5 Ways to Fill Open Job Positions Quickly

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By Lorna Faires

Topics: Fill Empty Positions

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5_Ways_to_Fill_Open_Job_Positions_Quickly.jpgWhether you own a high-growth startup or a business that needs to replace employees who have quit, have retired, or have been terminated, you want to ensure that you can fill open job positions quickly. Having an efficient and speedy hiring process that also ensures that you hire the right people is critical, but it’s easier said than done.

Keeping open job positions unfilled for too long can lead to many consequences of understaffing, including lowered productivity, an increase risk of accidents and errors, low employee morale, and reduced customer service. It’s imperative that you fill those empty roles quickly, before they start to negatively affect your business.

Use these five tips to hire the right candidates quickly.

1. Have Your Hiring Process Established Ahead of Time

When someone leaves your employ or you realize that you need another worker, you don’t want to be scrambling at the last minute. You should have your hiring process established well ahead of when you need it. Know who will be writing job descriptions, where you’ll be advertising your positions, who will be reviewing resumes, and which questions and metrics you’ll be using to assess candidates during the interview. When you have your ducks in a row, you can quickly get the hiring process started when the time comes to hire quickly.

2. Considering Hiring from Within

Though hiring from within your own company isn’t always possible if your current employees do not possess the right skills or experience for your open job positions, it’s always best to consider this route first. Your current employees, after all, are already familiar with your corporate culture and expectations, have already proven themselves, and will require less training time. If someone in house is adequate for the position, then it can make the hiring process go by much quicker so you don’t lose out on reduced productivity.

3. Create a Hiring Scorecard

Even if you go through the hiring process relatively quickly, you could end up digging your heels in when it comes to making a final decision. It can be difficult to choose among candidates and make that decision because you want to ensure that you avoid making costly hiring mistakes and hire the right person.

Creating a hiring scoreboard can speed up the decision-making process. Instead of relying on your gut feeling, a scorecard will help provide a quantitative basis for comparing interviewees. This more substantial factual assessment will take the lengthy guesswork out of the equation, so you can come to the right decision quicker.

4. Always Be Recruiting

We see it all the time: employers only seek out candidates once there are open job positions to fill. But when you start the hiring process from scratch, you waste a lot of time. If you’re always recruiting, even when you don’t currently have open job positions, you can line up and nurture a great pipeline of talent. This can reduce your time to fill roles—the moment a roll opens up, look to your pipeline and call up the appropriate candidates.

5. Engage a Staffing Firm

If you don’t have an established hiring process, don’t have qualified candidates within your company, don’t have interview metrics set up, and haven’t been recruiting all this time but need to fill open job positions quickly, then your best bet is to engage a staffing firm. Its recruiters will already have a wide candidate pool filled with pre-approved top talent that matches your hiring needs. All they have to do is call up the best candidates and start the interview process with you. You’ll benefit from the fastest hiring, so you can avoid the consequences of having positions open for too long.

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Lorna Faires

I have over 15 years of experience in the staffing industry, in a management role. I possess a strong background in recruitment, screening, and connecting candidates with the right employment opportunities. I love all animals, but especially my 3 dogs. Hiking and canoeing are my passions, and getting out into nature and being unplugged is my favourite way to spend my vacations.

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