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Published by Michael Boudreaux on December 23, 2021

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Ah, the holidays. It’s a wonderful time of year to spend surrounded by the warmth and comfort of friends, family, and loved ones. Unfortunately, the demands of work have a tendency to interfere with the lax holiday spirit — especially when it comes to recruitment and hiring.

As the year winds down, many people begin to look for new work and use this added downtime to increase their application outreach. Cue flooded inboxes, stacked calendars, and stressed managers. As it turns out, all is not merry and bright for hiring managers and recruiters during the holiday season.

However, while it’s easy to blame the holiday rush on the time of the year, it also opens a window into self-reflection and improving hiring practices. So ask yourself, is my applicant pool too broad — and if so, what can I do to narrow my scope and relieve some undeserved stress?

Qualifying Job Applicants On The Way In

While looking for the perfect candidate to fill a tech role can feel a lot like looking for a needle in a haystack, the solution is rarely an issue of applicant pool size. While it’s tempting to solve hiring issues by broadening your search, this often can result in adding more hay to the pile — but not necessarily any needles.

Data shows that bigger applicant pools often create more problems than they solve; the average recruiter is already spending a third of their week on sourcing new candidates, leaving little time for interviewing and vetting. Naturally, growing a pool only takes away from a recruiter’s most valuable resource: their time.

As we’ve said before, good talent is hard to find in a crowd of 30 but even harder in a crowd of 300.

Narrowing the Applicant Pool Without Excluding Talent

The most common way to narrow an initial pool of applicants is to introduce clear, strict job requirements combined with detailed opportunity info as early as possible. The more info you provide to potential hires, especially before they even apply, the more info they can use to self-qualify and determine if they are a good match. Providing as much information as possible in the job posting is one of the most reliable ways to save time, energy, and resources during the hiring process.

For example, instead of saying:

“Looking for hard-working, punctual, and motivated back-end programmers to join our team.”

Consider a more detailed alternative:

“Looking for an experienced Java programmer with 3+ years of experience working with modern UI frameworks such as Angular.js and React.”

Focusing on providing quality prospecting messaging, not the quantity of applications, is the hiring hack that will grant smaller applicant pools with the more appropriate talent. Once applicants are qualified on the way in, it allows hiring managers and recruiters to spend more time properly vetting candidates and matching talents.

Ways to further optimize your hiring process include adopting powerful technology into your recruitment toolkit, such as Wavely. Our hiring platform is an intuitive, streamlined way of interfacing with applicants in a way that is meaningful, purposeful, and conducive to the core elements of the hiring process. With a narrower applicant pool defined by clearly defined job requirements, you’ll be exposed to motivated tech talent looking to become a part of your team.