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 cliche 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.
First, we are going to go over the top 21 time management tips for recruiters:
- Take stock
- End busy
- Measure results
- Devote more time to less
- Create a target candidate profile
- Enhance job postings
- Be selective with interviews
- Deal with email
- Utilize smarter phone screening
- Use recruiter apps
- Score candidates
- Make time for the unexpected
- Do what works for you
- Implement creative recruitment strategies to weed out candidates for you
- Be mindful of social media
- Evaluate your time management techniques.
- Plan your day and stick to it
- Set goals
- Limit internet usage
- Limit work to work
- Prioritize
Then we will go over the top 3 time management techniques for recruiters:
- Inbox-Zero
- The Eisenhower technique
- Eat the Frog technique.
In the end, we will spare some time to mention some of the most effective time management apps for recruiters! Let’s get started!
Our Top 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 busy work, 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’ goals were met?
- How many candidates did you move on to another step (for short-term evaluation)?
- How many quality relationships with candidates for future jobs you’ve built.
#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 with 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. Enhance Job Postings
It’s easy to post on social media and job boards that your company is hiring for an open position.
Anybody can do that.
Unfortunately, posting a generic ad will result in hundreds of unqualified, overqualified or unfit candidates applying for a job that isn’t right for you or them. Work on enhancing job postings so that you’re able to cut down on applicants that aren’t right for the position.
You can save time and money by doing this. You can also spend more time focusing on calling quality candidates and searching for new talent in other places as well.
#7. Be Selective with Interviews
You could spend countless hours sifting through resumes and online inquiries about open positions within your company.
That’s why it’s important to make sure job postings are specific and target talent that will become an asset.
When interviewing, be selective with who you call. Make sure they’re fully qualified and have skills relevant to the position available. Screen resumes and ensure that you aren’t wasting your time interviewing someone who isn’t right for the job.
Using a recruiting software can also help with this process.
#8. 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 devious slavery to email that can really impact your productivity. A situation like this requires the 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.
This is one of the productivity killers, and here is our suggestion on how to deal with it.
Skim through emails first thing in the morning for half an hour and use flags to highlight which things need attention. Everything else can wait. 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 needed to 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!
Our online applicant tracking system also comes with free email templates? These email templates are designed to save you time. Click here for your free trial!
#9. 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 the ones in email or interviews.
Use the phone call as an opportunity to narrow down candidate choices and/or prepare the candidate for the interview. Bottom line, 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.
#10. 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.
Here is how Recruiteze can help you overcome your time management problems:
- Job Publishing – Once you have all the details of a job order, the next step is to post and publish a job advertisement on job boards and social media channels. We will allow you to do this in one click. One-click publish saves a lot of time since you do not have to maintain different accounts on the various job boards and post and publish on each of them.
- Customizable Application Forms/Screener Questions – This is an essential feature of modern staffing agency software. By adding a custom application form, you can quickly shortlist qualified candidates and reject non-qualified candidates.
- Customizable Workflows – Once your custom workflow is set up, it becomes effortless to manage numerous applications with ease and allows the recruitment team to work together effectively.
- CRM – Recruitment CRM helps you manage all your clients, hiring manager, and candidate information in one place. With the CRM features, all team members have access to the consolidated data of all notes, tasks, communications, and history. Hence you won’t waste any time going back and forth, ensuring that everyone is on the same page.
- Resume Database – As you are receiving applications, your resume database will grow. A modern recruitment agency software will allow you to organize your candidate data through workflows and tags easily. A good candidate database makes it easier to place qualified candidates quickly, saving you plenty of time.
- Communications – Communication is a vital aspect of recruitment. You need to maintain proper communication with clients, hiring managers, and candidates to make more placements. Recruiteze can help immensely by allowing you to create customizable email templates and send them in bulk while still maintaining them personalized.
- Job Portal Management – Recruiteze also acts as a job portal management system. It allows you to quickly create branded career portals and manage the active jobs on your career page through a job widget.
- Resume Formating with iReformat – No more manually formatting resumes. iReformat can help you save hours and hours of your time since it only takes around 15 seconds for resume formatting software to reformat your resumes however you want it.<