Shots fired. Home Depot has announced it will hire 100,000 workers to help staff its stores and warehouses ahead of the busy spring season, and is hyper focused on speeding up the time that an applicant hears back. According to an article in Bloomberg News, the firm has committed to cut the time to make a hiring decision from 5 days to 1.
Recent analysis of 400,000 confirmed hires on LinkedIn from June 2020 to March 2021 shows that the full run of stages between a candidates’ initial application – and the ultimate start date – can average as much as 49 days in some industries. It’s understandable why many companies view the news from Home Depot as a serious threat to the ability to attract talent when the unemployment rate is at a pandemic-era low of 3.9% and workers are just not responding like they used to.
How can you follow Home Depot’s lead and cut the hiring decision process time down to have the first offer to the qualified candidates in your pool? Here are a couple of ideas and references to get you stated:
Become obsessed with efficiency! Move like Tesla
Whether you’re a full-time recruiter or working independently, you might be wondering how to improve your recruiting efforts so you can more accurately hire the right talent. One of the most frustrating parts of recruiting is the sometimes laborious recruiting process that loses candidates, prolongs the process and creates havoc in the candidate experience. There are many ways to make your hiring process more efficient, and they will all depend on the unique variables of your recruiting team. Creating the right hiring workflows can help your most qualified candidates and recruiters achieve their hiring goals more effectively by learning from Tesla’s approach to manufacturing efficiency.
According to Bloomberg, Tesla’s factory in Fremont, California, produced an average of 8,550 cars a week in 2021. That’s more than Toyota Motor Corp.’s juggernaut in Georgetown, Kentucky (8,427 cars a week), BMW AG’s Spartanburg hub in South Carolina (8,343) or Ford Motor Co.’s iconic truck plant in Dearborn, Michigan (5,564), according to a Bloomberg analysis of production data from more than 70 manufacturing facilities. To frame just how much more productive Tesla is over its competitors, it’s noteworthy to mention that its factory in Fremont is 40% smaller than its closest rival Toyota.
So how did Tesla achieve such efficiency with less space and produce more? Read more here.
Revamp your minimum qualifications
Think of minimum qualifications as the “price of entry”. What do candidates absolutely have to possess to be qualified for the job you’re posting?
LinkedIn data scientist Brian Xu, analyzed 3.8 million job postings since 2017. He found 35% of entry-level job listings called for at least three years of experience. Analysis showed employers asked for at least three years of relevant work experience on 35% of their postings. That rate dipped briefly to 30% in June 2020, when labor markets were in freefall. It’s higher now, though, at 38.4%.
So it’s not that entry level workers “just don’t want to work”, many may feel they’re unqualified.
Read more on how to reexamine the minimum qualifications in this blog post.
Fix the Feedback Loop
The Interview Feedback Loop
Managers love to call me and complain about their open roles not being filled quick enough by recruiters. Of course, my job is to ensure all of my clients are happy but about 80% of the time, the obstacle to filling the job is not the shortage of talent or the lack of talent but rather, the length of time it takes for managers to provide feedback on the talent. I find a lot of managers don’t understand why it’s important to provide quick feedback on candidates.
Some of the common complaints I hear are from managers include:
- “My positions aren’t being filled quick enough.”
- “You guys take so long to get a new hire on board.”
- “Why does recruiting take so long?”
As a recruiter, I am always more apt to work harder and quicker for the managers who have a quick turnaround time for feedback. Usually, these managers are not the culprit of complaints because we’re in constant contact throughout the process. For those managers who don’t understand why it’s important to provide quick feedback on candidates, it’s time to wake up and realize candidates are in control in this market and they will not wait!
If you want more ideas on how to fix the feedback process, here are some previous posts to get your started:
- Why Radical Candor is Important in the Recruiting Process
- What Recruiting can learn from Netflix on the importance of the Feedback Loop
- How to use Work in Progress (WIP) Limits in Recruiting
- The Importance of Hiring Manager Feedback
Home Depot has made a smart move in publicly committing to cut the job approval process. This will not only attract potential works who want answers fast but also snap those managers and recruiters who tend to drag their feet in the process. Hats off to Home Depot for hopefully starting a much needed trend: examine the process and make it better with the candidate at the center.
Well done Home Depot, well done!
About me
and Sprint Recruiting
I joined the HR industry in 2004 after working as a sales leader in the Financial Services Industry for eight years. After spending his first couple of years in HR trying to fit in, I found my voice. Now I leverage all of the things I once hated about HR to become a consultant and invaluable partner to the businesses I support. I contribute to the HRGazzette and to DataDrivenInvestor on Medium. WARNING: my writing style is raw and in your face, not what you would expect from an HR executive.
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