Expert Tips to Boost Speed to Hire in 3 Easy Steps

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Speed to hire, or your hiring velocity, is critical to effectively growing your team with high-quality hires. Creating a structured interview process for your hiring team and empowering them with the most innovative and efficient hiring tools can cut your time to hire in half while boosting your quality of hire.

Video interview software is an all-in-one hiring solution that enables hiring teams to make collaborative, well-informed hiring decisions faster than traditional hiring models. Read on for our quick guide to boosting your speed to hire by taking practical and simple steps toward streamlining your hiring process:

Fine-tune before the interview

Identify interview evaluation criteria

You set your hiring team up for success by building a fair and accurate assessment of the skills and traits you need. It can slow evaluation processes when criteria aren’t clear and accurate before candidates apply. This is a critical time to poll team members to get insights into skills gaps, details about roles and responsibilities, and culture fit.

Taking this step saves your team time when filtering candidates right from the application stage because candidate skills and experiences match your team’s needs.

Create structured interview questions

Every assessment in your hiring process should offer equal opportunity to every candidate in addition to screening for the most essential requirements for the job. It’s important you reduce bias and eliminate redundant or ineffective questions in the early stages of your hiring process. 

Create lists of structured interview questions you can use to filter candidates accurately from the initial screening interviews through the final interviews. Build these questions from positive results from previous hiring processes. For example, identify the skills and traits of your top performers and determine ways to assess for similar qualities.

Upload culture videos and team testimonials to your careers page

Featuring engaging videos on your careers page and social media also shows talent your company is innovative and adaptive to modern technology. And candidate testimonials about their experience in your hiring process in addition to employee reviews can help new applicants understand what to expect. 

In turn, interactions through video make them more receptive and even excited about your video interview process. You gain candidate buy-in and a unique opportunity to show off how your speed to hire improves candidates’ experience.

Take fast action following the application process

Invite candidates to submit one-way video interviews 

Sending out one-way video interviews saves valuable time in the initial stages of screening. Talent can self-select in this stage by choosing to submit a video response. This narrows your candidate evaluations down to just the most serious candidates and reduces your chances of candidates dropping out in later in-person interviews. 

With SMS invitation features, candidates receive the invitation on their mobile device and will even get reminders to submit their responses without HR or recruiters needing to block out time to keep early interviews on track. Your team is more likely to see interview completion rates improve fast, increasing your speed to hire. In fact, Spark Hire customers report a 72% application to final interview completion rate. 

Share videos with hiring managers

Recruiters say their #1 conflict with scheduling interviews is finding a time that works for everyone. You avoid these costly delays by sharing video interview responses with hiring stakeholders. 

Links to one-way video interviews can be shared with your whole team. You cut out the scheduling hassle of pulling collaborators in for additional interviews without sacrificing gaining valuable feedback from key stakeholders. Everyone with a link can review on their own time, rate candidates, and provide constructive feedback.

Send video messages to candidates

Candidates expect fast response times at every stage of the hiring process. In fact, 58% of candidates expect to hear back after their application in one week. Video messages are the perfect way to connect with talent quickly and create unique updates to keep them engaged in your hiring process.

You can send out video messages to candidates with timely updates and additional information about your hiring processes, such as timelines and next steps. You speed up communication time while making the experience feel more personal for candidates. 

Streamline collaboration and communication 

Conduct live video interviews

In-person interviews are unmatched in assessing candidates for fit into your company, but they can be a scheduling nightmare if your team is swamped, candidates are currently employed, or live a long distance away. Live video interviews are a practical and effective solution if you need to replace an in-person interview or even if you plan to conduct a fully-virtual hiring process for remote candidates.

Live video interviews are an effective step before final in-person interviews. They can reduce the number of interviews candidates need to commute for, reducing scheduling conflicts with talent as well. You can even use them to expand your talent pool by interviewing and hiring long-distance talent or remote employees quickly, efficiently, and confidently.

Collaborate and collect team feedback

Including more people in your hiring process gives you a greater perspective on the quality of each candidate. However, panel interviews consume significant time and resources. You need a solution to involve stakeholders without the hassle of blocking more time out of their busy schedules.

Similar to one-way video interview collaboration, live video interviews can be shared to collect team feedback. Conducting a live video interview and sharing the automatically-recorded interview with everyone who needs to weigh in delivers the same team collaboration results without interfering with multiple team members’ schedules. 

Share video messages from leaders with candidates

Ensuring a positive candidate experience with a fast and efficient hiring process is critical to getting candidates to accept your offers. Sharing video messages from company leaders helps candidates feel valued and connected with the company. 

The structure of your interview process is a critical framework for your company’s growth. But the hiring tools and technology you rely on to schedule interviews, accurately assess skills and fit, connect and communicate with candidates, and collaborate with your team can make or break your speed to hire.