Tips For Streamlining The Hiring Process
Hiring is a critical pain-point for all businesses. At Kormo, we help hundreds of thousands of active users across Bangladesh, Indonesia and India find jobs that best fit their abilities and interests but we also strive to help employers navigate the hiring process more efficiently (and less painfully) using data and technology. This post offers some helpful hiring tips for the benefit of our Bangladesh based employers.
Tip #1 — Don’t ignore the weekends
For many job seekers, weekends are ideal periods to job hunt and employers who schedule interviews on weekends do themselves a favor. Our internal data revealed that interviews held on Wednesdays were more likely to be declined than interviews held on Saturdays by a factor of ~6x. Conducting interviews on days when candidates are likely free from major scheduling constraints such as an existing job may seem intuitive but employers seem to eschew intuition and rarely conduct interviews on weekends relative to weekdays. Employers also infrequently post new job listings during weekends, a missed opportunity as user engagement metrics are potentially higher during these times (more to come on this topic in a future blog post). The takeaway is that greater activity during weekends especially when it comes to coordinating interviews, improves hiring outcomes and helps employers stay ahead of the competition in the war for talent, i.e. less pain more gain.
Hiring Tip #2 — Longer application window >>better applicant pool
Determining the “application window,” i.e. the period that a job is open to receive applications is a delicate balance between setting a long enough time horizon to grow the candidate pool and accelerating the hiring process as quickly as possible since each additional day searching for a new hire is one less spent on productivity. We analyzed the application windows of several thousand job listings and found that after approximately 30 days, each additional day only marginally increased the size (and hence quality) of the applicant pool. This suggests that an optimum application window resides somewhere along this 30 day period. Employers seeking to maximize the quality and size of their applicant pool might want to consider a longer window (e.g. 30 days) but for some employers, a shorter window could be more suitable due to the timing of their particular needs and business operations.
When opting for a longer window period, one might wonder if there are trade-offs associated with this choice. Does selection become more time consuming with a larger applicant pool? Not necessarily. Kormo’s candidate recommendation feature enables HR personnel to source and evaluate job seekers programmatically so that the quality of the applicant pool scales with applicant volume far more efficiently than through manual vetting. By leveraging technology, Kormo provides employers the “bandwidth” to scour an indefinitely large applicant pool. Discovering that unique and exceptional candidate has never been easier.
For further insights on general hiring practices, an excellent Harvard Business Review article written by Peter Cappelli can be found @https://hbr.org/2019/05/recruiting.
Kormo is a mobile app that helps individuals find great job opportunities across Bangladesh, Indonesia and India (as the Job Spot in Google Pay). The product was incubated inside ‘Area 120’ @ Google.
