For recruiters and hiring managers, optimizing the recruitment funnel is always a priority.
Easier said than done though, right?
Putting together the perfect team involves finding the right candidates and getting them on board. An ineffective screening process might mean you end up with the wrong candidate – an inefficient funnel might mean losing the good ones to competitors.
Minimizing your company’s time to hire is an essential step for optimizing your recruitment funnel. A shorter hiring time helps companies find the right talent quicker, save on costs, and avoid losing good candidates to competitors.
Reducing the time-to-hire involves:
- Speeding up the efficiency of your funnel
- Improving the reliability of the hiring process
- Taking advantage of automated processes
What is ‘time to hire’?
The time to hire is the total number of days it takes for a company to employ a candidate. Typically, the starting point is marked from the day the application is received. The duration comes to an end when the candidate accepts the job. Thus, the time to hire spans the entirety of the recruitment pipeline.
Metrics are reliable tools for monitoring the success of your company’s recruitment funnel and identifying problem areas. Time to hire metrics in particular is used to track a company’s recruitment progress. If your time to hire is especially high, then this means your recruitment funnel needs improvement.
The time-to-hire metric can be calculated with the following formula:
Time to Hire = Accepted date – date having entered the pipeline
By calculating the time-to-hire metric, recruiters and hiring managers gain key insights into the efficiency of the recruitment process overall.
Time to hire vs. time to fill
People often confuse the terms “time-to-hire” and “time-to-fill” and use them interchangeably. Although both metrics are pertinent to the recruitment process, there is a stark difference between the two.
As mentioned earlier, time to hire refers to the total time a company takes to move a candidate from the start of the recruitment process till the end. It starts when the application is received and ends on the day a candidate accepts the offer.
This metric reveals a hiring team’s efficiency in identifying and recruiting the right candidate. If your company’s time to hire is longer than the benchmarks, it might be due to problems in the recruitment funnel.
On the other hand, the time to fill measures a company’s time to fill a particular position. Thus, it starts from the day the company thinks about hiring a new team member. It spans the job description approval time, job advertisement time, and continues until you have generated a pool of candidates. Since this metric measures the time it takes to fill a job role, it spans the time to hire as well.
The formula for time to fill: Time to Fill = Accepted date – date of the vacancy announcement
The time to fill gives a business valuable insight into the efficiency of each department’s involvement in the hiring process, including the advertising, marketing, and HR departments.
If your company’s time to hire is longer than the industry standard, then it’s time to work on optimizing your recruitment pipeline. Some methods to speed up your hiring process include using templates for job descriptions, identifying and reaching your brand’s target audience, and training your team to work more efficiently.
The definition of both these metrics may differ slightly from company to company. This is because some businesses mark the start of the time to fill on the day the job vacancy is advertised, while others begin from the day the company experiences a job vacancy.
One condition remains constant regardless of how you define the metrics, though: the time to fill is always greater than the time to hire.
The importance of reducing time to hire
Every hiring team’s priority should be to minimize the time to hire.
Why?
Well, when a company is looking to hire, it’s typically because they will require a team member in the near future. A prolonged time-to-hire duration means the productivity of operations may take a hit, as you struggle to fill a position.
An efficient, and reduced, time to hire indicates a successful recruitment process and signals a company’s proficiency in reliably finding the right candidate.
Another reason to reduce your hiring time is to avoid losing promising candidates to your competitors. Candidates often apply to multiple companies simultaneously, and a delayed hiring process may result in a potential employee taking another offer.
Thus, to avoid losing out on the best applicants, minimizing your hiring time is necessary.
5 ways to minimize time to hire
We’ve discussed the definition of time to hire and why it’s important for recruiting teams to minimize it.
But how exactly can you reduce it? Well, here are five ways to do so!
1. Structure your hiring process
The hiring process is a strategic endeavor and should be treated as such. When it comes to hiring, you need to have a general strategy that is followed each time.
Your recruitment strategy should account for factors like:
- The structure of your screening process. How much importance does your company give to resume screening? Are you using a skills test platform for pre-assessment? How many interviews will there be? What is the interview format?
- Which designated channels will your organization use to advertise job posts? Will you leverage social media channels, such as Facebook advertising, to get the word out?
- What resources do you have to minimize hiring times? Have you invested in a skills assessment platform or video interviewing software? Does your organization have an employee referral program or access to a talent pool?
- What is your organization’s hiring budget?
Devising a formal hiring strategy helps streamline the recruitment process and reduce hiring times significantly. When it comes to recruiting, don’t go in blind.
2. Automate your email correspondence
Automating your organization’s communication channels is a surefire way to optimize the recruitment funnel and decrease the time to hire.
Email is one of the most rewarding communication channels to automate, as most correspondence with candidates happens through it. One of the many reasons automating your email correspondence is beneficial is because it saves recruiters from unintentionally neglecting some candidates.
Moreover, linking email automation to candidate applications saves recruiters from having to manually sift through applications to contact prospects. Instead, you can automatically inform candidates about the hiring decisions as soon as they’re made.
3. Use tech skill assessments for screening
Unfortunately, statistics from a survey conducted by Checkster (a reference-checking company) revealed that as many as 78% of applicants lie on their resumes. So, while an automated computer algorithm can screen candidates who have the right qualifications and skills on paper, the applicants may not actually be suited to the role.
But how can you efficiently screen these candidates without going through the pains of manually testing the skills of each possible candidate?
Well, tech skills assessment platforms save the day here. Tech assessments are strategically tailored questionnaires or assignments that help recruiters screen candidates pre-interview. The appeal of these tests lies in how they test a candidate’s ability to solve real workplace problems, so the hiring team can realistically assess how fit an applicant is for the role.
With the help of coding test platforms like WeCP (We Create Problems), recruiters can design custom, cheat-proof skill tests for assessing candidates. This helps optimize your screening process and is a far more reliable assessment method than resume-checking.
4. Maintain a talent pool
A talent pool is a collection of quality prospective candidates that your organization has interacted with over the years. This may include talented applicants that interviewed for a job at your company but were not ideal for the particular role, or even interns that are set to graduate soon.
By maintaining a database of top talent, HRs can significantly reduce their time to hire come recruitment time. This is because you’ll have easy access to a pool of qualified candidates to choose from. An old applicant that wasn’t fit for a role they applied for may now be the perfect pick for a new position.
5. Leverage interview scheduling tools
Interview scheduling can be tricky, especially for recruiters with large teams and many candidates to interview.
How do you account for everyone’s busy schedules? Who will interview whom? The process can get messy quite quickly and, consequently, time-consuming. So, how do you manage?
Well, fortunately, there are smart applications available online to help recruiters automate interview scheduling. Hiring teams and candidates enter their available times for the interview, and the apps work their scheduling magic.
Alternatively, you can use an all-in-one recruitment tool like WeCP (We Create Problems). With WeCP, recruiters can not only automate interview scheduling but also conduct HD online remote interviews with pair programming capabilities to screen applicants with the help of custom skill tests. These features help organizations significantly reduce their hiring times by streamlining the recruitment process.
How to hire the right person every time
A company’s time to hire is a valuable metric for measuring the health of inter-company communication and recruitment operations.
Recruiters often look towards minimizing the average time to hire a new employee. However, you’re not out to find just any employee; you’re looking for the right candidate. So how do you optimize the recruitment process to the point where you always hire the right person?
In the previous section, we covered how to minimize your hiring time by automating the communication process and taking advantage of tech skill assessments. Utilizing skill tests for screening not only minimizes the time to hire but also helps you find the best candidates.
Finding the ideal candidate for your company in minimal time isn’t easy, but it’s not impossible either. By optimizing the recruitment process as a whole, you can significantly reduce the time-to-hire. Achieving an efficient, reliable funnel increases the collective chance of success for each recruiting initiative.
WeCP (We Create Problems) is an industry-leading technical skill testing and video interviews platform that helps recruiters optimize their hiring process and minimize the time to hire.
Learn more about how WeCP helps fortune 100 companies reduce hiring costs and find the best tech talent by scheduling a demo today.
