You have positions to fill. Good candidates are hard to come by. You have limited money. And less time. Sound familiar? That’s the life of a modern talent acquisition manager in the age of pandemics and labor shortages.
This guide will provide you with detailed information to help you understand and measure time-to-hire in order to attract better candidates more quickly. We hope you enjoy reading it and, more importantly, find it helpful.
It is the “north star” metric for most companies when it comes to measuring the efficiency of their talent acquisition strategies.
Time-to-hire measures the days between when a candidate enters a company’s recruitment pipeline to when they accept a job offer. Once candidates finish applying for jobs, the clock starts ticking.
Time to hire gives your recruiting team insight into whether they are spending too much or too little time recruiting, which affects your cost per hire.
It is distinct from time-to-fill, which counts the days from when a job opening is first approved or advertised until the position is filled.
Time-to-hire can vary depending on several factors like the industry, the company’s size or the prevailing economic conditions.
During labor shortages, time-to-hire tends to rise as candidates with in-demand skills fill multiple job offers. During these times, employer branding and company culture take a more important role, as both are essential to attract great new talent, while reducing time to hire.
Time-to-hire also tends to be higher at larger organizations. In the US, companies with over 5,000 employees took over twice as long to hire new employees than the national average – 58 days compared with 25 – according to a study by the University of Chicago published in the Wall Street Journal.
Companies that gain a reputation for taking a long time to fill positions can lose potential future applicants.
If positions remain unfilled - even after processes have been optimized - it could be an indication that your employer brand needs strengthening. But if you don’t track time-to-hire, you won’t know.
Many valuable resources in terms of time, energy and money are wasted by taking a long time to hire new employees.
When HR leaders invest in technology to help track and reduce time-to-hire, companies see a greater return on investment.
You should collect feedback after each step of the interview process, and after the job has been filled so that you can improve future candidate experiences.
When you’ve optimized your company’s time-to-hire, you’ll have ended a damaging cycle and prevented it from creeping back in again.
Using recruitment marketing and talent attraction technology will help you faster engage with higher-quality candidates. It allows you to advertise vacancies on targeted channels to reach a larger talent pool while also strengthening your employer brand.
You no longer have to depend on that contact over at LinkedIn, Monster or Indeed. You can get the tech to do the work for you.
But perhaps most importantly, technology-supported recruitment marketing and talent attraction help you save money and optimize hiring costs.
Managers are constantly trying to drive budgets down, so they may not see the benefits of spending on the implementation of an Applicant Tracking Technology or setting a recruitment marketing budget.
Once HR leadership sees the benefits of this initial investment, they will be open to increasing the budget for fuller Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) and recruitment marketing solutions to save you even more time and money.
Think long-term. Act short-term.
So, what’s a good first step to achieve data-driven hiring? Talent Relationship Management Systems, Applicant Tracking Systems and HR Tech—oh my!
Our goal is to make your life easier, and our technology does exactly that.
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