Time to hire measures how quickly you can select and hire the best candidate for a role. As such, it is one of the most important metrics to measure the efficiency of your recruitment process. It helps you identify improvement areas in your recruitment process and it can answer important recruiting questions.
But why is it such a crucial recruitment metric? Successful TA professionals track time to hire because they know that if their recruitment takes too long they’ll lose top talent. The job market remains highly competitive. On average, top candidates stay on the market for only 10 days. What if your recruitment process lasts for 20, 30 or 40 days?
Additionally, the longer you take to fill a role, the higher the cost per hire will be. Nevertheless, tracking and reducing your time to hire is not just about speeding things up. It’s about developing the most efficient process to hire the best candidate faster, but without skipping any important part of the process.
Measuring your time to hire is actually simple. You just need to count the days passed between a candidate entering your pipeline and accepting your offer.
For example, you post a job (day 1) and a candidate applies on the 4th day and gets hired on the 19th day. Your time to hire is 19 - 4 = 15
If you want to get an overall overview of how long it takes you to hire people, then you need to calculate your average time-to-hire.
In this case, you need to sum the time to hire for each position and divide it by the total number of positions.
Let's say you opened 5 jobs positions since January, you need to sum the time to hire for each job and divide it by 5.
You can measure the overall time to hire of your company or measure it per department. You can also measure it for various time periods as well (monthly, quarterly, yearly) depending on what questions you want to answer.
To help you make the most of your recruitment process, here are 5 steps to effectively reduce the time to hire.
The right talent acquisition software can automatically track and measure your time to hire. This saves you time and allows you to get the insights that matter to answer critical recruiting questions. By finding out how long it takes to hire a candidate you can identify areas of improvement and take action.
Once you’ve answered these questions, you can identify your weak spots and take action to improve them.
One of the most time-consuming parts of recruitment is CV screening. Some vacancies can receive hundreds of CVs and analysing large-volume applications manually is hard and very often inefficient. However, using AI-powered talent acquisition software speeds up the process as the system automatically parses and screens the CVS.
Moreover, software that is equipped with matching and ranking algorithms saves you even more time as it weeds out unsuitable candidates right at the start of the recruitment process, helping you to focus on the candidates that do match your requirements.
Pre-hire assessments such as cognitive ability test, personality test and motivation test are a key part of an effective selection process. Not only do they allow you to predict the candidates’ ability to succeed and thrive in a given role to make more informed hiring decisions but they also allow you to move faster while ensuring the quality of candidates.
Using talent acquisition software with integrated, ready to use pre-employment assessments makes it easier and faster to evaluate the true potential of your candidates and look beyond their CV to find the perfect fit for a position.
Candidate communication is often one of the most frustrating aspects of the recruitment process, not only impacting the time it takes to hire someone but also affecting the overall candidate experience negatively.
Using an automated email system is a great way of ensuring effective communication with candidates with little effort. A talent acquisition software can offer you the possibility to create and share within your team a set of email templates that you can personalise and send in bulk.
Interview scheduling can be a hassle for both you and your candidates. Finding a suitable time for everyone involved often leads to days of emails exchange delaying the entire recruitment process.
However, you can simplify interview scheduling and take it from days to hours. If you use talent acquisition software with the right calendar integration and a self-scheduling tool, you can send automated interview invitations to multiple candidates at once and let them choose an available time slot from your agenda. It can be that easy.
Tracking your time to hire must be used to improve your talent acquisition process rather than focusing on how to just hire quickly. It's normal that some roles take longer than others to fill.
So, when evaluating the length of each recruitment process, what you need to identify is what aspects/tasks are not optimised and, therefore, are increasing the time it takes to find, evaluate and hire candidates.
However, speeding things up just for the sake of being fast at filling positions can hinder the selection process and lead to lower quality candidates getting offers.
That being said, keep in mind that tracking time to hire is a way of making sure you dedicate the right amount of time and resources to the various roles you're hiring for, while also making sure your overall recruitment process is working efficiently.
Skeeled offers you the perfect opportunity to bring innovation and digitalisation to your hiring. Check our website or our LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook pages for further information.
Thanks for reading and see you next time!
Your team here at skeeled