How recruitment process optimisation fuels efficiency and cuts hiring costs

The current challenges in reducing cost per hire

With global economic uncertainty set to persist, the pressure is on for talent managers and department heads to revisit their hiring strategies; but with less resource. At Sova, we help enterprise organisations centralise their approach to candidate assessment, minimising wasted resources whilst at the same time improving efficiency and quality of hire.

Current assessment solutions and technology often mean dealing with siloed platforms that don’t talk to one another, data in different places, multiple logins, and numerous commercial contracts – the cost of ownership is high. In turn, this causes a poor candidate experience, as well as fragmented hiring data and swathes of lost time for the talent teams grappling with an inefficient tech stack. The final result? High costs, stretched internal teams and talent lost to competitors.

Working with your budget in mind doesn’t mean you have to make ‘either or’ decisions where efficiency and quality of hire come into play. With an all-in-one assessment platform you can have both, providing deep optimisation of your recruitment process.

Optimising the recruitment process

Cost of ownership

On average there are over ten recruitment solutions in an end-to-end hiring process, according to Aptitude Research. This can include early careers assessments, skills testing, virtual assessment centres and video interviews, to name a few. Using a variery of independent assessment solutions from different providers and platforms mean talent teams are often dealing with multiple, disjointed processes, training requirements and heavier administrative processes. Spreading candidate touchpoints across the company also creates silos in how assessments are used, the results they provide and how feedback is provided.

This leads to an inflated total cost of ownership, caused by multiple licence fees across multiple contracts. With 1 in 2 companies keeping a close eye on the ROI of their recruitment tech investment, this piecemeal approach is inefficient and unsustainable for enterprises who must take a more holistic approach to hiring.

Sova solution:

The Sova platform consolidates multiple assessment solutions into one platform, allowing you to hire fairly and accurately at speed by using automated hiring journeys. The platform is built around your specific company needs, making it a flexible, scalable foundation for making informed and strategic hiring decisions.

With a range of expert assessment content and format styles, you can design and build a multi-stage assessment process, all in one place. From early careers, volume hiring to internal leadership development, using the Sova Assessment Experience Platform (AXP) limits the number of differing tools needed in your techstack and creates overall hiring efficiency. Instead of multiple stakeholders and contracts, you instead have a single source for consistent, proactive and optimised hiring journeys.

Time to hire

In today’s hiring market, speed and efficiency are key. Global time-to-hire is, on average, around 30 days. Research by Robert Half indicates that 57% of job seekers lose interest in the job if the process is too long, and that 39% say 7-14 days is too long. Candidates with in-demand skills won’t wait, so hiring decisions must be swift but effective in order to remain competitive.

The challenge is that each application requires significant resource to process, from CV reviews, to assessments and arranging interviews. Often this is done manually by talent teams who may have hundreds of applications for any one role, and must manage multiple assessment stages with data from different providers. For large enterprises, this inevitably means slow decision-making and talent lost to competitors who can move faster.

Sova solution:

Most talent teams and heads of department don’t have access to all the information they need in one place. This means that it is challenging and time-consuming to make strategic hiring decisions. With the Sova AXP, what would otherwise be a multi-stage, multi hurdle process, can be reduced to a single blended assessment. This can shorten the process from weeks to days, for example Santander accelerated their assessment completion time from 11 to 1.5 days.

Hiring is further streamlined by offering successful candidates interview self-scheduling to successful candidates; meaning those less suited are automatically filtered out. With all the application steps automated and in one place, talent teams can make strategic hiring decisions quickly and based on a cohesive body of feedback and results.

Reducing resource required to hire

A consistent and repeatable process can help things to run smoothly especially at enterprise level. But talent teams are getting leaner with less resources, yet expected to do more. Hiring managers shoulder this burden, working manually or with inefficient tech stacks to win over new hires.

The impact shows in the poor conversion rates at the final stage (4:1), resulting in hours of wasted hiring manager time. With time spent screening for the right applicants, scheduling phone interviews, assigning assessments, in-person interviews and gathering internal feedback, the strain is felt internally and by candidates.

Sova solution:

Sova works to optimise your recruitment journey by helping you find the right candidate with up to 90% accuracy. The ability to process applications in real-time via an automated all-in-one platform means the team and candidate journeys are improved from the start.

Using Sova, hiring teams can design the assessment experience according to the needs of the role. With automated objective assessment, on-demand interviews, video AI scoring and machine learning, and candidate self-scheduling, organisations can free up employee time to focus on value-creating activities. Sova AXP automatically sifts out 60-70% of unsuitable candidates, increasing prediction and candidate quality, and consistently producing high conversion ratio (hiring 2 in every 3 candidates) at the final stage.

Improving the candidate experience

With multiple roles often needing to be filled at once, candidates can find themselves waiting considerable lengths to know how successful an interview has been. Many applicants are unhappy with the status quo as 57% of them note feeling “frustrated” with the time it takes to hear back, and many losing interest in the role altogether.

Candidate dissatisfaction has a significant cost to reputation and brand perception, which in turn has a financial cost. For example, Virgin Media’s slow hiring process had a direct effect on revenue. Unhappy applicants - who were also customers - cancelled their accounts, resulting in a $5m annual cost in lost subscriptions.

Sova solution:

The Sova AXP provides a consumer-grade assessment platform that removes friction from the hiring process, with automatic feedback, job-relevant content and interview self-scheduling. For example, British building society Nationwide found that 97% of candidates found the assessment engaging, and 94% agreed it gave them a positive impression of the organisation.

A positive candidate experience also means fewer drop offs during the hiring process. Santander improved their completion rates by 68% with the Sova platform, meaning they were less likely to lose out on talent.

Making more accurate hiring decisions

Poor recruitment decisions can be costly mistakes, but many companies still use transactional and outdated assessment tools that don't yield the best insight. CVs are often unreliable, interviews are subjective and often serve as poor predictors of job performance. A lack of digital screening and testing means companies limit the amount of diversity of soft and hard skills they hire.

The best companies are flexible to the changing needs of the market and hiring is no different. Job descriptions are the tip of the iceberg and skills needed for a role may change as the team grows. The hiring process should be able to take this in stride and adapt, aligning with what a candidate can offer to prioritise a happy and effective team.

Sova solution:

Organisations that use Sova increase their talent decision-making accuracy by 90%.​ With the Sova AXP, your talent team can ensure they are making reliable, accurate hiring decisions. An all-in-one AI-led platform creates flexibility and learning opportunities for role requirements based on past hiring successes.

Sova creates flexibility and learning opportunities for role requirements based on past hiring successes. Need someone detail oriented? Maybe a visual thinker? A candidate with unflappable decision prowess? You can target that, even if what you need evolves over time. This ushers in scalable team growth made possible by a consolidated platform that offers transparency for everyone in the hiring process.

Is doing nothing an option?

The specific pressures that business leaders face today vary by sector, industry and region. Worsening economic conditions compound these pressures further. With inflation impacting cost of living across the globe, constrained global supplies squeezing corporate performances and great talent scarce — the hiring landscape is set to be challenging. A heavy reliance on legacy recruitment platforms, ‘out of the box’ single solutions or manual hiring practices will leave organisations in the crossfire of a rapidly changing work landscape. Without a more strategic approach to talent assessment, companies limit the ability to work withthe changing needs of the job market, and risk losing great candidates to competitors.

Futureproof your hiring strategy

Investing in the right digital initiatives at the right cost can blunt the negative effects of economic pressures in the short term, and build competitive advantage long-term .

To keep a competitive edge, organisations need to be digital-first, reflecting the world of the people they hire. With the Sova AXP, companies are able to craft a hiring journey from start to finish, tailored to the needs of the role and customised to the applicant. Attacking the inefficiencies within the hiring process with a digital solution can strengthen and optimise your recruitment strategy, plug information silos, save hiring managers from repetitive tasks and offer candidates an overall more positive experience.

Conclusion

The key to reducing hiring costs starts with having a platform in place that gets ahead of the typical challenges found when looking for candidates. This means you need to prioritise the purchase of software which:

• Can streamline the application process saving on time and additional labour
• Quickly adapt to the changing needs of a role without impacting the efficiency of hiring
• Has the facilities to ensure easy accountable management across departments limiting silos and gaps in information.
• Can sift through suitable applicants to decrease time-to-hire saving budget and encouraging new staff retention
• Offers different test and assessment types to empower you to hire at scale creating a clear candidate experience and ensuring fair and accurate results.
• Position you as forward-thinking, future-proofing your hiring strategies regardless of industry and economic changes.

With all of these challenges being addressed, the right AXP will make recruitment an optimised, efficient and scalable operation, freeing your hiring team to focus on the high-value, engaging work they’re there to do.