Is It Time to Reimagine Your Seasonal Hiring Process?

I’ve had the pleasure to work with companies to re-imagine their hiring processes for years. With HireVue, I’ve been able to help companies move faster and improve high-volume and seasonal hiring needs among others. And since the need for seasonal workers is only going up, the drive to re-imagine seasonal hiring processes is greater than ever. With unemployment in the U.S. below four percent and between three percent and seven percent in Europe, a re-imagined seasonal hiring process can mean hiring your seasonal help faster, ensuring they’re a good fit, and gaining a competitive advantage. But, what does a re-imagined seasonal hiring process look like? First, consider the traditional process.

The Traditional Seasonal Hiring Scenario

The traditional season hiring process looks something like this:

1. You post a job opening.
2. You wait for resumes or applications to come in.
3. Your applicant tracking system (ATS) screens candidates against your minimum qualifications.
4. Recruiters manually screen applicants that meet your minimum qualifications.
5. Recruiters or hiring managers schedule phone interviews with selected candidates and may spend hours or days coordinating with candidates’ schedules.
6. Hiring managers set aside time to interview selected candidates.
   • At least 25 percent of candidates are no-shows for the interviews. That’s because some are already employed, accept other roles during the process, have last-minute scheduling conflicts and/or are unwilling or unable to pay for gas to get to the interview.
7. You make offers and at least 20 percent of hires don’t show up on day one and another 20 percent quit within a few months.

Your time to fill is likely at least three weeks. Maybe two if you’re lucky. Robert Half research showed that 39 percent of candidates think a hiring process that takes seven to 14 days is too long. And that’s for office jobs, not seasonal ones. So the length of your hiring process is definitely costing you candidates. It’s also likely that your best candidates were among the no-shows and are now working somewhere else, maybe for a competitor. The traditional process adds costs to your bottom line too. It uses hours of recruiters’ and hiring managers’ time — hours your recruiters could have spent on recruitment marketing and hiring managers could have spent serving customers. Plus, you’re not really sure about the quality of the candidates you’ve ended up with. It’s time to re-imagine how you go about hiring seasonal staff.

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Seasonal Hiring Re-imagined

If you re-imagine your seasonal hiring process, you can shorten your process, decrease drop-outs and ghosting while actually finding better quality candidates. You can do it with available HR technology — like the HireVue Platform or HireVue OnDemand video interviewing — and achieve a process that looks like this:

1. You post a job opening online.
2. Applications come in.
3. Candidates are screened against minimum qualifications by your ATS.
4. Applicants who meet minimum qualifications automatically receive an invitation to take a structured on-demand video interview or video assessment. They take the interview whenever, wherever they want using a smartphone or computer.
5. Recruiters or hiring managers make an offer to candidates based on the video interview and video assessment or move on to a live interview (video or in-person).

You can even further shorten the process and get to one that looks like this:

1. You post a job opening.
2. Instead of applying, applicants take a structured on-demand video interview.
3. Recruiters or hiring managers make an offer to candidates based on the video interview and assessment alone or move on to live interviews.

With on-demand video interviews, your candidates don’t have to take time off from work or pay for gas to come onsite. Recruiters and hiring managers don’t have to chase down candidates or bother with scheduling. And if you use HireVue Assessments with your HireVue video interviews, you can automatically identify candidates who have the same characteristics as your top performers. It’s absolutely realistic that your time to hire can be the same day or one or two days or even the same day as the interview. And in addition to shorter hire times, more hires show up day one. They feel good and share traits with your best workers, so more of them stay through the season and, perhaps, beyond. And you saved your recruiters and hiring managers up to hundreds of hours while finding better candidates faster.

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Most importantly, your candidates had a good candidate experience — that’s important because many of your candidates are also your customers. Your process lets candidates interview without taking time off or paying to travel. And you made an offer or rejection quickly, so you’ve respected your candidates’ time. Your hiring managers saved time too. Time used to focus on helping customers instead of coordinating schedules to interview too many unqualified candidates. And your cost to hire is lower because of the time saved in the recruiting process and potentially salvaged or created customer relationships. This article was originally published on HireVue. It is reprinted with permission.