A Cornerstone OnDemand European focus group of 53 in-house recruiters found that almost two hours each day were spent on administrative tasks. The hours add up to a whole work day each week – a statistic not to be taken lightly.
It’s no surprise then that in-house recruiters would like to spend more time doing these results-based tasks by incorporating more ‘recruitment hacking’ techniques. Recruitment hacking is the concept of using technology, shortcuts and new ideas to automate tasks, eradicate low-value activities, and focus on activities that help them find and hire the right talent.
So, how does an in-house recruiter hack? Here are four of my favourite recruitment hacking tips:
1. The Love vs Hate list
To ensure you’re making more time to focus on hiring, you need to hack your own work day and methodically remove things that stop you from being efficient. This starts with a list. Think about all of the things you do in a typical work day or week, and which of those tasks you love and hate. File the tasks under the relevant column depending on your preference, and set yourself a time goal of completing 75% love-tasks and 25% hate-tasks. Then, share this with your team and see if anyone loves doing certain tasks you hate – just because you don’t like it doesn’t mean they don’t! If someone or something else can do some of your hate tasks, delegate them accordingly. Eliminating the tasks you don’t like and perform inefficiently on will improve your happiness and improve your productivity.
2. Get some Pomodoro in your life
This style of working isn’t for everyone, but the Pomodoro technique can be a great way to improve work habits and make you more productive. The technique involves using a Pomodoro 25-minute timer to plan your day. You review your to-do list for the work day and decide how many 25-minute Pomodoro sessions plus breaks you can fit in that day, then go! Using this technique can help keep you on task and undistracted – though it helps to switch off things like email, social, mobile and as many other typical distractions that you can.
3. Rescue back your time
Have a bad habit of perusing Facebook or your other favourite websites a bit too long in your work day? RescueTime is for you. This tool is a fantastic way to identify where hours in your day are escaping to and assess how distracted you are, even if you think you’re particularly productive. You can use this on both your desktop and mobile, and improve your productivity by blocking access to certain sites throughout particular times in the day, or having an alarm go off when you exceed your allotted time allowed on certain sites. It’s not a time saver per se, but it will keep you more focused.
4. Bring third party apps to your ATS
Tightly integrating third-party efficiency apps into your ATS can really improve efficiency. Some of the most popular include multi-posting of jobs to job boards, video interviewing and screening, and aggregated searches across multiple candidate bases such as LinkedIn and Monster. If you’re using an ATS with an open API, such as what will be possible within Cornerstone Edge, this integration is simple. The Platform-as-a-Service offering will let customers integrate their Cornerstone Unified Talent Management suite with other workforce systems to maximise human capital management investments. This provides flexibility to create new applications to customise user experience, extend talent data, or tailor features for unique business needs.
For more techniques and ideas, download the Recruitment Hacking: Hire the Best First e-book here.
