Sourced candidates are twice as efficient to hire as applicants. Yet, the process of finding the right talent for your organization can still be extremely time-consuming and pull your attention away from strategic priorities.
As a recruiter or hiring manager, your time investment in recruiting is best spent two ways:
- Having conversations with qualified candidates to evaluate who is the best fit and who you should keep in mind for future opportunities.
- Maintaining relationships with top talent, so you have a strong pipeline for future roles.
Working with a virtual assistant can help you spend most of your time on those activities instead of all of the research, coordination, and data entry required to secure top talent.
Here's how.
Find Better Candidates, Faster
Often, the most time-consuming step of recruiting is sourcing passive candidates. This issue is especially prominent when you're filling a role that has very broad or very specific requirements. In the former, you have an over-abundance of options, while in the later, you may struggle to find enough qualified people to reach out to.
The more time you spend sourcing, the less time you have to evaluate if candidates you find are a good fit. A virtual assistant can help by tackling the sourcing process for you. All you have to do is give them your requirements, and they'll find you a list of qualified people.
If you have a large candidate pool, they can also help you save time by prioritizing recruits.
For example, let's say your job specification has ten qualifications. Two are non-negotiable, four are highly desirable, and you'd like candidates to have at least one of the remaining four.
A virtual assistant can take this information and rank candidates based on how closely they fit your criteria. This allows you to speak to potential recruits to determine how qualified they appear to be, which can help narrow down candidates faster, especially when you don't have much time to fill a role.
Spend More Time Engaging in Conversations Instead of Coordinating Them
67% of recruiters say it takes anywhere from thirty minutes to two hours to schedule a single interview due to difficulties in lining up schedules and accommodating changes. Spending just as much, if not more time scheduling interviews than running them, is a huge waste of time.
To choose the best talent, you need to focus on evaluating candidates and giving them opportunities to see their potential growth at your organization. An easy way to do that is to offload coordination to a virtual assistant. They'll schedule interviews, resolve last-minute conflicts, and send out information that everyone involved needs in advance, such as the candidate's resume, questions, instructions for the candidate, etc.
You can use the time you save to engage in more thoughtful deliberations about who your organization should move forward with.
Effortlessly Maintain Long-Term Relationships with Potential Recruits
Less than half of recruiters and hiring managers stay in-touch with strong candidates who aren't hired for the initial position they applied for. This is a significant lost opportunity since many of them may be a good fit for future roles.
Maintaining relationships with candidates who weren't hired because they were slightly less qualified than the person hired can expedite the process of filling future roles since you have a network of strong, pre-screened candidates you can reach out to.
A virtual assistant can manage this process for you by using your applicant tracking system, CRM, or equivalent tool to:
- Document why candidates weren't hired - this lets you filter who you should and shouldn't reach out to
- Save LinkedIn profiles since that's often the most stable piece of contact information
- Tag candidates for the types of future role they would be a good fit for and store notes on their qualifications
Depending on your style of recruiting, they can help you use this information in two ways:
- If you enjoy maintaining relationships with candidates, they can set reminders for you to reach out based on a time cadence or specific triggers such as when you're attending industry events that they may also be at.
- Run reports of former candidates and check their LinkedIn profiles to identify people who are a good fit for roles you're currently hiring for.
Both of these approaches let you easily source from your existing network and maintain valuable professional connections.
Find Out if a Virtual Assistant is Right For You
Offloading sourcing and coordination to a virtual assistant lets you secure the best talent for current and future roles. To learn more about how support would work for your specific situation, reach out to us for a free consultation.