Candidate Acceleration

What Is Candidate Acceleration?

Candidate Acceleration is the process of identifying candidates from a pool of applicants who are an extremely good fit for a particular role, helping you attract, engage, and retain top talent. Below, we explore what candidate acceleration is and why it’s important for your business.

What is candidate acceleration?

Candidate acceleration is about improving communication, integration, and collaboration to accelerate your talent acquisition process. It’s not just about hiring faster; it’s also about hiring better.

Candidate acceleration can be achieved by improving candidate engagement through:

Improved candidate experience (e.g., pre-screening tools) - this makes it easier for candidates to apply and helps you identify the right people faster
Better use of technology (e.g., automated scoring/screening) - this allows you to focus on more complex assessments that require human judgment
Reducing time spent on administrative tasks - speeding up the entire hiring and onboarding process

Candidate Acceleration requires setting clear benchmarks of qualification (e.g. a competency model) and having a process in place to flag qualified candidates to the hiring team. Candidate Acceleration typically entails moving a candidate past certain stages to the final decision-making process or last interview round.

Why is Candidate Acceleration Important?

At many companies, the hiring process takes too long. There can be a number of reasons for this:

Getting too many unqualified applicants
Internal disorganization (disconnected systems, inconsistent messaging, etc.)
An unappealing employer brand
Poor engagement with active and passive candidates
Limited personalization in candidate outreach
Hiring managers devote too little time to the hiring process
A lack of standardization in your hiring process
Difficulty retaining or expanding your talent acquisition team

Having an established-enough recruitment model and hiring program to contribute to business growth requires careful thought and consideration.

And one of the drawbacks of Candidate Acceleration is the potential to misidentify talent as a result of the competency model for the specific role. An example of this would be quickly hiring a great digital marketer, only to realize the role requires expertise in developing long-form blog content.

To effectively execute Candidate Acceleration steps, your team needs to spend time properly calibrating the needs for a role.

What does this role need to do?
What are its responsibilities?
What skills and knowledge does someone need in order to be successful in this role?
How can we measure whether someone has those qualities or not?

Understanding core competencies for each role and finding ways to pinpoint the candidates that match those competencies empowers companies to hire the best talent faster. That’s why it’s best practice to avoid Candidate Acceleration until your hiring process, and competency model(s) have been sufficiently iterated upon and are battle-tested.

Once this happens, pushing amazing candidates to the front of the line improves the candidate experience and accelerates a company’s time to hire.

How Candidate Acceleration Can Impact Your Business

The candidate acceleration process is not just about improving your hiring process. It is also about improving communication, integration, and collaboration within your organization. This will help you to find the right people for your business who can make a positive impact on its growth and success.