter your lists to find the right people for the role
Post job roles on all the free job boards in just one click.
Step #2: Build automatic pipelines for zero effort hiring
The next step is all about building automatic pipelines that cut your hiring team's precious time, so they can take the breaks they need and avoid making rash (and costly!) hiring decisions.
Premier Power BI consultancy firm P3 Adaptive has experienced powerful pipelines first-hand — and with a consistent applicant stream of 10+ candidates per week for each open role, they couldn’t do it without Breezy.
We caught up with founder and CEO Rob Collie and his right-hand man Kellan Danielson to find out how to avoid burnout and maintain a great candidate experience:
“We have different stages in each position. First, all candidates go into the initial stage, which is really just about pre-qualification. Like, are you in the US? What's your pay range? The answers to those questions will trigger emails or progressions to different stages, and we have automated emails that go out if they don't meet those qualifications,” says Kellan.
Here’s how to do it with Breezy:
- Set up a customizable pipeline to match your hiring team’s needs.
- Use an automated questionnaire to tick off the role musts like location, etc.
- Use Breezy’s automatic stage actions to move candidates through the pipeline.
- Set an automated, personalized email to all non-qualified applicants.
“It wouldn’t be feasible to broadly advertise job openings without a good automation system to filter candidates out initially. If we had to handle all that manually, we'd probably say we're just not going to advertise. Breezy’s automation allows us to throw a larger net.”
— Kellan Danielson, President and COO, P3
Step #3: Screen for quality with customizable questionnaires
Next up, it’s time to filter the appli-cans from the appli-can’ts with a streamlined screening process.
Forward-thinking SaaS company Unito knew this would be one of the most time-saving (and burnout-busting) steps to get right. So, we caught up with Head of Employee Success Sarah Corboliou to find out how they nailed their screening process with Breezy:
“Our process starts with an automated screening questionnaire. There's no cover letter… ever. If anyone answers this question with anything that looks like a cover letter, it's gonna put me off right away. Then we move onto the phone screen which is more of a conversation,” she says.
Ready for the breakdown?
- Kickoff with a customized questionnaire that’s tailored to the role and includes technical questions.
- Set up automated thank you emails to non-successful applicants.
- Invite successful candidates to self-schedule their all-important phone screen.
Step #4: Create a time-saving tailored interview process
Interviews are key to getting to know candidates — but finding out who they really are takes time and more than one set of eyes.
For a company dedicated to customer service, helping employees avoid burnout is a natural responsibility for Nando’s Peri-Peri — which is why for them, creating a streamlined interview process that helps (not hinders) their teams is everything.
“Breezy’s the most user-friendly tool I have used this far in my recruiting career!”
— Jackie Phillipson, Talent Manager, Nando’s Peri-Peri
We spoke with Talent Manager Jackie Phillipson to find out how Nando’s aced the interview process with Breezy:
“Being able to create and customize my pipelines to exactly how we do things — to be able to add a column into Breezy that says ‘trial shift’ because we put our management candidates through a trial shift as part of the interview process — that’s what we needed,” says Jackie.
Here’s how to ace interviews with Breezy:
- Ask candidates to self-schedule interviews to find the best time for them and your hiring managers.
- Customize your pipeline to reflect how your interviews run (think: columns for trial shifts or test projects).
- Use Zoom, Google Meet, or quality built-in video to save time while building a face-to-face connection with candidates.
- Record interviews to involve the whole team in finding the right hire.
- Privately add notes and discuss the candidate as you interview them with Breezy’s in-interview candidate dashboard.
Step #5: Use team scorecards to make better (and faster) hiring decisions
Most hiring managers already know the power of a well thought-out scorecard. By unifying your hiring team’s responses you can minimize bias, compare thoughts easily and get solid data-led insights to help make that final hiring decision one you’ll never regret.
For Karim El Naggar, CEO at Nucamp, scorecards are a vital part of the hiring process that help hiring teams find their unicorn candidates faster than ever.
“Scorecards and automated emails were important for us as we moved candidates to the next stages. We want to avoid unnecessary manual steps between stages... Also, Breezy’s ability to look at all the emails, scorecards, discussion threads with your team members, and just move the candidate from one stage to the other all in a simple screen — it’s really powerful,” says Karim.
Here’s how to use Breezy’s scorecards to bring the hiring team together:
- Customize your scorecards to match your candidate KPIs (in Breezy, you can edit this whenever you need to).
- Assign your scorecard a position, so it appears in the profile of every candidate for that position.
- In Breezy, hiring team members can access the scorecard from the ‘Scorecard’ tab of a candidate’s profile, and view it in-interview during video calls with candidates.
- Check in to see how candidates scored overall (Hiring Managers can see scorecard results from all members of the hiring team, to see how the candidate did across the board).
Avoid hiring burnout with a beautifully simple process
Growing teams have a lot on their plates — and with too much work and not enough downtime, employee burnout is all too common.
But with the right recruitment tools in place, your hiring team can save time, increase productivity, and build a stellar candidate experience all with minimum fuss.
At the end of the day, your employees just want to know you give a hoot — and what better way to show you care than with a streamlined hiring system that empowers candidates and gives hiring teams time to breathe.
