Jieyi’s strong personal style
In my previous article, I talked about how to improve your recruitment process. This article goes into more detail about each stage of the process and gives you a concrete plan for improving it.
If you’re reading this, you’ve probably already been through some sort of hiring process yourself — maybe as an applicant or as someone who helped with hiring. If that’s the case, then you know how frustrating it can be when things don’t go well. You might have been left hanging for days or weeks without any communication from the company. Or you might have had a great interview but never heard back. And if you’ve ever been on the other side of the table, you know how difficult it is to hire good people — even if you do everything right, you’ll often find yourself dealing with poor candidates and a lot of friction in the hiring process.
I think we all want to avoid these problems. We want to hire good people quickly, and we want to do it efficiently and fairly. But there are many ways to mess up the hiring process, and most of them are subtle enough that they go unnoticed until they cause a problem. That’s why I’m writing this series of articles about how to improve your recruitment process.
In this first article, I’ll talk about diagnosing the broken stage in your pipeline before trying to apply fixes broadly. In the next article, I’ll give you a concrete benchmark to compare your recruitment process against. Then I’ll show you how documenting your pipeline as a flowchart can help you spot bottlenecks and keep your process consistent across teams. After that, I’ll discuss how improving job descriptions and using precise sourcing tactics can widen your qualified applicant pool and reduce bias. Finally, I’ll explain how continuous recruiter training and technology compound efficiency gains throughout the entire hiring process.
Diagnose the broken stage first
The key idea behind any improvement initiative is to figure out what’s broken, fix that, and only then apply broader fixes. It’s very tempting to try to apply fixes to your whole hiring pipeline at once, especially if you see signs of inefficiency here and there. But that approach rarely produces good results — fixing one broken piece of the system tends to produce faster results than applying generic fixes to the whole thing.
Why? Because it’s much easier to diagnose a specific bottleneck than to apply a broad solution to an entire process. When you try to apply generic advice to the whole process, you risk making mistakes that could make the overall situation worse. For example, suppose you decide that your biggest issue is that you’re taking too long to fill positions. You might then look at every part of your process and try to speed things up. But if you didn’t spend time figuring out where exactly the delay is coming from, you could end up making things slower. The same applies to almost any other problem you might have with your hiring process.
Instead of applying broad fixes to your whole hiring pipeline, you should focus on diagnosing the specific stage causing delays or candidate drop-off (sourcing, screening, interviewing, or offer and close). Once you’ve identified that specific stage, you can apply fixes to that one area before trying to apply general advice to the rest of the process.
Most hiring teams skip this diagnostic step. A 2018 SHRM survey found that only 20% of organizations formally measure the quality of their hires. Instead, the majority of companies optimize for time-to-fill and cost-per-hire, with no check on whether their efforts to speed up the process are actually producing worse hires.
So the first step toward improving your recruitment process is to identify which stage of the process is broken. If you don’t take this step, you’ll likely end up applying fixes to the wrong parts of the system, resulting in less-than-optimal improvements.
What a healthy recruitment process looks like
A healthy recruitment process looks like this:
Interest from the right kind of candidate in the job posting;
Smooth interview process with at least one or two strong potential candidates;
Strong communication during the offer stage; and
Onboarding that integrates the new hire seamlessly from day one.
There are four purposes to targeted recruitment:
To ensure that the organization has the competencies needed to achieve its goals;
To increase the number and quality of applicants for hard-to-fill roles;
To represent various segments of society; and
To reduce the cost per hire.
Map the pipeline and make bottlenecks visible
Documenting your pipeline as a flowchart makes bottlenecks visible and keeps your process consistent across teams. The underlying stages will always be the same, regardless of whether you label them as five, seven, or eight steps. Some variations are normal — for example, some organizations separate “approvals” into a separate stage, while others include reference checks within the assessment stage. But documenting your pipeline helps train new hiring managers, spot bottlenecks, and run a consistent process across teams.
Tracking the source of hire — which channels produce the best hires — is a key metric to track. Improving your job descriptions and using precise sourcing tactics can help you widen your qualified applicant pool and reduce bias. Remove gender-coded language from your job descriptions, and review how gender diversity appears on your career pages and social posts. Boolean search targeting can help you reach women-only colleges, historically Black colleges (HBCUs), and similar institutions. Here’s an example of a search query that would target female-identifying graduates of HBCUs: “quality assurance specialist” AND “san francisco bay area” NOT “software engineer” OR “web developer”. Just remember not to change your job posting without also changing your screening criteria.
Improve interviews, technology, training, and outsourcing decisions
Adding interview rounds to reduce risk lengthens the process without necessarily improving decision quality. Evaluate every candidate on the same essential factors you decided upon before interviews began. First impressions are unreliable as a sole signal — back your instincts with evidence from multiple sources. Psychometric assessments provide a data point that resists intuition-driven bias. Using a shared assessment tool (e.g., McQuaig) gives everyone involved in the hiring process a common language and benchmarks, reducing unnecessary repeat rounds of interviews. Interviews are widely used but widely misunderstood.
Technology and continuous recruiter training compound efficiency gains throughout the entire hiring pipeline. Technology surfaces best-fit candidates, captures leads, connects candidates with relevant job descriptions, and preps them for the next step in the process. Recruiters find top talent faster than competitors, drastically reducing the time to offer. Continuous learning is an ongoing requirement, not a one-time fix — ongoing training for recruiters, interviewers, and hiring managers including unconscious bias reduction ensures that everyone continues to improve over time.
Outsourcing recruitment makes sense when the constraint is limited internal capacity, not a structural pipeline issue. Outsourcing a structural problem risks shifting the same bottleneck to an external party rather than resolving it. Some organizations use recruitment agencies or recruiting software to save time, reduce cost, and ensure compliance.