This Recruiting Hack Will Save You Time and Lead to Better Interviews Finding the best talent requires attracting, impressing and filtering top candidates as efficiently as possible.
By Andrew Cohen Edited by Dan Bova
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For CEOs of all types of companies, recruiting can be among the most important, but time-consuming, of your responsibilities. Finding the best talent requires attracting, impressing and filtering top candidates as efficiently as possible at all stages of the recruiting funnel.
That's why it's so crazy for me to see early-stage startups waste hundreds of hours on boring "first interviews," where the CEO or junior employee simply regurgitates the details of the company vision, organizational structure and job responsibilities to gauge a candidate's level of interest.
Recruiting funnels could be so much better optimized by using one simple tactic: Send a "recruiting pitch deck" to the candidate ahead of the first interview.
Related: 4 Creative Tactics to Find and Recruit the Best Talent
This could be a short PowerPoint, Keynote, Prezi or Google Slideshow that gives a bit more detail about the job opportunity. The idea is to help prepare the candidate by painting a clearer picture than what might be available on your website or other public information. You could potentially even re-use several slides from your investor pitch deck while adding one to three slides with details about the open vacancy, such as job specifics, immediate team members, technology details, etc.
Sending candidates a recruiting pitch deck before the first interview yields the following benefits:
- It filters out misfits before the interview even starts.
- It makes your company look more professional.
- It gets the candidate more psyched about the opportunity.
- It saves 15 to 30 minutes of explanations on each interview.
- It allows the candidate to come prepared with better questions.
Since you can often learn more about a candidate by the questions that they ask than by the answers to your questions, sending this pre-interview information can help ensure that you will be fielding more interesting questions at each stage of the recruiting process. Every first interview will therefore be magnitudes more productive as a result of such information symmetry.
Considering that the scarcest resource at any company is management's mental bandwidth, optimizing your recruiting process is one of the best gifts that you could give your company.
Related: 5 Great Ways Your Employees Can Help You Hire Smarter
