How to Improve Time to Hire in 2021

When one thinks of the idea of hiring someone, the first image that comes to mind is piles and piles of CVs and resumes waiting for review. Of course, time and technological development has changed the entire process from archaic, time-consuming, and inefficient to quick, thorough, and exact, making the recruitment process more like a field of science, with careful calculations and data-driven solutions.

As the recruitment process becomes more and more advance, it just goes to show how important it is to keep up. Having well-suited and efficient employees is a huge part of a business’s success and therefore it is vital to employ the best recruitment metrics possible. A LinkedIn study discovered using recruitment metrics makes the hiring process twice as faster as a regular one with the most important of these metrics is the time to hire since 57% of job seekers lose interest if the hiring process is too slow.

Time to hire is one of the key metrics involved in the recruitment process that essentially measures how long it takes for a firm to hire a candidate for the open job role. The process starts when the application is received and ends only when the candidate is hired and the position is taken.

However, when measuring time to hire one must always be careful not to confuse it with the time to fill metric. While the two sound astoundingly familiar, time to fill tells the firm how fast their hiring process is while time to hire tells a firm how quickly they can identify the best candidate, making it an indicator of how effective a firm’s hiring team is.

Converting something as subjective as the hiring process and the time it takes to empirical data may sound tough or even daunting, but once you have solid data supporting you can figure out the loopholes in your entire hiring process. And if that alone wasn’t a good enough reason, having an accurate time to hire metric also makes sure that the best-suited candidate does not lose interest in the entire process. If the process is too long and tedious, it might lead to an unsatisfactory experience from the candidate’s side, which may even lead to a loss in the company’s reputation. Moreover, an ineffective hiring process ends up putting more work-wise and financial strain on the company.

Once a firm has calculated its time to hire, it becomes easier to estimate and figure out how long each department needs to find a person to fill a role or even act as a replacement. Where an ineffective hiring process means the job’s work falls on the current employee rather than who it’s supposed to, greatly impacting a company’s productivity.

Time to hire may sound like an overcomplicated metric but it can simply be calculated through this simple formula:

This can be further simplified through the following example. Mark, who is the candidate applying for the job, sends in his application on the 1st of May, which is the day the candidate applies for the offer. He goes through the entire process and eventually gets accepted onto the role a month later, on 30th May, making that the day the candidate accepts the offer. Hence in order to calculate the time to hire, days from 1st of May to the 30th will be counted as the time to hire, making the time to hire 30 days.

Now that we’ve covered the basic formula for the metric, we can move on to the slightly more complicated parts of the metric. However, keep in mind that these are just the more fine details and technicalities that one should keep in mind when calculating time to hire and are not overly complicated formulas or methods.

The first and foremost factor behind successfully using the time to hire metric to improve hiring is to make sure you have the right data. This can be done by calculating first through the formula provided above, then move onto how long the process itself is. That is, for instance, how much time it takes the candidate to move on from the initial interview to the final stage. The next step would be to measure the final number of days it takes till the candidate accepts the offer. Once this data is collected, the firm should measure the number of most effective employees to the least competitive and then compare their time to hire to competitors.

Focusing on the details mentioned in the process will help to figure out the problem areas and then later streamline the hiring process accordingly.

When collecting data to measure your firm’s quality of hire, it is important to keep each department’s needs in mind. That is, remembering that each department and each role has different requirements meaning some jobs are easier to fill than others. Hence when calculating the time to hire these differences must be considered and not bunched up together.

A good way to deal with this, therefore, is to separate each department and their roles from time to hire as a separate process to avoid inaccuracies.

One of the most prominent uses of the hiring process is to figure out and get rid of inaccuracies in the hiring process. One of the best ways to go around that is to make sure your hiring process is structured and organized. Even if you feel that it is, map it out to have more accurate responses. That is starting from the job opening and jot down all the parts of your processes like the CV screening, the number of interviews you have, etc. All of this can help figure out the lag in your hiring process and eliminate it.

This may sound like a rather arbitrary step to have in your process, but measuring the quality of your candidates is also an essential part of having an efficient quality of hire metric. The best way to do this is to measure the proportion of high-quality candidates to low. Many times, firms tend to keep low-quality candidates in the pipeline for the sake of it, making the entire process longer and more complicated than it needs to be. By measuring the quality of candidates, the firm can only keep around the best ones before moving onto the next step, saving time and effort for themselves as well as the candidates.

The best and perhaps the easiest way to improve time to hire is to make sure the hiring managers only spend time and effort on the best candidates. Candidates who are not well suited for the job only tend to waste time and increase the average time to hire. We here at Recruitment bot make sure that you only get the best matches by prescreening candidates, shortlisting them, meaning only the top candidates make it to you. This means a more rigorous pre-employment testing process, more facetime with top candidates, allowing you a headstart in your hiring process before it has even begun.

Another good way to improve the time to hire is to be fully aware of how your hiring process works. If the hiring process is too long or too complicating, or even not organized enough, it might lead to an inefficiently high time to hire. The best way to go about this would be to have a short and clean screening system and a thorough and detailed interviewing system.

For every step in the hiring process, know the amount of time you want to spend on it. Meaning, if your hiring process is split into three parts, the screening, the initial interview and the final interview know how many days you want your hiring manager to spend on each and then work accordingly so that you have an accurate time to hire, and know where your trouble areas are.

Screening tests, pre-employment assessments, employment tests, all exist for a reason. They exist so that you can have quality employees in good time, so that you can maximize your production. And in order to do that, it is important to trust the process. RecruitmentBot’s screening process has been carefully curated to only provide you the best, so it is essential that you let the system take the reign and do what it does best so you can get the best employees in record time.

The time to hire metric calculates all variables till the best candidate makes their way to the job. And to find the best candidate, you need to conduct a thorough investigation into each candidate. But then the question arises, if you spend so much time looking into so much detail of every candidate, how will your time of hire be reduced to an efficient number? Well, thats where RecruitmentBot steps in, where the screening process not only shortlists, but also provides candidate reports, so you can have maximum information in the shortest time possible.

Because time to hire is a metric, with figures and statistics aimed at increasing the overall quality of hire, many assume it has a one size fits all nature. That is far from true. Every industry has its own time to hire, just as it has its own process, and knowing what works or doesnt work for yours can make a world of difference. Fortunately, whether you know or not, RecruitmentBot sure does! You simply enter your requirements and our screening system provides the right candidate at a time and way that works for your industry.

As mentioned before, many hiring managers tend to get confused between time to hire and time to fill, a mistake that costs their employer a steady stream of good employees and therefore, efficiency. Similarly, most hiring based research also tends to focus primarily on time to fill rather than time to hire. However, through research conducted by the Society of Human Resource Management (SHRM), it was estimated the average time to hire is roughly 36 days, which is around a month, and that there is an estimated gap of 24 days between the screening process and the job acceptance. We cannot be the only ones to see the harmful potential in this average. A whole month’s worth of gap means the employer and the firm suffers for a solid month at least till an employee is hired, who may not even be the right fit. Recruitment Bot significantly lowers this time to hire by making the initial screening process so easy and efficient, that not only do the candidates make it to the interview phase of the hiring process at the speed of light, but our AI ensures its only the right candidate that makes it this far.

Many argue that figuring out an average time of hire is tricky because each industry and each department within the industry has different requirements and work at different paces. For example, in a cement factory, hiring mainly line workers will have a different average time of hire in comparison to an architectural firm looking to hire an architect. Of course, this a valid argument, but then again, what else is the Recruitment Bot for? Our AI can adjust to the needs and the pace of whatever department and still provide only quality employees.

Hiring has become a complex process, even though it doesn’t need to be. And even though our screening system reduces the difficulty by a mass proportion, it is still important to know certain metrics and certain facts about the hiring process to truly understand how complex it can be if you don’t opt for efficient solutions. And to understand this, one must know not only about the time to hire metric but also about the difference between time to hire versus time to fill, a concept most hiring managers fail to understand and therefore lose out on making the right hiring decisions.

Simply speaking, time to hire is an efficiency metric, meaning that it helps management/ employers understand how efficient the hiring process and the hiring managers are. It measures quality within its calculation, and gives it a top priority, while time to fill is simply calculating how fast the next employee is hired. To elaborate on this, time to hire measures how long it takes for a quality candidate to get employed, or to put it differently, how long it takes the hiring team to find the right candidate to fill the job. Quality of hire takes into account several factors, including every factor up till the employee is hired, but stops when they take up the position so that external factors don’t undermine the result, such as personal commitment, trial period etc.

Time to hire is an essential metric that helps streamline the entire hiring process, saving time and money for everyone involved by streaming and pipelining the hiring process making the whole thing more efficient to ensure the best possible candidate is hired. Reducing the time to hire may sound like a complicated process because of all the metrics involved, but we are here to make it as easy as possible for you, by saving time and effort at every step possible to make sure that you have the best time to hire and the best employees.