Triage Transforms Recruitment

I was recently asked this brilliant question by Elliott King, founder of MintTwist, digital marketing agency based in London. 

“It takes a long time to ‘triage’ applicants and to first interview candidates. What do you recommend we do to speed up and improve the quality of the process to save costs and improve the quality of 2nd interviewees?”

Such a relevant question for business owners wanting to grow their teams in the current market and for the foreseeable future. 

​The 'ER' challenge is changing

At the end of Q1 the unemployment rate was 3.9%. This is predicted to more than double over the next 6 months. You'll see a massive pendulum swing from candidates being in the driving seat, to employers taking the wheel. 

Many employers who have been hit hard during this pandemic will be re evaluating the resources and skills they need to drive their business forward with redundancies being a likely outcome. 

Businesses that have been less affected during this crisis, like Mint Twist, will now be able to continue on a planned growth trajectory.

Many desperate job seekers will have a blanket approach to sending out CVs in response to job adverts, regardless of suitability for the role. They will be considering jobs that they wouldn’t have entertained 6 months ago.   

On the flip side, it will be challenging to tempt quality people to jump ship from a secure long service with their current employer. You’ll have to work hard to encourage them to take a leap of faith to a new, unknown work set up. 

The last point is a different issue for another article. Here, I’ll focus on the flood of applications and the triage process.

Where you once received a frustratingly slow trickle of mediocre applications, you will now quite literally be inundated. 

If you've been ready to scale up for a while, but have been held back because of the lack of applications from the right people, you won’t know what’s hit you!

There will be lots of choice, but quantity rather than quality is a very time consuming situation, as Elliott suggests.

How do you ensure you're not spending all of your time ‘triaging’ and first interviewing poor quality applicants. 

Here are three ways to improve your triage process:

• Write an even tighter job advertisement that attracts the people with the interests and skills you’re looking for and puts off those who don’t. Write engaging job ads, job descriptions and social media posts aimed at your target audience.
• Be transparent about the challenges of the role and your thorough recruitment process. Talk about what’s involved and you will quickly put off people just looking for a quick win. 
• Have an extremely efficient first filter in place that quickly eliminates poor quality candidates so you can spend time on the people you might want to recruit. You can add a front end self assessment too, allowing people to get a deeper insight into the role. This means that less suitable applicants will select out and you’ll encourage an ‘only the best should apply’ approach.

If you are ready to improve your recruitment process and want to save time and money, please join me on 11th June for How to Attract, Engage and Recruit the Best People online workshop.​

More Details and Book Here