Time management is the bane of all recruiters’ existence. You have all of these plans for reaching goals, making money, and satisfying clients and candidates, then unexpected responsibilities and busy work rear their ugly head.
Sorry about the cliched metaphors. The dread of wasted time is best described in these dramatic terms. Thankfully, you can tackle the time management beast, and this post will help you do it. Stop wasting time and start using Recruiteze today! Our free online applicant tracking reducing hiring and recruiting time. And since it’s free, it also saves you money. Click here to start working smarter.
14 Time Management Tips For Recruiters
#1. Take Stock
Start your battle with time management by examining what you are already doing. What works? What doesn’t? What are you not sure about whether it works or not? What activities, processes, and mindsets are you chained to? Make a list of these things, and let it sit while you read the rest of this post.
#2. End Busy
We have a tendency to feel like we’re accomplishing a lot just because we’re busy, but unfortunately, it can often be just the opposite. We get so overloaded sending emails and making phone calls and doing so much stuff that we don’t notice until we settle down and the smoke clears that we accomplished very little. Then we get in a panic to accomplish more and throw ourselves with even more determination into that busywork thinking it’ll eventually pan out. Contrary to our natural inclination, this is the time to slow down, possibly even stop, and evaluate what we’re doing.
#3. Measure Results
Most recruiters measure their success by phone calls, but what if those phone calls aren’t fruitful? What have you accomplished? Largely a waste of time, that’s what. At the end of the day, week, month or year, look back on:
- How many candidates were hired
- How many candidates are satisfied with their new position after a few months
- How much money you made
- Whether your clients’ hiring goals were met
- How many candidates you moved on to another step(for short term evaluation)
- If you built quality relationships with candidates for future jobs
#4. Devote More Time To Less
You probably audibly asked, “What?!,” to that suggestion. You think doing less work will cost you money and success, but doing a better job on a smaller number of tasks is a great way to become a highly competitive and therefore richer recruiter.
Consider which are your best clients, the ones with the most need for work, the ones whose need is most compatible to your skills, and the ones you can collaborate with best. Keep them and weed out the rest. Start small if you want to by getting rid of one at a time. Then, focus on delivering your best results for these clients with the help of our other time management tips.
#5. Create A Target Candidate Profile
If you haven’t already, create a target candidate profile that includes things like important experience, personality traits, preferred management styles, motivational factors, location, etc. This will help you develop a clear, definable, and fair tactic for considering candidates. You will end up spending less time deciding on and less time justifying your candidate selection with this profile. Make sure when you create this profile to further save yourself time by prioritizing the most important things to look for in a candidate. You don’t want to be too rigid about it, because you might overlook qualified candidates and end up spending unnecessary time looking for someone else, but you do want to have a targeted idea of who to pursue in the first place.
Don’t look into everyone who meets one or two criteria and waste time on a huge number of candidates. Do use a targeted candidate profile to home in on and give these people thorough consideration to make sure you don’t dismiss or accept someone too lightly.
#6. Deal With Email
Email beats down every recruiter if they aren’t aggressive at controlling it. There is simply way too much email coming in, and you have to check it because it is crucial to your job. This inspires a devious slavery to email that can really impact your productivity. A situation like this requires organization of both your time and your inbox.
Begin by setting aside a certain time to devote to email. Rather than answering every notification or checking your email every spare moment, designate once a day or twice a day to email time.
In a previous post we suggested, “Personally, I like to skim through first thing in the morning for half an hour, and use flags to highlight which things need attention. Everything else can wait. I do the same thing mid-morning, mid-afternoon and at the end of the day, flagging for tomorrow.”
Recruiter apps are also excellent tools for managing emails. Followupthen will resend emails to you when they are needed so you can delete the originals and have an inbox with only pressing matters waiting for you. Our recruiter app, Recruiteze, will parse resume emails for you directly into your candidate database. All you have to do is send Recruiteze the email. It also automatically combines candidate information from the same email address into a profile for that candidate. Instant organization! Did you know that our online applicant tracking system also comes for free email templates? These email templates are designed to save you time. Click here for your free trial!
#7. Utilize Smarter Phone Screening
Don’t just pick up the phone and give a phone call because it’s the thing to do or you simply want to get the ball rolling. Make full use of the phone call and your time by having a distinct purpose for this task. Ask different questions on the phone than you will in emails or interviews. Use the phone call as an opportunity to narrow down candidate choices and/or prepare the candidate for the interview. Bottomline, don’t just do it because you have to or to set up an interview, do something with it that will save you time from another step.
#8. Use Recruiter Apps
We’ve touched on recruiter apps for emails, but they do so much more that can save you time. They can help you organize and optimize candidate resumes, maintain reporting metrics to help you reach your goals, stay connected to recruiting news, and more.
#9. Score Candidates
Do nothing with a candidate’s profile without giving them a score on a ready-made, universal score you have made or making notes about the candidate from this individual viewing. Either of these tactics will help you save time reviewing candidate information and make it much easier for you to compare similarly qualified candidates. So, if you’re first skimming their resume, reading their social media profile, or talking to them on the phone, jot down a score or a note based on this interaction.
#10. Make Time For The Unexpected
The unexpected will happen anywhere, in any profession, but it is particularly prevalent in recruiting jobs. Rather than avoiding it or trying to manage it out of your schedule, make room for it, make plans for handling it. If someone comes to you unexpectedly, see if it is possible for them to speak to you at a more convenient time, like an hour of the day you set just for things like this. If not, work on a strategy to address their needs as quickly as possible. Aggressively, but not rudely, manage your time so you are in control rather than letting tasks control you.
#11. Do What Works For You
The best time management plan won’t work if you can’t or won’t do it. Play around with ideas and see what works for you. Tweak plans to fit your habits. Think about personality just as much with yourself as with your candidates. If you are a creative person, use creative means to organize your time, tasks, and paperwork. If you can’t get by without reminders and notes, set aside a time of day to create notes and reminders to get you through the day. Or week!
#12. Be Mindful Of Social Media’s Pull
Recruiters need social media to perform very basic aspects of their work, but this puts you in a very bad situation when it comes to temptation. You’re scrolling down Twitter or Facebook trying as hard as you can to get some quality work done and you get lost in humor or inspiring land. You then realize you’ve spent thirty minutes, if you’re lucky it’s only thirty minutes, of social media enjoyment. Recruiting? What recruiting? Oh yeah!
In a past post on productivity killers, we pointed out the importance of setting time limits on social media use. You will have to be aware of what you are spending that time on if it’s limited, and if you spent your allotted time for assessing a candidate laughing at kitten photos, you’ll feel really silly when you have to go back and force yourself to actually look for work-related information on that candidate during a period you should be moving on to someone or something else.
#13. Create Job Adverts And Communications To Weed Out Candidates For You
The best targeted and creative job advertisements can actually weed out poor candidates. This technique may range from listing more detailed and strategic job requirements on an advertisement to ruling out the least qualified with more subtle means. Describe the company culture in advertisements, even if it is only with a few choice words. Deliver advertisements to a select group, such as people living in a certain area or the business’ current customers. If you have fewer, better qualified candidates to choose from, you’ll spend less time ruling out candidates and more time on building quality relationships. Recruiteze, the number one online applicant tracking system, also comes fully integrated with your very own custom job board. You’ll be able to create targeted job postings to attract the best talent in your field. Keep reading to learn more about how Recruiteze can help reduce hiring time.
#14. Evaluate Your Time Management Strategy
Routinely evaluate your strategy to make sure that it still works or that it couldn’t be improved. It is pretty much a given that it will need improving while you first learn what your best strategy is and later on as industries and the job market changes.
Conclusion
You have the power to wrangle your recruiting tasks into a manageable workload that will satisfy you, your clients, and your job candidates. It requires a little aggression, trial and error, and evaluation, but it is possible.
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