Five Tips for Quickly Hiring the Best Candidate

As executive recruiters, we help dozens of organizations hire top leaders each year. We’ve found that the organizations that have been most successful in hiring the best candidate within a short time have followed these easy steps.

Best Practices for Hiring the Best Candidate Quickly

1. View hiring the best candidate as a project and assign it to one person to project manage. Hold the project manager accountable for driving the timeline and achieving results. The project manager should provide regular status updates to the search committee, managers, peers, and other stakeholders. Typically the project manager is from the human resources team, but they do not have to be.
2. Develop and stick to a timeline.  Ensure your team is aligned on the steps you’ve defined in your hiring process and your proposed timeline. Block times for interviews as the search is starting, make sure you’re planning around holidays, business trips, and vacations. Top organizations not only share their timeline internally but also share them with candidates to help elevate their candidate experience.
3. Define exactly what the organization needs and wants, as well as where compromises can be made. Get consensus from stakeholders on not only exactly what experiences the perfect candidate has, but also where trade-offs may be made. For example, if a Bachelor’s degree is required for a position, but a great candidate with twenty years of experience and no degree applies, should that candidate be considered?
4. Create a sense of urgency. Having a vacant position costs your organization money and extended vacancies can decrease morale for team members having to cover extra responsibilities. If hiring the best candidate is a priority for the organization, stakeholders will make time to be involved in the process no matter how busy they are.
5. Leverage technology. The hiring timeline can be shortened through the use of technology like Microsoft Teams, Zoom, or WebEx for initial interviews. It may take a candidate several days to find a calendar opening so they can drive to your headquarters and interview, but they may be able to do a telephone or video interview after hours or during lunch. The more accommodating you can be, the faster you’ll hire the best candidate.

Following these simple steps speeds up the timeline for hiring the best candidate to meet your organization’s needs.