4 Time Management Tips For Recruiters - How to Make the Most of Your Day

There are always times when you leave the office feeling like you’ve put in an excellent day’s work. Heightened productivity often surprises people as it’s initially difficult to determine the cause.  But in reality, it relies on a lot of elements, some of which are internal, others are external, and a numbered few are tiny practices that fade into the daily routine.

Given the repetitive nature of a recruiter’s work, bursts of heightened productivity go a long way, and learning how to generate and maintain that type of drive can transform the way recruiting is approached.

1- The workspace

It only makes sense to attribute heightened productivity to the ability to focus on one’s work without allowing distractions to break your concentration. Visual distractions can be the difference between a good day’s work and a disappointed hiring manager. As such, ensuring that your workspace and immediate environment are free of any distractions that might pull you away from the task at hand. This doesn’t necessarily mean removing your pet’s framed picture from your desk or discarding all the little things that bring you joy and make the space your own, but removing the clutter from your physical space translates to a more organized and on-track mental state. This is an excellent first step towards increased productivity.

This goes for your desk’s organization just as much as it does your files, folders, and digital data. Make sure that all your resources are easy to find, that the tools and information accessed on a daily basis are well organized and always within reach. Create to-do lists for your day, your week, and your month. Set your own milestones and stick to them. Acts as small as muting your phone and notifications can change the attitude and drive behind a productive day.

2- Scheduling Activities

A recruiter’s workday is very rarely turbulent. It’s even less so when you take advantage of calendar apps to better organize the goals you absolutely need to achieve. Moreover, contact with candidates and hiring managers requires some form of scheduling as is. Accommodating events as they appear and going off book leave recruiters with far too much untracked data and cluttered activities, making it hard to keep up with developments.

For example, Google Calendar is one of those underrated tools that recruiters should leverage as much as possible. It makes personalizing events with important details extremely easy, which in turn maintains an organized and well-defined daily process. Details such as location, guests, comments, and the outcome are all part of the data that can later be utilized to track performance or as a reference to a specific project. In fact, while developing Manatal's applicant tracking system, we ensured that the most important tools in a recruiter’s arsenal are available directly on the platform. Tools such as Google Calendar, job boards, and a variety of others can all be integrated with our ATS, allowing for easy access and an organized interface. A very useful practice is to schedule every part of the day and allowing that schedule to dictate what you do and when you do it, this includes your lunch break, your research blocks, etc... What this achieves is a sense of direction, one that you’ve set for yourself to make the most of the day.

3- Correctly Prioritizing Tasks

It’s key for a recruiter’s success to be able to discern what takes priority throughout the day. Optimally, recruiters would be able to touch on all projects, contribute to the development of each in a different capacity. But urgent time-sensitive tasks, difficult and cumbersome operations, and projects that are more time-consuming should always come first.

The relationship between recruiters and deadlines is an infamous one, known for the stress it generates and the discomfort it causes both ends of the conversation. Getting the more difficult tasks out of the way early in the day (or the week) allows you to better absorb its state, its development rate, and the various recruitment metrics that you track. Take the first 40 minutes of your day to set plausible daily targets to achieve. The importance and required time of each task should have an impact on the priority. Begin with the important tasks first and get them out of the way for a relatively relaxed workday.

4- Invest in an ATS

Your desk is organized, your files are easily accessible, and you’ve removed distractions. While this is the foundation for a good day’s work, the reality of the matter is that recruitment as a function ends up overstretching your time and effort to perform a task that gets more complicated as time goes by.

As the company grows and its need for specific talent grows alongside it, recruiters find themselves braving an entirely new sphere that they are not familiar with. At times, recruitment calls for complex and intricate roles. Investing in an ATS can ease a recruiter’s burden. For example, Manatal’s recruiting software provides users with a variety of features addressing candidate sourcing, onboarding, time management, data management, team collaboration, and automated resume parsing. This in itself eradicates most of the tasks that take up the majority of a recruiter’s time and helps them remain on track as they recruit, making difficult and complicated hiring campaigns a simpler endeavor that ultimately pinpoints the talent that’s hardest to locate or define. Managing your time as a recruiter goes beyond knowing and scheduling exactly what you intend to achieve in every given day, it’s also about determining the tools that can simplify and automate the more strenuous tasks of a recruiting campaign, allowing recruiters to focus on the aspects where they add the most value. While the ATS takes care of the technical aspect, recruiters are able to focus on the human front instead, assessing the candidates’ personality, communication, and all the factors that software cannot discern.

Investing in a well-rounded ATS with specific features that cater to your needs can catapult a recruiter’s daily achievements into a more comfortable and fast-paced rhythm.

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