How to hire faster: tried & tested tips to hire faster

Anyone working at a small business knows it can be stressful. When a startup is growing rapidly, it’s not unusual for everyone to be working beyond capacity. And for a small team, the only way to alleviate that pressure is to hire more people. And to hire them quickly.

We know what it’s like because we’ve been there.

In early 2018, Charlie was going from strength to strength. We had a product that our customers loved and an ambitious vision for where we wanted the company to go. We were opening up new roles all the time, but finding good candidates for those positions was an ongoing struggle. While everything else at Charlie was becoming more streamlined and effective, our hiring was stuck in second gear. We needed to hire faster — much faster.

Looking back now, it’s obvious what was broken. We built Charlie on a foundation of focussed proactivity, where we identify our objectives and then pull out all the stops to achieve them. But in contrast, our hiring process was incredibly reactive.

We’d become used to working on the back foot — fire-fighting, reacting to problems, and making small fixes rather than being assertive about what we wanted to achieve.

When you think about it, the traditional hiring model is one of total passivity: you stick up a spec on a few job boards, then sit waiting for the dream candidate to walk in the door. It shouldn’t really be a surprise when this hiring ‘strategy’ fails to meet our expectations.

We’ve written this guide so that other small businesses can skip the trial and error and instead create a foolproof and fast hiring process. It really is possible to reduce time to hire while still engaging the very best people.

Why reducing time to hire matters

Efficient hiring strategies are important for any company, but especially so for small businesses and startups.

This is because the impacts of a lengthy hiring process are felt more dramatically across a small team. You need to reduce time to hire to avoid impacts like:

A loss of productivity

Without the people you need, your company will never be as productive. That’s simple maths: the longer it takes you to hire, the less work is being done. What’s more, your current team is probably overloaded and this will be negatively affecting their productivity too.

Higher costs

Hiring costs money, so the longer you’re advertising for a role the more money you’re spending. There’s also the associated costs of prolonged job openings, where you’re not generating the money you could be if the position was filled.

The risk of losing top talent

You want the best person for the job, but so does everyone else. Competitors with more efficient hiring strategies will snag the top talent and you’ll be right back where you started.

So now you know why you need to hire faster, but what if you don’t know how? Let’s take a look at our top tips to reduce hiring time.

Key strategies to reduce time to hire

How to improve time to hire? If you’ve never had to do it before, you’re probably unsure of where to start.

The good thing is that there are some simple steps that combine to create a fast hiring process. You simply need to follow them:

Streamline your job descriptions

If you want to hire faster, start with your job descriptions. Clear and focused job descriptions do a lot to attract the right candidates — quickly.

To help you craft the best job descriptions and find the best people, we have a free job description template for you to download, use and adapt. A job description template ensures you never forget to include an important detail or highlight something that sets you apart as an employer (at Charlie, for example, we always include salary bands in our job descriptions as we like to show we’re transparent).

Use an Applicant Tracking System (ATS)

An applicant tracking system (also known as an ATS) is a digital tool that small businesses use to make sure they have the right hiring processes in place to hire the right candidates.

An ATS like Charlie Recruit will help you reduce time to hire by automating CV screening, managing all communication with candidates, and tracking the recruitment progress. In short, an applicant tracking system simplifies and streamlines every aspect of hiring.

Pre-screen your candidates

Efficient hiring strategies always include the pre-screening of candidates so that no one’s time is wasted.

Pre-screening helps to narrow down the talent pool so you only take the best-suited people to interview, which means you’re more likely to recruit and avoid having to re-advertise the role. Techniques such as skills assessments or initial phone conversations are all popular pre-screening methods, and you’ll find that a good ATS will help you do these too – you can, for example, use ATS that will implement AI within their platform to leverage this part of hiring.

Set a clear hiring timeline

If you want to hire faster, you need to work to deadlines — this means planning out your recruitment process with clear timelines for each stage.

At Charlie, we rapidly move candidates through our hiring pipeline and we’ve built this fast hiring process to automate a lot of the actions around recruitment. It makes a huge impact if you want to reduce time to hire.

Improve communication

One of our top tips to reduce hiring time is to communicate. It sounds basic, but one area where a lot of companies fall down is communicating with applicants and candidates during recruitment.

But proactive and timely communication will prevent drop-offs and maintain interest, so it’s absolutely essential. Plus, it makes you look professional. Put yourself in the applicant’s shoes: what would you want to know?

Acknowledge their application and advise of next steps
Communicate if they’ve successfully moved through to the next stage
Clearly state what that next stage looks like and what’s expected of them
Thank them for their time and confirm if they’ve been successful
Provide all role information and documentation as quickly as possible
Send a short welcome message

Leverage employee referrals

And last but by no means least, don’t forget your team!

Candidate referrals from current employees are more likely to be a good fit for your company. And incentivisation is always a good idea. At Charlie, our referral scheme is super straightforward: if one of our team recommends someone who successfully passes their probation then they get a financial reward.

Have succession planning at the ready

Know that one of your top performers or someone in the leadership team is leaving? Make sure you have a succession planning template at the ready to replace them and avoid panic.

Efficient hiring strategies in practice: how we do it at Charlie

To close off this guide, we wanted to show you how we hire faster at Charlie.

Our fast hiring process is based on the ‘sprint’ concept: a block of work focussed around a clearly defined objective within a set period of time.

Here’s how we do it:

Days 1-2

Meet with all relevant team members to clearly define the role and job spec

This ensures that everyone is aligned on their expectations of the candidate and the skill-set required. For such a fast-growing company, it can be hard to keep a clear handle on exactly what we want from each new hire, so this step helps us focus our minds on who we need.

Create a job description that outlines those expectations

Recruiters and job listings alike will perform better if you provide a clear and detailed job description.

Create the hiring deck

A hiring deck is a set of slides we share with all prospective candidates. It outlines exactly what they can expect from the hiring process: details about phone screenings, how many office visits they’ll be asked to make, as well as who they will be meeting as part of that interview process.

A hiring deck is useful because it clarifies the candidate experience, and helps to reduce any anxiety about what we need from them.

This ensures everyone is in the loop before we start any external comms.

Identify and post on all relevant job boards

The best job board options can change depending on the role being advertised, so it’s worth putting in some research.

This is a really important aspect of turning hiring from a passive process into a proactive one. You have to make your search for candidates an active goal for the whole business.

Days 3-9

Ongoing review of candidates

The priority for days 3-9 is proactively reviewing candidates as they apply:

Are they the standard we want?
Are we receiving applications from people who are not the right fit for the role?

It may be that the job spec is not doing what we need it to.

But if we got it right across Days 1-2, our hiring pipeline should be nicely filling up.

Day 9

Assessment of the candidate pipeline with everyone involved in the hire

Day 9 marks the end of the sprint. All being well, we have a good pipeline of candidates and can start inviting them to phone screenings and interviews.

Day 9 also involves a review process with all the key people involved in the hire. In the past, there have been times where we weren’t happy with the applications, or our objectives had shifted during the sprint. So this review prevents the recruitment process from dragging on.

Hire faster for better business performance

Prior to adopting the hiring sprint, our recruiting time was hovering around fifteen weeks per candidate: over two months between recognising that we needed someone and that person actually being brought in.

While established companies might think that’s pretty good, two months is an eternity for a startup or small business. Since we introduced the hiring sprint above, we’ve cut time by half and never looked back. Hopefully this is useful for you to start implementing this at your startup too, and if you're looking for a tool that can help you do that, you can find out more about our ATS Charlie Recruit.