In today’s fast-paced recruiting landscape, maximizing recruiting efficiency is essential.  Customers want candidates placed faster, all while maintaining candidate quality. Having a quick time-to-hire, while maintaining quality candidates can be a game-changer in both retaining customers and gaining new business. So, how can recruiters maximize their efficiency to save time and focus on the best resources available to them? In this article, we explore 3 ways. 

Track Your Source of Hire

If your staffing agency isn’t already tracking where candidates are coming from, you should begin tracking this.  A Referral Report helps you identify how candidates are finding you and also identify which sources are the most effective in placing candidates on an assignment.  Are most candidates referred to you? Are most finding you on social media? Are most coming in from a job board?  Identifying your candidate referral sources will give you immediate insight into successful ways you have found candidates.  If one source isn’t bringing in a lot of candidates, then you can focus on other sources that bring in more. 

This report can be taken a step further though and you can use it to track both your Gross Margin and your Net Margin Bottom Line with each source.  So, with the Referral Report, you are not only tracking where the most candidates are coming from, but you can track which source is generating your highest margin. See an example of a referral report below. 

Create Talent Pipelines 

Talent pipelines help you keep track of your TOP candidates. These can be new candidates that just came into your ATS or existing candidates in your ATS that you want to keep track of for future opportunities.  Pipelines are a useful tool when building a list of “top” candidates. Pipelines that can be managed within an ATS is even better, as it will streamline the entire recruiting process. 

Breaking your talent pipelines out by position would be a great place to start.  This will help you identify top talent when recruiting for a certain position (i.e., nurses, administrative assistants, forklift drivers.)  When you have talent pipelines broken out by position, you can quickly refer to that list and reach out to those candidates.

If you prefer to have fewer pipelines, you can also break it out by industry. The way you break it out may depend on the number of industries you service.  If you have a specific niche, then it may make the most sense to break it out by position. If you service many different industries, perhaps you will want to focus on breaking your pipelines out by industry.

Breaking each pipeline out by industry or position will help as you recruit for current positions and will also be useful in the future when you are recruiting for positions that are similar. These will be talent pipelines you continue to add to and update—not just a one-time use.  That way top candidates will always be readily accessible based on the industry and/or positions you are recruiting for. 

Rank Candidates

In addition to creating talent pipelines, another best practice that can be implemented is ranking candidates. Does your ATS allow you to rank candidates? Can you go a step further on your pipelines and rank those candidates?  After a recruiter’s initial communication with a candidate, they can assign a numerical ranking to the candidate based on their qualifications. It can be a simple 1 to 5 rating scale. That way when a recruiter is searching for a candidate to fill a clerical position, for example, you can use the search in your ATS to search for candidates that have a high clerical ranking. 

In your talent pipelines, you can also have a ranking system, so you are first reaching out to candidates that are ranked the highest. 

Maximize Your Recruiting Efficiency Today 

Maximizing your recruiting efficiency is important when trying to place qualified candidates. In order to recruit more efficiently though and place the most qualified candidates, you need to first know where your top candidates are coming from. Second, by organizing and tracking your top candidates on a pipeline, you will always have your best candidates readily accessible when needing to fill a position.  Lastly, by taking it a step further and ranking your candidates, you can identify the best of the best and focus on those candidates first.  Implementing these best practices will help you have a productive recruiting workflow and help you focus on placing the best talent.  

Questions about implementing these best practices? Reach out to Ultra-Staff EDGE Staffing and Recruiting Software to see how you can use the tools in an ATS to maximize recruiting efficiency and place top talent!