Just in Time Hiring - Is Your Recruitment Software Ready For It?

Have you ever been in a situation when an important resource, who has been working on a critical project for over a year and has become a very valuable asset for the team, got a better offer and decide to move on? Sounds familiar?

In today's knowledge economy, most of companies are more dependent on their human resources than the companies in the traditional economy. Such a situation means you have to find equally good or better replacement, that too in a very short time. Now one solution to that is to have a strong bench strength of your resources so that a new resource can be quickly allocated to the project, however, having higher bench numbers mean less profit for the company and today's competitive world along with a weak western economy means it would make your company less competitive. Companies with less bench strength would be able to quote lower rates and that would affect directly to your business bottom-line

That's where concept of Just-In-Time hiring comes into picture. Idea of Just-In-Time hiring is to decrease bench strength as much as possible and make recruitment process efficient enough to service any request from business within reasonable time-frame. For JIT hiring to work, Time to fill a vacancy has to be in the range of 10-15 days. Anything more than that would impact the project and you would end up with a dissatisfied client. So the key goal for JIT to work is to make the process efficient. In an ideal world, the moment you have a vacancy, you would source one resume, screen the candidate, forward it to hiring manager, hiring manager would interview that candidate, company would issue him an offer letter, candidate would join the company and everyone would be happy.

But we don't live in an ideal world. Do we?

If you look at the numbers, percentage of candidates that are sourced, less than a one percent of are issued offer, and even lesser percentage of these would actually join the company. So to hire a single candidate, you would at least need 100+ resumes of the required skills and experience level. If you do an analysis of time consumed, a great deal of time is wasted in doing initial screening and short listing candidate that are worthy of an interview.

Key to success of Just-in-time strategy is to reduce time for initial screening of the candidates. All the help that can be made available during this phase of hiring is welcome. That's where technology can help you. If you are using recruitment software that supports built-in employment tests or screening tests, that can save you a great deal of time and can make your Just-In-Time strategy work.

Just-In-time strategy is used by many corporate in the world since last several years successfully to utilize human resources more efficiently and to reduce bench strength. This approach requires you to use technology to your advantage as without its help this strategy is bound to fail.

If you are using a Recruitment Software (Applicant Tracking System) that has built in support for employment test (screening tests), you can use it to your advantage. System can filter out candidates that are not worthy of human eye and now you have to manually screen only those candidates whose profile matches with the job. We have seen such tests can reduce number of candidate that needs to be manually screened by over 60%.

Coming back to example mentioned above, using technology you can easily increase efficiency of your hiring process by almost 150%. Earlier you were selecting one candidate out of 100+, now you have to select one from 40!

Technology is revolutionizing recruitment process all over world. Are you using right systems to recruit the talent you company deserves?

Author is Founder at Screener and worked extensively on recruitment technologies. Screener is Applicant tracking system (Recruitment software) that fully automates the process of applicant screening. It can be configured to send out notification to candidates once he clears the screening test with your contact details. So now you don't have to hunt for candidates. Candidates who are serious about job and have cleared screening would contact you!