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Last updated: January 13, 2026
Originally published: September 5,2024
Hiring shouldn’t feel like a bottleneck—but for many small businesses, it does.
While Employ’s 2025 Benchmarks Report noted that small to medium businesses have the highest average application per job, they also tend to have the lowest screen-to-interview rates.
As a result?
Roles stay open longer than expected. Strong candidates drop out mid-process. And recruiters are left juggling spreadsheets, inboxes, and follow-ups just to keep things moving.
If you’ve recently found yourself Googling “how to improve my hiring process,” you’re not alone.
In this guide, we’ll walk you through how to improve the hiring process with practical steps (specific to small businesses) you can take today to reduce time to hire, improve candidate experience, and build a hiring workflow that actually supports growth.
Why Improving the Hiring Process Matters More Than Ever
Today’s candidates expect speed, transparency, and clarity. And when the hiring process feels slow or disorganized, they don’t wait around—they move on.
At the same time, small teams don’t have the luxury of inefficiency. When teams are lean and mean, delays don’t just slow things down—they compound fast, often felt 10x more than they are by your enterprise counterparts with more capacity to flex.
However, when you are able to make those tangible improvements, the results speak for themselves:
- Keep qualified candidates engaged
- Improve collaboration across teams
- Make better hiring decisions
- Create a stronger candidate experience
Common Mistakes That Prevent Teams from Improving the Hiring Process
So, where are teams going wrong? Often, this can be boiled down to a few key pitfalls that impact hiring metrics and overall organizational success:
- Too many steps in the hiring process (think approvals, interviews, reviews)
- Over-interviewing candidates
- Relying on manual tools that don’t scale
- Delaying feedback and decisions
How to Improve the Hiring Process: 5 Strategies for Small Businesses
While we can’t diagnose every team’s specific cause for hiring delays Grey’s Anatomy-style, we can share a set of proven strategies that help teams rethink, refine, and improve how they hire.
Strategy #1: Set Clear Hiring Goals to Measure and Improve the Hiring Process
With the unsteadiness of the recruitment market, many small businesses have entered a sort of never-ending cycle of updates, overhauls, and improvements. Talk about exhausting.
We want to help you get off that hamster wheel. And to do so, we suggest focusing on a few key metrics that you’ll measure against to determine success. After all, you can’t boil the ocean. Start by defining what metrics you’ll measure and how you’ll assess your data will help you determine what’s working, what’s not, and where you can look to improve in the long- and short-term.
- Time to fill: How quickly does it take to hire and onboard a recruit? Do you have any areas that bottleneck your recruitment processes?
- Source of hire: Take a look at where you find candidates and determine the success of those channels and platforms. Is there one that outperforms the rest? Should you devote more resources to that channel or platform? On top of this, analyze your applicant completion and quality of hire rates.
- Cost of recruitment: In addition to cost per hire, examine the cost of each sourcing channel against its effectiveness.
- Employee and candidate satisfaction: You can determine the overall satisfaction trends across your current and new hires using key metrics, such as employee survey results and offer acceptance rates.
Time to hire may be a priority, but other recruitment metrics (like those listed above) sometimes highlight a larger challenge you may need to address head-on. Consider what simple changes you could make to your hiring process that will make an impact right away.
Strategy #2: Standardize Your Hiring Workflow
If every role follows a different hiring path, consistency becomes impossible.
Standardization is one of the fastest ways to improve the hiring process for small businesses. It doesn’t mean every role and every interview is identical—it means your hiring process follows a clear structure, including who’s involved, who approves, etc.
To standardize your hiring process:
- Use consistent job descriptions and templates
- Define interview stages ahead of time
- Establish clear evaluation criteria
- Set timelines for feedback and decisions
A standardized hiring workflow makes it easier to spot bottlenecks, train new team members, and scale hiring as your business grows.
Strategy #3: Focus on Soft Skills
For growing companies, hiring new talent is always high on the wish list. But finding qualified talent is often easier said than done.
Employ’s 2025 Recruiter Nation Report found that, “Forty-three percent of recruiters said they interviewed more than half their applicants. That suggests qualified matches aren’t surfacing early, forcing teams to advance more candidates just to keep searches moving. Volume may be improving, but it’s not yet translating into stronger pipelines.”
One way to solve this issue? Adjusting your lens to refocus on soft skills.
Because while a candidate’s qualifications or experience might not be an exact match for the job description, their knowledge, skills, and abilities might make them the perfect fit.
Oftentimes, soft skills aren’t listed on a resume, so it’s important that your job descriptions list any relevant soft skills and that your recruiters are prepped to identify and assess these kinds of skills during an interview.
For example, consider:
- Asking your candidates directly: Be specific. During interviews, ask them what soft skills they possess and identify examples of how they have used those skills previously.
- Testing them online: Another mechanism for identifying candidate’s soft skills is requesting them to take an online assessment. The JazzHR Marketplace offers a variety of assessment providers that specialize in candidate assessments.
- Seeking a second opinion: Get in touch with a candidate’s references and ask them to describe their soft skills. This can validate or flag anything your candidate says within the interview stage.
Strategy #4: Invest in Passive Candidates
Fact: If you’re only focused on active job seekers, you’re overlooking some of your strongest future hires.
According to the 2025 Job Seeker Nation report, “over three-fourths of respondents reported being “somewhat” or “very” satisfied with their jobs (in 2024 this was 79%; in 2025 it’s 83%). However, the percentage of respondents at least somewhat open to other job opportunities is virtually unchanged: 86% were open in 2024 compared to 85% in 2025. Almost half (46%) identified themselves as “very open” to new opportunities in 2024, and this figure didn’t budge in 2025.”
For small businesses, passive candidates aren’t a nice-to-have—they’re a competitive advantage.
Instead of reacting to openings as they appear, passive recruiting allows teams to get ahead of demand. By identifying and engaging qualified talent early, recruiters shift from waiting on applications to building relationships with people they actually want to hire.
The focus isn’t on pitching an open role. It’s on starting conversations, personalizing outreach, and creating familiarity over time. When candidates already understand the company and its culture, future hiring becomes faster and more intentional.
The payoff shows up when roles open up. With a warm talent pool to draw from, teams can skip the scramble, reduce time to hire, and make higher-quality hiring decisions.
#5. Leverage Affordable Hiring Software for Small Businesses
As Charlie Chaplin showed us all those years ago: automation has the power to transform how work gets done.
In recruiting, smart automation cuts busy work, controls costs, and keeps hiring moving. More importantly, it gives hiring managers time to focus on what matters most—building real candidate relationships and making high-quality decisions.
Instead of spending hours on manual tasks, teams can use automation to handle the repetitive work behind the scenes, while keeping candidate interactions personal and intentional. The result is a hiring process that feels more efficient for recruiters and more human for candidates.
The key is finding a solution that’s both effective and affordable.
Small businesses don’t need the complexity of enterprise-scale systems. But they also don’t want a scaled-down version of a higher-priced tool that fails to meet their actual needs.
That’s why it’s important to choose recruiting tools that align with the volume, pace, and complexity of your hiring. The strongest hiring strategies strike the right balance between automation and human judgment—using technology to handle administrative work while keeping candidate engagement personal, intentional, and human.
Hit the Ground Running: How to Improve the Hiring Process with JazzHR
Improving your hiring process can feel daunting. But with the right strategies, tactics, and tools, small businesses can drive better hiring outcomes—without adding unnecessary complexity.
The payoff? Faster hiring, stronger candidates, and a more consistent recruiting experience—even with limited resources.
Ready to make hiring easier? JazzHR is built to help small teams hire smarter, faster, and with less friction.
