Hiring in most companies I have seen works like fishing without a rod. Someone is needed, the manager writes a job ad and throws it onto a couple of sites, a week later his inbox holds two hundred CVs mixed with spam, half the responses are in a messenger, some are in HR's private messages, and a few candidates "from friends" are written on a sticky note. Someone gets invited to an interview, someone gets forgotten, someone is promised a call back that never comes. A month later the person is found, everyone exhales, and all the other candidates, including very strong ones who were just slightly unlucky with timing, dissolve. Six months later another person is needed for a similar position, and the fishing starts from scratch.
I have been building systems for business for many years, and in that time I have become convinced: hiring is a process just like sales. It has a funnel, conversion, cost, timelines and losses. And just as sales without a CRM lose customers, hiring without a system loses people.
Hiring is sales in reverse
Look at hiring through the eyes of a process architect. There are traffic sources: job sites, social networks, referrals, the company's own website. There is a funnel: application, screening, test task, interview, final interview, offer, first day, probation. At every stage some candidates drop out, and it matters to understand where and why. There is a deal cycle, which HR calls Time-to-Hire, the time from opening a vacancy to the person starting work. And there is reputation, which works both ways: a candidate treated rudely talks about it just as eagerly as an unhappy customer.
The only difference is that in sales a company sells a product to a customer, while in hiring it sells itself to a candidate and chooses at the same time. A two-sided market where both parties evaluate each other. And while almost nobody argues today that sales need a CRM, many companies still run hiring out of email and spreadsheets.
What an HRM system gives You
An HRM is not just an employee database with birthdays and passport numbers. On the hiring side it is a tool for systematic recruiting, and here is what it gives You in practice.
- A single point of entry. Every application, wherever it comes from, lands in one place. No candidate gets lost in someone's personal inbox.
- A visual funnel. The manager sees how many candidates are at which stage for each vacancy, and where things are stuck. If twenty people passed screening and only two reached an interview, the problem is not the candidates but the process between stages.
- Initial scoring. The system marks, by set criteria, who formally fits and who does not, and the recruiter spends time on conversations rather than on reading two hundred identical CVs.
- A talent pool. Strong candidates who were not hired today stay in the database with notes. Six months later, when a similar position opens, the first calls go to them, not to job sites.
- Templates and automatic messages. Every candidate gets an answer, even if it is a polite rejection. The employer's reputation stops depending on the recruiter's mood.
The talent pool as the main asset
Let me dwell on the talent pool separately, because its value is usually underestimated the most. Every time You open a vacancy from scratch, You pay for attraction: the recruiter's time, money for job postings, the manager's time for interviews. A candidate who reached the final round last time and lost by a hair is a candidate You have already paid to attract. If he is recorded in the system with the note "strong, did not fit the start date", next time a single call might close the vacancy in a week instead of a month.
It is like a garden the gardener does not uproot every autumn but leaves the roots for next year. A company without a talent pool plants its garden anew every time. A company with one, after a couple of years, has its own base of people who already know it, have already passed part of the selection and, importantly, have already been treated by it politely and respectfully.
The best candidate for tomorrow's vacancy is often the one You politely turned down yesterday.
Where automation does harm
So that it does not seem like technology solves everything. Automatic scoring is dangerous if the criteria were invented by someone who does not understand the job well. I have seen systems that screened out excellent engineers for lacking a university degree, while half the company's best specialists had no diploma. Automatic emails irritate if they sound like a robot. And trying to replace a live interview entirely with tests and questionnaires leads to hiring people who are good at passing tests rather than people who are good at the work.
So the rule is the same as everywhere: automate the routine (collection, sorting, reminders, emails, statuses) and leave decisions to people. The system should free up the recruiter's and manager's time for a conversation with a human being, not replace that conversation.
Where to start
Take Your last closed vacancy and try to reconstruct its history: how many applications, from where, how many reached an interview, how long each decision took, which rejected candidates received any answer at all. If You cannot reconstruct it, You do not have a hiring process, You only have its result. The next step is to set up a single place for all candidates and describe the stages of the funnel, even if at first it is just a spreadsheet.
In Forma, hiring and personnel live in the HRM and vacancies sections, next to projects and tasks, so a person who has passed the hiring funnel immediately becomes an employee with a role, access rights and tasks, without moving data from one program to another. And if Your hiring process is unusual, we design it for Your company. Hiring stops being fishing when You have a net, a map of the lake and a logbook of the catch. Good people for Your team, colleagues.
