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Hiring managers around the world are on a constant mission, to build an effective recruitment process. So, they need to know how to reduce the time to hire. This deceptively simple metric measures the time it takes a candidate to move through the recruitment process from application to hire.
A shorter time-to-hire leads to a shorter overall recruitment process, reducing the time-to-fill. That means teams are able to find quality candidates faster and make an offer before their competitors. After all, the job search is a stressful time for a candidate. They’re not going to wait on your team to catch up when the other guys have already put a solid offer in front of them.
A shorter time-to-hire will also improve the candidate experience. This is equally as important as making an offer before the competition. Modern candidates are looking for communicative employers. As the first point of contact between the candidate and an employer, recruiters set the precedent for what the candidate will expect from the workplace. Having to wait a long period of time for a response may signal that’s what they can expect on the job. Consequently, a poor candidate experience from a long time to hire increases the chances that your ideal candidate will decline your offer at the end of the process.
As such, time-to-hire dictates much of the strategy on how to hire employees.
The time-to-hire varies according to industry and location. However, according to Yello, the average time-to-hire across all industries is approximately 3-4 weeks. LinkedIn found this number was even higher for open marketing and management positions, with a median of 40 to 41 days, while customer service and administrative fields had a median of 33-34.
Either way, that’s roughly one month for an applicant to move through the recruiting process. For those looking for work, that’s indeed a very long time to wait. That’s why a slow time-to-hire wreaks havoc on the candidate pipeline.
The longer your time-to-hire, the more likely you’ll lose talent to competitors that moved faster and made an offer first on the top talent. In fact, according to Forbes, the best candidates are off the market within 10 days of looking for a position. That’s right, 10 days. The blink of an eye in comparison to 4 weeks. That means the companies with the fastest time-to-hire are reaching the best talent and making an offer first.
Recruiters wanting to bring down their average time-to-fill, from recognizing the need for a new hire to making that hire, will have to bring down their time-to-hire. But why is the average time-to-hire so long in the first place? Well, Glassdoor provides us with some insight. They found the average interview process took 23.7 days – almost the length of the entire average time-to-hire.
So, how do you find the time-to-hire for your own recruitment process? What do you need to know? What additional information can you extrapolate from this metric? Well, let’s take a look.
We’ll start with a simple time-to-hire formula. You just need to know the date a candidate applied for the position and the date they accepted the offer.
So, finding your average time-to-hire is simply:
Average time-to-hire = Applicants combined time spent in the recruitment process / Number of accepted applicants.
For example, if you had three candidates that each spent 21, 33, and 44 days from application to hire, your formula would look like this:
Average time-to-hire = (21+33+44)/3
That would make your average time-to-hire 32.7.
You can use this number to factor into other important metrics. For example, a long time-to-hire will likely indicate a larger cost-per-hire, the average cost it takes to hire a single candidate.
Time-to-hire is also a major factor in understanding candidate experience. A long time-to-hire can and will lead to frustration and dissatisfaction among your candidates, increasing the chances that they’ll decline an offer. In fact, according to CareerPlug, 58% of job seekers have reported declining an offer due to a poor candidate experience.
It’s important to note that time-to-fill is similar to but distinct from time-to-hire. Whereas time-to-hire measures the time candidates spend in the recruitment process, time-to-fill metrics are concerned with the length of the entire recruitment effort.
Finding your time-to-fill is just as simple as time-to-hire. You can simply count the days from recruitment begins to when you make a hire for the position.
However, if you want to find your organization’s average time-to-fill, you can use the total days to fill multiple positions and divide that by the number of positions.
(Position 1 + Position 2 + Position 3) / Number of positions = Average time-to-fill
According to Dice Insights, you can use this information to find exactly how much revenue you lose a day while waiting to fill a position. Simply take annual revenue and divide that by your number of employees. Then divide that by the number of working days in a year. That’ll give your revenue per employee per day.
Finally, multiply that number by your average time-to-fill. The resulting number is your average revenue lost from a vacant position.
Here’s the average revenue lost from a vacant position formula: [(Annual Revenue / Employees) / 220] x Time-to-fill = Lost revenue
According to Zippia, vacancies cost employers approximately $98 a day over the average time-to-fill of 42 days. That’s an average of $4,129 per position.
With these costs in mind, between losing revenue and top talent, no doubt you want to know how to shorten your hiring process. And that can be hard. Recruitment is a time-intensive process with hundreds of applicants to sift through. Even with an ATS to screen resumes for your team, the interview process takes up the bulk of a recruiter’s time. That’s why it’s the best place to start saving time.
Virtual interviews, an asynchronous interview solution, are the best tool available to hiring teams today to solve the time sink that is interviewing.
For one, they eliminate scheduling from the process entirely. Right off the bat, that means the 30 minutes to 2 hours recruiters spend scheduling interviews per candidate is off the table. There’s no need for either party to work around each other's time to find the perfect scheduling window. In fact, Qualifi’s research has found that this flexibility not only allows candidates to respond outside the typical 9 to 5, but it also brings in 75.5% more responses than traditional phone interviews.
What’s more, recruiters only have to “conduct” the interview once and every candidate replies to that singular interview. This is because recruiters only have to record their side of the interview, and that’s delivered to selected candidates. All the recruiter needs to do from there is to wait for interviews to come in and conduct the screenings.
Here’s how virtual interviews work:
It’s really that simple. This ultimately saves recruiters time to focus on the most important tasks in recruitment and get the perfect hire faster.
