A 5-Step Framework To Scale Your Hiring Process Successfully in 2024
Nearly three quarters (72.6%) of companies are planning to hire more people in 2024. To make that a success, talent leaders and recruiters have to balance a myriad of details: candidate experience, inclusion, finding the best fit, and hiring not just for present skill set but future potential, among others.
With multiple variables at play, your hiring process becomes more important than ever.
This is something we understand deeply at Willo. We’ve helped over 5,000 organizations globally scale up their interviewing process with features like one-way video interviews, automated right to work checks and inclusive, science-backed candidate scoring.
Featuring insights from the Willo 2024 Hiring Trends Report, this blog covers a 5-step framework you can implement to scale up hiring processes more effectively.
Source: Willo 2024 Hiring Trends Report
Growth seems to be the goal this year: 39.7% are planning modest growth and 32.9% are planning for significant hiring growth in 2024.
But a desire to hire doesn’t immediately equate to ease of hiring—respondents noted a few anticipated hiring and retention challenges, chief among them the salary and benefits expectations that top talent will have, skills shortages, and competition from other employers for top talent.
5 steps to scaling up your hiring process
Whatever hurdles you’re facing, you need a process in place. As you build your process for scale (or even just efficiency), here are five steps that will keep your plan smooth, strategic, and flexible.
1 - Plan your hiring future and tie it to business outcomes
To put it bluntly: Why are you planning to hire? Or, put another way, what goals does the company have that require additional hiring?
Once you have that knowledge in hand, bring it one level deeper, connecting HR goals to business goals. For example, most organizations that use Willo highly value the candidate experience; they want all candidates to feel respected through the process, regardless of the ultimate hiring decision. At the same time, they don’t want to hire brilliant jerks, so they need a hiring process that weeds them out.
But how does a great candidate experience with no brilliant jerks lead to a business outcome?
You need to draw the full path. Here’s an example: great experience → better employer brand → stronger candidates → higher quality hires → more productivity from individuals → better performing teams → higher chance of achieving company goals.
This is a big process with a lot of steps, and each step has the opportunity to falter; we’ll get to how to plan for those issues below.
2 - Identify business constraints
When you know the reason behind your HR goals—that is, how your goals ladder up to overall business goals—you then need to name your constraints.
For example, MyTutor came to Willo with a double-whammy challenge: not only did they want to make their hiring program more efficient (which is our bread and butter!) but the whole talent team was looking to reduce overhead and assign recruiters’ time more effectively. In this case, efficiency was measured via recruitment capacity and overhead was a holistic cost structure. I’m happy to say Willo was able to help them increase capacity 75% while reducing overhead by 12%.
Recommended by LinkedIn
Understanding your organizational constraints is a necessary step to finding the right solution for your context; without it, you’ll have a great idea on paper that you can’t implement.
3 - Identify your cut, keep, and invest
With your goals and constraints documented, you can begin to identify—at a high level—the areas that you want to cut, keep, or invest more in.
For instance, let’s say you’re aiming to increase interview capacity while reducing overhead at the same time, like MyTutor. You will likely want to cut initial screening time as much as possible, keep any processes directly tied to candidate scoring and quality assessment, and invest in initiatives that automate and improve the candidate experience.
As a startup CEO, I understand innately that efficiency often means cutting. But it’s imperative to remember the things you want to keep and invest in—after all, this activity is not to cut in the abstract but to help you achieve your overall goals.
4 - Name your time-consuming, low-value work across the board
As you build your recruiting process, look for steps that are time-consuming and necessary, yet provide little return on time investment.
The most common example is conducting phone screens, a continual bottleneck as Recruiters have to schedule calls, manage time zones, sit on the call waiting, deal with no-shows, and find time to write notes after the fact. One Willo customer, for instance, admitted that phone screens eat up 20 hours per week of Recruiter time, since the company routinely receives thousands of applications for its early grad programs. Another area is moving data between platforms, for example a niche hiring tool into your ATS.
Tip: Don’t be afraid to go beyond the areas labelled for “cutting.” For instance, in the example above I mentioned looking to invest in processes that improve candidate experience. One obvious part of a good candidate experience is communication. However, manually writing emails to every candidate, at every stage of the process, is incredibly time consuming. This could easily be named a low-value task ready for a better solution.
5 - Find tools that help you cut, keep, or invest
By this step, you’ve got everything you need to begin looking for solutions. Not only will you know your goals, constraints, and strategic approach, but you’ll have this low-hanging fruit to pick off first.
A lot of Willo customers bring our platform in as part of a larger digital transformation in their companies. Those leaders share they are typically looking for the following solutions:
Pro tip: As you think about automating tasks previously done by humans, make sure you let your team know which tasks they will be moving to, not just the ones you’re automating out. This will help get more people on board, removing any fear that they are being automated out of a job.
Scale process to scale teams
Building the right team is a difficult task. But within that task is a huge opportunity to build a process that prioritizes hiring people, not paper.
For more data and insight on hiring trends, download the full 2024 Hiring Trends Report