What is a Recruitment Audit?
A recruitment audit is a comprehensive evaluation of your recruitment policy. This will help you understand if your current recruitment process is effective in attracting your ideal candidate. It can help you determine hiring bottlenecks, your level of candidate engagement, and your reputation among applicants. Our recruitment audit checklist can guide you through this process.
Why Audit Your Recruiting Process?
Audits can help you pinpoint places in your recruitment process where you may be losing candidates. An audit can ensure your staff is on the same page, and help you decide how to change and tweak your process. You can use a recruitment audit checklist to gather and process information about your most common challenges.
When it comes to fixing staff shortages and setting hiring goals, it’s crucial to know where you’re starting from. Sometimes, recruitment policies aren’t updated between hiring managers, or they’re changed without the big picture in mind. If you’re facing a staffing shortage, it can be hard to know exactly where your recruitment pain points are. After all, it’s a long process with many variables.
It can feel daunting to tackle a recruitment audit. Be equipped to handle the process with this streamlined recruitment audit checklist.
Your Recruitment Audit Checklist
1. Determine Who Should Be Involved
Ideally, try to include the input of everyone involved in your recruiting process. This can include people in charge of direct recruitment, social media managers who post about jobs, supervisors who work directly with hired employees, and anyone working in the HR department. However, an audit can be complex. To avoid confusion, appoint a project head who delegates tasks and keeps everyone on track.
Action Items
- Pick a team member to be responsible for collecting and managing feedback from surveys.
- Ensure that everyone understands their roles and responsibilities at a kickoff meeting.
- Clearly share your timeframe and goals.
2. Map the Candidate Journey
Mapping the candidate journey is one of the most crucial steps in your recruitment audit checklist. Take time to understand exactly how your candidate moves through the hiring funnel, from first finding the job ad to accepting the job offer. Make sure to track small steps, like email exchanges, as well as moments when your candidate may interact with your recruitment marketing. Every step of the process can be a place to lose candidates or keep them engaged.
Action Items
- List out every step in the candidate journey, no matter how minor.
- Pinpoint potential bottlenecks when your recruiting might slow down.
- Identify moments when you might be losing candidates to further investigate with quantitative and qualitative data.
3. Map Your Internal Processes
Now that you’ve mapped out your candidate journey, take the perspective of your recruiters. From beginning to end, what is their process like? What steps does the hiring manager have to take in order to recruit a candidate? Remember to look at which steps of the process are allocated to which people in your HR hierarchy. Finally, don’t forget to look over your recruitment marketing process. Where are you distributing jobs? Are you paying for ads? These are all important aspects of the process to consider. Create an internal workflow or a policies and procedures document to map who is responsible for each part of the process.
Action Items
- List out every step in your internal recruiting process.
- Make sure each step is attributed to the people involved within it.
- Pay particular attention to candidate touchpoints.
- As with the candidate journey, pinpoint stages in the process you’d like to further investigate through quantitative and qualitative data.
4. Look at the Quantitative Data
Gather your raw data: your time-to-hire, time-to-interview, and candidate conversion rate. (If you’re an Apploi user, you can see your hiring velocity from your account.) Looking at the raw numbers can help you understand where candidate leakage occurs.
For example, imagine that you have a high number of candidates applying, but a low percentage of candidates agreeing to an interview. This means that you may be losing engagement between the application and the interview. Look at your candidate response times at each stage and your own response times. In addition, it’s worth looking at the number of candidates engaging, conversion rates on your landing page and job ads, and other recruiting statistics.
Action Items
- Collect data on time-to-hire, time-to-interview, candidate conversion rate, traffic on your recruitment landing pages, and any other recruiting metrics you monitor.
- Work with your team to determine what other variables are important for you to track.
- Scan for metrics that might be causing problems, like a notably long time-to-hire or a low candidate conversion rate.
5. Look at the Qualitative Data
While numbers can tell one side of the story, reviewing qualitative data is another crucial step in your recruitment audit checklist. Have you been collecting feedback from candidates over the years? Return to any surveys or feedback forms from candidates and employees to add dimension to your audit.
If you haven’t received feedback, it’s never too late to begin. Try sending out a survey to past and present applicants as part of your audit.
Action Items
- Return to past surveys and feedback forms. Determine with your team how far back you want to go.
- Collect feedback in a spreadsheet or in another format that will make it easy to review.
- Look for recurring feedback that might indicate ongoing challenges related to your recruiting process.
- Consider sending out new surveys uniquely suited to your auditing goals.
6. Apply to Your Own Job
It’s important to put yourself in your candidate’s shoes. Try “applying” to your job posts, both on computer and mobile. If your jobs are distributed on multiple platforms, try applying from multiple sites. Is the process smooth and not too lengthy? Did you run into technical difficulties? This is a good way to understand what your candidates might be experiencing as they apply.
Often, the length and complexity of an application can deter potential candidates. Remember, 92% of people never finish job applications.
Action Items
- Test your job applications through multiple platforms.
- Be sure to look at the mobile versions of your applications as well.
- Look at ease of application, the length of time it takes to complete, any technical issues, as well as how the application looks aesthetically.
- Document any challenges you run into.
7. Gather Input From Current Employees
While moving through your recruitment audit checklist, don’t overlook some of your most important resources: current employees. Current employees all went through your recruitment process. They have first-hand knowledge of its strengths and weaknesses. They’re a useful source when it comes to understanding how successful you’ve been in engaging candidates.
Send out an anonymous survey to gather your employees’ feedback about your recruiting process. Potential survey questions could be open-ended, such as “why did you choose to apply?” or “why did you choose to accept the position?” You can collect quantitative feedback by asking them to rate certain experiences from one to ten.
Action Items
- Send out a survey to your current employees based on the goals of your audit.
- Ensure employees have an option to stay anonymous for the most honest feedback.
- Collect feedback and take note of any trends.
8. Gather Input From Recruiters
Recruiters can also have valuable insight about what’s working and what isn’t. Recruiters are often the ones most interested in making the hiring process smoother and easier. Just like with your current employees, qualitative or quantitative surveys (or a mixture of both) can help you understand your recruiters’ feelings.
Action Items
- Send a survey to your recruiters, or anyone else who interacts with the candidates on behalf of the company.
- Collect feedback, identify common challenges, and note what would need to change to improve your process.
9. Evaluate Your Recruiting Process
By now, you have a wealth of information from your recruiting audit checklist. Now it’s time to condense your findings into the most helpful learnings and new goals for your team. List out the biggest issues you’ve uncovered in your recruiting process. Rank them by priority and share your findings. Diagnosing pain points is important. However, it’s also important to recognize what you do well!
Action Items
- Determine key findings, both positive and negative.
- Rank the pain points you’ve uncovered by priority.
- Share your findings with your team.
- Determine what actions you will take based on the results of your audit.
Better Recruiting With Apploi
No matter what you’ve uncovered during your recruitment audit, Apploi can help streamline your process. Interested in learning more about how you can recruit, hire, and onboard healthcare staff quickly? Contact us today for a free demo of our software solution.
