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How to Scale Up Hiring Without Losing the Human Touch

Scaling up is an exciting time, but it can also come with stress and anxiety. After all, when it comes to hiring, your business needs to balance finding optimal candidates with completing your day-to-day work. 

As a result, many businesses turn to technology to streamline the hiring process. The right recruiting tools and strategies should enable you to scale up efficiently without sacrificing the human touch necessary for forming strong connections with candidates. 

Let’s explore top strategies for humanely scaling up your business’s hiring efforts.

1. Implement Candidate Tracking Processes

When businesses seek to grow quickly, it’s easy for promising candidates to get lost in the shuffle. You can resolve this issue by using modern candidate tracking tools. These platforms allow you to create profiles for each candidate and monitor their progress through your hiring process, from initial application to interviews to delivering your job offer. 

If parts of your hiring process are automated, be sure to monitor candidates even when they’re not directly interfacing with your team. Then, if problems occur, you can step in to help them or resolve issues when automated messaging cadences don’t account for their unique situation. 

When assessing hiring platforms, look for tools that increase your efficiency but still take a human-first approach to ensure you’re engaging candidates at scale.

2. Use Technology Strategically

Almost all modern businesses incorporate technology into their hiring process. From asynchronous interviews to resume scanning tools, software can dramatically reduce the administrative burden associated with hiring. 

However, too much technology and too little human interaction can build a wall between you and candidates. To maintain candidate engagement and encourage application completion rates, be strategic about how and when candidates will interact with automatic processes. 

For instance, you might use technology heavily during the early stages of your hiring process to filter out unqualified candidates. Then, after identifying top candidates, you might incorporate more one-on-one outreach.

You can also ensure a human connection with technology by prioritizing software solutions with candidate-focused personalization features. For instance, you might look for a solution that segments candidate messaging or refers to them by first name to help the experience feel more organic and meaningful.

3. Keep a Close Eye on Metrics

Use your hiring tools to collect data on your hiring process to determine if your new approach is helping you meet your business goals. 

There’s a wide range of metrics you can track to assess your hiring practices, such as the number of applicants, candidate quality, and average cost of hire. When determining if you managed to retain a human touch as you scale up, JazzHR’s guide to recruiting metrics recommends looking at these performance indicators:

Application completion rate. The more applicants who see your hiring process through to the end, the more streamlined and user-friendly it is. 

Funnel conversion rate. Funnel conversion rate measures how far the average candidates get through your entire process, such as advancing to the interview stage. A low conversion rate might signal poor candidate relationship management. 

Nurture engagement levels. Track how candidates engage with messages meant to nurture their relationship with your business. Higher rates show you’re building positive connections with prospective employees. 

Candidate feedback scores. Ask candidates directly about how they felt about your hiring process to gain insightful qualitative feedback. 

Offer acceptance rate. How you conduct your hiring process might determine whether a candidate accepts your job offer. For instance, if you showed respect for a candidate and managed to build a rapport with them, that might influence their decision to accept your offer.

Use a mix of qualitative and quantitative data to assess how candidates feel about your hiring process. Do they appreciate your efforts to build a human connection? Are there any steps that feel unnecessary? Does your hiring technology ease the process or are aspects of it confusing? Answering these questions helps you determine if your efforts have been successful and make targeted improvements as you continue scaling up.

Growing your business opens doors to new opportunities, including finding new talented employees who can elevate your organization. Ensure you build these relationships in a uniform, streamlined manner by leveraging hiring tools and software that prioritizes the candidate experience.