Top 5 Tips to Speed Up the Recruitment Process Without Compromising Quality

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Hiring one IT specialist takes more than 22 days of work: It takes time to coordinate requirements, write, publish, and promote a job posting, review CVs, conduct interviews, and check references. According to Glassdoor, it takes an average of 45 days to hire some IT specialists, such as BAs. At ITExpert, we have even encountered cases where it took about 255 days to fill vacancies in some IT companies.

However, a long recruitment process increases hiring costs. According to SHRM, a community for HR professionals, filling a new vacancy costs a business 50–60% of an employee’s annual salary. This indicator increases if the company has many stages of selection or is looking for a jack-of-all-trades with unrealistic expectations.

However, the recruitment process can be significantly accelerated and made less expensive. We have collected life hacks on how to improve the hiring process — to reduce its duration and cost without compromising quality.

Recruitment optimization: why you need to hire IT specialists quickly

The recruiter’s sad humor: “Conduct interviews faster because by the end of the interview, the cost of the developer may increase.” The growing demand for personnel, high salaries, and the possibility of remote work in foreign companies are leading to a tremendous fight for IT specialists.

Ten years ago, the demand for developers was also high, but since then, it has grown and continues to do so. Companies are expanding their IT departments, launching new products, and forming dedicated teams to work on them. Organizations with a long recruitment process, multiple (more than three) interview stages, and test tasks have a very low chance of hiring skilled employees because a developer can find 25 or more job openings per day.

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Even mass layoffs bt the tech giants did not turn change the situation on the market of senior candidates. Developers at middle-senior+ grades are still choosing among several offers from different companies, receiving counteroffers, and refusing offers. When it comes to selecting an employer, they value speed and clarity.

ITExpert’s case study: a candidate confirmed his presence at a technical interview to an agency recruiter two hours before the start, but 30 minutes later asked to cancel the interview — he had received two job offers and saw no point in communicating with another potential employer.

Therefore, it is important to use up-to-date recruitment methods and optimize the recruitment process as much as possible, ensuring the swift hiring of suitable candidates. Bear in mind that losses for a company due to a failed employee hire range from €12,000 to €100,000, as estimated by French recruitment experts.

Current issues of recruitment and personnel selection in IT

According to the community of HR directors, it is already impossible to fill most of the positions at the middle and higher levels worldwide. The likelihood of candidates ignoring your vacancy or withdrawing from the process increases if the recruitment procedure is improperly organized, candidate market constraints are not considered, or there’s a lack of initial understanding regarding the type of specialist needed for the team. However, standardizing the recruitment process is only part of the problem. We have compiled typical mistakes when hiring middle/senior candidates in IT.

1. Incorrect organization of the recruitment process. 5–6 interviews and a protracted decision-making process: Congratulations! Your vacancy will be open for more than a year! In IT, job seekers are “cold” and will only be interested in a vacancy if the offer is genuinely appealing (for example, with a modern stack and attractive perks) or if the salary is high.

In the case of six selection stages and a test task that takes several days to complete, a candidate is likely to refuse to go through the recruitment process. Senior candidates will have already accepted offers from other companies, leaving you with the option of choosing from the remaining candidates or devoting even more time to the hiring process.

2. Not understanding what kind of specialist you need. Sometimes, employers don’t know what they want, so they talk to candidates and decide whether they need the person during the interview process. Alternatively, they may hire someone irrelevant, but the request for a specialist remains.

Write down the requirements and expectations for the candidate, as well as the stack he or she will work with. If you don’t prepare a vacancy description in advance, you can miss out on the right specialist. Then, you’ll have to make concessions in technical requirements, monitor the candidate market one more time, and process new CVs.

3. Ignoring the limitations of the candidate market. Employers often expect to receive approximately the same number of CVs for each job opening. They do not understand the limitations of the market or do not want to analyze these details in depth, as they always want to be able to choose the best candidates from the pool.

However, there are positions for which there are only 200 candidates across the local candidates market. One example of this is Pixi vacancies in gaming. Among the positions that are harder to fill are DevOps architects, senior ML engineers, and enterprise architects, with only 50 people available in Ukraine for the latter.

Important: 80% of professionals are not looking for a job right now. If you don’t poach a skillful candidate or quickly hire someone from the 20% of “available” candidates, you can be stuck with an open vacancy for a long time.

4. Mass mailings via LinkedIn. According to statistics, 79% of candidates use social media when looking for a job. However, mass mailings, particularly via Linkedin, do not work. Only 10-15% of specialists open the messages with vacancies that they receive. 

Instead of a standard request to add to contacts, craft personalized messages. Make sure to explain why you are reaching out to the user; for example, you saw the necessary skills or are writing after a recommendation.

Describe the position and the company and explain why working for it might be of interest to the specialist. Use a CTA (call-to-action) to indicate what you expect from the candidate. For example, you can ask in the message whether the person is interested in the offer, which will increase the likelihood of a response.

5. Lack of prompt response. Due to the high volume of resumes, you may forget to respond to a specialist or postpone feedback due to management delays. However, 23% of applicants lose interest in a company if they don’t receive a response within a week of sending their resume or attending an interview, and another 46% within the first 14 days. In addition, a slow response can affect the employer’s reputation. This is a red flag for the candidate, indicating a potentially poor management strategy within the company. The absence of a timely response can adversely affect the HR brand.

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Candidates with advanced hard and soft skills don’t wait long; they are quickly snapped up by competitors. The sooner you give feedback, the less time candidates will have for interviews at other companies. So, they are more likely to choose to work for you.

The hiring industry is already 90% a candidate market. This conclusion was reached by MRINetwork recruiters after analyzing the experience of 600 companies around the world. Given the shortage of skilled professionals and fierce competition for them, you need to grab the attention of candidates starting from the first contact, avoiding typical hiring mistakes.

Modern recruitment: how to hire employees quickly

We have compiled popular recruitment tools and effective ways of recruiting staff that will help you fill vacancies faster and more efficiently.

1. Create a targeted job vacancy

How to improve recruitment? Start by writing a job posting. Define who you are looking for. Make a job description after answering the questions:

• What are the prospects for working for the company in this position?
• What is the most interesting thing about this job?
• What can drive a person in this position?

The lack of distinctiveness and clear description means that you will receive many CVs of irrelevant candidates who applied on a whim — and not just for your vacancy.

2. Promote your job opening on social media

To get more relevant candidates, encourage users to share it. To do this, get rid of boring descriptions and designs by trying new formats and creativity.

What motivates people to click on a job posting: creative visuals, catchy headlines, and a light and fun tone of voice.

3. Use automation services and tools

Automation software does most of the work for the recruiter. It sorts candidates, sends emails to those who are not a good fit for the company, answers common questions in messager apps, and conducts initial interviews. Automated recruitment helps to work much faster and more efficiently; according to Deloitte, 93% of recruiters’ time is spent on routine tasks, although 65% of tasks can be automated.

Optimization of recruitment work should start with CV screening services that can be done, for example, with the help of Ideal software based on artificial intelligence, which, according to the developers, saves recruiters up to four hours a day.

You should also automate communication with candidates. Mya chatbot will handle up to 75% of common questions that are often asked during the initial interview. The app is used by L’Oréal Paris, Deloitte, and PepsiCo, and is perfect for juniors or filling more mainstream positions. Important: When there are 50 candidates in the market and you need to maximize their interest, using a chatbot is not advisable. Such optimization of recruitment is perceived negatively by candidates.

In addition, one should not ignore candidates’ applications and leave them without feedback. According to statistics, 50% of applicants do not receive feedback after sending a CV. The best way to maintain your HR brand is to set up automated emails. You can do this by enabling automation from Gmail or using Espressive, a digital workplace assistance tool. The software has a virtual support agent that can provide up-to-date information about the status of a submitted resume.

Automation in IT recruitment reduces the cost and speed of recruitment. More than 66% of company executives believe that the automation of hiring processes and the use of AI will significantly improve the quality of the recruitment department’s work.

4. Use the internal resume database

What should I do with the candidates who did not receive a job offer but have the necessary skills? Or those who sent CVs but, for some reason, were not suitable for the position that was open at that time? You should give feedback to specialists and save their resumes in the internal database.

If you work for a large company or a recruitment agency, you most likely have access to special software, such as CleverStaff, Hurma, or AmazingHiring. Such software helps to conveniently store information about candidates in one place and evaluate the quality of recruitment activities in the company, as well as demonstrate how to boost recruitment, increasing its efficiency.

Experienced recruiters know that finding candidates is an ongoing process. The resume database allows you to fill both current and future vacancies. The candidate you decided not to make an offer to today may be the one you’ll hire for a new position tomorrow. Polite communication and the ability to refuse in a way that does not impact negatively on the company’s reputation will help you fill vacancies faster.

5. Minimize the number of interview stages

According to 68% of IT professionals, the optimal number of stages is 2-3:

• First stage is the initial communication with the recruiter (HR screening).
• Second stage is a technical interview.
• Third stage is the final interview with the CEO or project manager, during which you can talk about the business, competitors, and future goals of the company.

Only 10% of respondents indicate that the number of interview stages doesn’t matter if the company is well-known or the management offers unique benefits and the position involves interesting tasks. The other 90% will refuse to go through the recruitment process if you have six stages of interviews and a test task, even if you’re offering a position in Google.

Important: Test tasks are acceptable for junior developers or those who have just moved up to the mid-level, but most of senior specialists will not be willing to complete them. In addition, test tasks are not always representative of a candidate’s skills.

Conclusion: optimizing recruitment

Only 30% of candidates actually open job offers, not the full 100%. Remember that you’re working with a cold audience; therefore, it’s important to “sell” the vacancy by minimizing the chances of candidates’ dropping out of the recruitment process during multi-stage interviews by choosing a competitor company.