How to Reduce Time-to-Hire to Ensure Efficient Hiring
How to reduce time to fill and time to hire?
Reducing time to hire and time to fill involves streamlining recruitment with tech tools. Maintain an active candidate pipeline, use ATS, conduct skills testing and video interviews early, and provide a great candidate experience. Automate tasks, leverage AI for resume screening and implement structured hiring processes. By following these steps, you can significantly reduce time-to-hire in public sector recruitment.
Time-to-hire is the duration between when a candidate applies for a job and when they receive an official job offer. This recruiting metric is often measured in days. The average time-to-hire is 24 days, but the rate varies across industries.
Did you know you can slash your hiring cycle by 60%?
This statistic is enormous, especially if your business struggles to fill vacant positions quickly. Hiring in any labor market is challenging. And with the talent shortage worsening each year, finding top-notch candidates is even more complicated.
Unfortunately, taking too much time to hire can take a toll on your company. It can bring about lower operational efficiency, not to mention the increasing cost per hire. Plus, you might lose promising applicants to your competitors. That’s why it’s important to know how to reduce time-to-hire.
Yes, you can speed up your hiring process without compromising candidate quality. But first, it’s crucial to understand the time-to-hire definition.
Why is the Time-to-Hire Metric Important to Track?
It’s important to track this metric for several reasons. Delays throughout the recruitment process can frustrate top-tier candidates. They might withdraw their interest and apply to competitors with a quicker time-to-hire. Also, remember that job seekers often have multiple active applications. So, you want to move quickly before another company offers them a job.
Plus, excessively lengthy hiring processes can burden your HR team. Hiring managers will need more work hours to evaluate applicants and conduct interviews. As a result, you lose productivity.
The financial impact of recruiting can be alarming, too, with the costs of a prolonged hiring process rapidly growing. From advertising job openings to conducting interviews and background checks, these require time and resources.
Then, there’s the possibility that the longer a position remains vacant, the more revenue you may lose. For instance, unfilled sales roles can result in missed deals and opportunities for revenue generation.
It’s crucial to consider the candidate experience, as well. You can better engage with your candidates when you make hiring decisions quickly. And happy candidates positively impact your organization, even if you don’t hire them. They can recommend your company to their peers or colleagues and increase your chances of landing top talent.
How to Calculate Time-to-Hire
To find out your company’s time-to-hire, compute the days from when the candidate submitted their resume to when they accepted the job offer. You may use the following formula:
The day the candidate accepts the job offer – The day the candidate applies for the job = Time-to-hire
For instance, Candidate A applied on July 1 and accepted the job on July 20. The time-to-hire for this employee is 19 days.
To compute your average time-to-hire across all new employees, add the days you took to hire each applicant and divide this total by how many new hires you have.
Let’s say you recently hired two people. Candidate B sent an application on July 10 and took the offer by July 23, so their time-to-hire is 13 days. Combining this with Candidate A’s time-to-hire of 19 days, you get 32. After dividing this by 2, your average time-to-hire is 16 days.
5 Ways to Reduce Time-to-Hire
Follow the tips below on hiring faster to improve your recruitment and hiring efficiency and candidate experience.
1. Create a structured hiring process
An entire cycle in recruitment usually has the following steps: preparing, sourcing, screening, selecting, hiring, and onboarding. By thoroughly planning each step, you can avoid bottlenecks and delays while ensuring you focus your time and effort on working with high-potential candidates.
For example, you can do a brief phone interview after sorting through resumes to filter out candidates who don’t fit the bill. Pre-employment assessment tests are also an efficient way to verify skills and identify candidates who fit your company well. These standardized tests also eliminate unconscious bias in hiring for an objective assessment of candidates.
2. Leverage sourcing channels
LinkedIn, Indeed, and JobStreet are the most popular candidate-sourcing channels. However, you can also use social media to increase your reach. Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram give you a wider audience than online job boards.
Some job boards cater to specific professions, such as accountants, paralegals, and more. These online platforms come in handy when you’re hiring specific skilled workers.
3. Develop a talent pipeline
A talent pipeline is a pool of candidates ready to fill a position, and a well-built talent pipeline is a proactive recruitment strategy that drastically reduces time-to-hire. The candidates can either be employees gearing up for advancement or potential hires.
When you have a group of pre-screened individuals, you can skip the advertising and screening steps and go straight to candidate selection. It’s like having a line of backup team members on hold. You can tell them about the vacant position to know if they’re interested.
You can also locate prospects through conferences and work gatherings. These venues help expand your connections, including potential candidates. They also provide opportunities for interacting with job candidates so you can have first-hand information on who fits well in your organization. From there, it’s a matter of maintaining contact and engagement to develop your talent pipeline.
4. Broaden your touchpoints with applicants
The hiring process can stir up various emotions for applicants. They might go through frustration, anxiety, or even boredom, especially when left hanging for a long time. That’s why it’s crucial to consider the candidate experience. After interviews and assessment tests, stay in touch with them. Keeping applicants in the loop about the following steps will retain their interest in joining your company.
Open communication also gives candidates a good impression of your company. When you engage with them often, they trust you and want to be part of your organization even more.
5. Facilitate collaboration between hiring managers
Typically, multiple staff and team leads participate in the recruitment process. A clerk might do the initial phone screening, followed by the HR manager and interviewers. All of them have their own opinions and insights about the candidates. However, deliberate collaboration and sharing of ideas can help speed up the entire process.
Communicating candidate information online, including notes from calls and meetings, gives everyone in-depth knowledge of each applicant. From hiring to onboarding, the process becomes smoother and more efficient when everyone’s on the same page.
Hire in No Time
The hiring process can be time-consuming, but it doesn’t have to be. A structured method, teamwork, and the right tools can optimize recruitment practices to help your company build the human resources it needs for maximum productivity.
To further streamline your recruitment, turn to EmployTest. We offer multiple pre-employment assessment tests that speed up your hiring process by allowing you to objectively evaluate applicants, helping you hire faster.
Experience the future of recruitment – book a consultation with our expert team!