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A fast and efficient hiring process keeps high-quality candidates moving through your talent funnel and into open seats. But your time to hire is just the tip of the iceberg when measuring the success of your hiring process.
Your speed to hire, or hiring velocity, is a more holistic way to track the most crucial hiring metrics to your company’s growth. We’ve put together this brief guide to walk you through them:
Improved candidate experience
The candidate experience is one of the most important metrics to consider when evaluating your hiring process. In a recent Candidate Experience Report by Greenhouse, 41% of respondents stated a timely recruiter response and follow-up times had a major impact on their experience.
More than half of candidates expect to hear back after their application in less than one week. This puts pressure on your team to assess candidates as quickly as possible in the early stages of hiring.
Replacing antiquated steps like phone interviews with one-way video interviews enables recruiters to invite candidates to submit responses to structured interview questions on their own time. Ultimately, cutting out lengthy and redundant steps in the early screening process increases your chances of keeping top candidates in your hiring process long enough to advance them.
Be the first to extend an offer
When candidates are not happy with their experience, they are inclined to drop out of the hiring process. Candidate dropout can happen at any stage. Yello found in their Nationwide Recruiter Survey that 60% of recruiters frequently lose candidates before they are able to schedule an interview.
Aligning the schedules of busy candidates with multiple hiring stakeholders can add days to your hiring process. During that time, top contenders for your open positions are likely interviewing with other companies.
Offering a fast, flexible, and convenient way to collaborate on early assessments minimizes the risk of losing candidates before talent can advance to in-person interviews. And moving candidates quickly through your hiring process means you retain high-quality candidates until the final interview stage so you can make offers ahead of competitors.
Reduced HR & recruiter burnout
HR and recruiter burnout have been a priority concern for years. Workvivo revealed that nearly all (98%) of HR professionals are burned out. Additionally, 97% have felt emotionally fatigued by their job in the last year, and a startling 75% are open to leaving their job. Recruiters report similar stress due to overwhelming workloads and pressing timelines.
Considering the average number of applicants to a single job post is approximately 118 (250+ for corporate roles), recruiters spend days just trying to schedule initial interviews. This doesn’t account for the amount of time collecting and coordinating evaluation feedback from hiring managers.
A tedious hiring process consumes the time HR professionals require to complete their long list of duties in managing a thriving workforce. HR burnout impacts more than just the effectiveness of your hiring process. And the cost of replacing an HR professional is significant compared to the cost of improving your company’s speed to hire.
Reduced hiring costs
In the United States, the average cost per hire is approximately $4,000 for non-executive roles. When your company has multiple roles to fill, you are likely to watch your hiring budget drain quickly. Alarmingly, the cost of vacancy is reported by Zippia to be $98 per day. This more than doubles the cost of hire over 42 days (the average time it takes to fill an open position).
Of course, employee churn is inevitable and company growth is a necessary business objective. There’s always going to be a need to fill empty roles. Considering ways to reduce hiring costs, such as investing in innovative hiring technologies, can increase your speed to hire and reduce your hiring costs long-term.
Video interview software, for example, can cut your hiring time in half, drastically decreasing your vacancy cost. You can also share video interviews with multiple hiring decision-makers to weigh in with valuable feedback without carving out time for redundant interviews.
Improved quality of hire
While you want your hiring process to be as quick and efficient as possible, you also need to ensure your quality of hire doesn’t suffer. Reducing your time to hire by cutting corners in the evaluation process results in reallocating costs rather than mitigating them.
The average cost of a bad hire, according to the Department of Labor is equal to 30% of the earnings of the employee in the first year. That’s astronomical compared to the cost savings of making smart hiring decisions with a structured, streamlined hiring process.
Implementing a hiring strategy that empowers your hiring team to collaborate effectively, weighing the unique perspectives of all key stakeholders on the same video interview responses, allows your team to make informed decisions quickly and efficiently. Rather than cutting corners to reduce your time to hire, you create a convenient, fair, and accurate evaluation process that improves your quality of hire.
