Picking the right employees for every single job is the secret to successful operations in an organization. As companies expand, they tend to streamline most of their processes, human resources included.
However, you need to be particular with crucial job roles, such as project management to pick the most suitable candidates. This doesn’t have to be complicated either where you manually work on every recruitment process, spending time and resources.
We’ve come up with some of the best time management strategies for effective project manager recruitment. Hire the best and advance your organization by creating a workforce of dedicated employees.
Leveraging time management strategies for effective project manager recruitment
Project managers play a crucial role in the working of an organization. They:
- Understand the project and create the blueprint for its operation.
- Delegate tasks to suitable employees with instructions and deadlines.
- Supervise the work being performed, guiding to derive more efficiency and resolving conflicts that may arise.
- Review the final product before submitting it to their superiors.
Around 46% of businesses regret their new hires.
Sometimes, the process is rushed and sometimes they settle for less suitable candidates simply because they couldn’t find the most suitable one.
This leads to a tremendous loss of time and effort for companies, not to mention resulting in a lacking and less-than-desirable workforce. The solution is to be more diligent in your hiring efforts, especially for crucial roles such as project management.
In this article, we discuss some time management strategies that help you hire for crucial roles better and faster while still adding personalization to the processes.
1. Prepare interview questions beforehand
One of the most important aspects of any hiring process is determining whether the candidate will fit into your company's culture or not. Interviews help you determine that more than other steps of the process.
To make the interview a valuable experience for both you and the candidate, prepare your interview questions in advance as per the role. Here are some essential project manager interview questions to help you get started.
The goal is to ask questions that let their personality shine through and help you assess if they are a good fit for the role and company culture or not. Preparing questions based on the job role in advance helps you save time and get straight to the task.
However, a pro tip here is to leave 2-3 questions space empty for completely personalized questions. These can be based on something unique in their resume, or tests that let you understand their values.
Doing so will help you conduct interviews that are personalized but do not consume a large amount of resources. They will help you pick the most suitable project managers that understand their role right from the get-go.
2. Make the most of your scheduling software
Most companies make the mistake of limiting the use of employee scheduling software to simply scheduling the shifts of their employees.
Employee scheduling software solutions offer a host of services over and above scheduling.
These services can help you with many day-to-day tasks, recruitment included while keeping integrations with different tools completely secure. You may set up interviews with candidates using a scheduler app. It helps you view the availability of candidates and your hiring team better and plan accordingly.
Some of the best employee scheduling software are dedicated to offering connecting services that help you collaborate and communicate better with your associates. You may choose system integrators that make scheduling interviews easier.
This is important because you cannot expect every candidate to be able to use complex software solutions to set up an interview slot for themselves. It needs to be easy and the instructions to them need to be clear regarding it.
Here’s how you shall use scheduling software to set up interviews and calls with your candidates:
- Send them an email asking them to pick a slot for their interview on your schedule.
- This will be followed by a link to a public scheduler space where all the available spots will be shown and the candidates can choose at their convenience.
- A public space will allow multiple candidates to view and choose slots at the same time without ever being a conflict.
- This will also ensure that the recruitment team can see candidates choosing slots in real-time and can follow up with ones who haven’t yet.
- Make sure to explain to the candidates how long the interview will last, if it will be a voice or video call, and what documents they need to keep beforehand, etc.
3. Automate everything you can
The key to hiring the most suitable project manager is to personalize the process with relevant tests and interview questions. However, you simply cannot have every step of the process be manual as it will take too much time and resources.
The most ideal solution is to optimize the process by automating as many tasks as you can. Some processes such as setting up test questions and planning an interview will require manual input in some capacity.
But the rest of the processes shall be made automated to save you time. These processes can be:
- Resume screening
- Contacting the candidate for a test
- Scheduling an interview with you
- Sourcing their information for future use
- Some steps of the orientation
Automating these processes helps keep tasks organized and saves you time and resources. You will be free to direct your energy toward the part of the recruitment process that requires manual input from you.
A pro tip in this regard will be to keep your recruitment team in the loop regarding automated tasks so that everyone knows which candidates are being processed at all times. This helps avoid miscommunication and errors.
4. Make orientation personalized
The orientation of a new hire is crucial in setting the foundation of their employment relationship with you. For a role such as a project manager, it requires more than just a basic orientation meant for everyone.
Personalize the orientation process to help the project manager understand the workings of your organization from the get-go. They should be able to understand the work culture and your values to adhere to them as they undertake projects.
This is because the tasks they’re needed to perform will stay or less the same on every project. This is why they can be explained to them with a generic orientation. What needs personal input is the essence of your company they need to uphold.
To do this, have a one-on-one meeting with the new project manager and let them know how you operate and what you expect them to do in this role. You may introduce them to their new team and let them get to know each other.
You may even conduct a workshop for the newly formed team. This will help the manager understand each and every team member and assign roles to them that will truly suit their style of work.
5. Review your efforts
One way to fast-track your recruitment process is to conduct a self-review. It helps you identify mistakes and points on which time and effort are being put in for little to no reward. Eliminate redundant steps and streamline the process for better results.
For example, a step in the recruitment process of project managers could be to give them a hypothetical project to see how they will delegate tasks in it. But it may be too lengthy that candidates give up and don’t follow through with it.
An easy fix would be to remove that particular test and rather put a question in the interview to check the candidates’ spontaneity. To review your recruitment process and improve it, focus on the following aspects:
- Assess how long the recruitment of a single project manager takes and the cost that is spent on it.
- See how many steps the process has and how expansive your reach is when scouting for candidates.
- Check how large and diverse a pool you gather with your efforts.
- Skip steps that could be subjective and don’t apply to all candidates.
- Prepare a basic recruitment process first and add personalization later.
- Don’t make the process too rigid and leave room for improvisation.
Focussing on the above aspects will help you tweak your process and make it more flexible. It will remove steps that may be taking up time and resources while still keeping it open to personalization.
Make personalization and automation go hand-in-hand to recruit the best project managers
Management jobs are crucial in an organization and require effort and care in their recruitment for companies to be able to create an optimized workforce.
To hire better, take a look at your current recruitment process and add and delete steps to make it the most optimized it can be.
Use automation where you can, such as scheduling interviews and personalization in the tests and interview questions to test the candidates better. Personalize the orientation to make them understand the company culture better.
