Josh TolanThe old adage “slow and steady wins the race’’ does not apply when hiring top talent. 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. The benefits of creating a fast hiring process – with the right tools and strategies to assess and improve your hiring outcomes – are significant. 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. Of course, several factors influence how effectively your team engages candidates – but one that candidates have agreed on for well over a decade is how much time they spend in the hiring process.
In fact, 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.
The bottom line is candidates value their time – and they expect you to. When asked “What is one thing you wish organizations and HR professionals understood better about the hiring experience from the perspective of a job/work candidate?” in Sterling’s 2022 Benchmark Report, candidates replied
- “Companies should prioritize ways to shorten the screening period.”
- “Don’t leave people waiting for an update longer than one week.”
- “HR professionals need to understand that candidates are always applying for multiple jobs.”
Unfortunately, research by Talent Board found that 42% of candidates report interviewers don’t make good use of their time. It’s not surprising that Greenhouse respondents listed “interview questions are not vague, duplicated, or irrelevant” and “flexible scheduling options” as ways to improve the candidate experience.
Replacing antiquated steps like phone interviews with one-way video interviews, for example, enables recruiters to invite candidates to submit responses to structured interview questions on their own time. Glassdoor revealed the No. 1 interview assessment step that adds time to the hiring process is phone interviews – conducting a phone interview can add 6.8 – 8.2 days to the recruitment process.
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. This approach to speeding up and streamlining early screening stages addresses several concerns that impact the candidate experience.
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. When Sterling searched for candidate dropout insights in their 2022 Benchmark Report, they discovered nearly half of candidates admitted to considering abandoning their most recent hiring experience. More than one quarter actually dropped out, and the No. 1 reason they reported was “the process was taking too long.”
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.
Why? Yello’s respondents claim a recruiter’s biggest interview scheduling challenge is finding a time that works for everyone. Scheduling conflicts are often the culprit behind a slow hiring process.
When you need to align the schedules of busy candidates with multiple hiring stakeholders, it can add days to your hiring process. During that time, top contenders for your open positions are likely interviewing with other companies. Nearly 10% of candidates responded in Sterling’s survey that they didn’t complete the hiring process due to accepting an offer somewhere else.
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. Respondents in Yello’s Nationwide Recruiter Survey reported they spend ⅔ of their overall hiring time on the interview process. For perspective, it takes between 30 minutes and 2 hours to schedule a single interview and, on average, recruiters can have up to 30-40 open requisitions at one time.
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.
According to Indeed, HR professionals balance responsibilities including
- Recruiting
- Fostering a safe working environment
- Managing employee relations
- Administering payroll
- Managing compensation and benefits packages
- Handling disciplinary needs
- Ensuring compliance with labor laws and regulations
- Overseeing training programs
- Supporting employee development
- Assisting employees
A tedious hiring process consumes the time HR professionals require to complete their long list of duties 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. This accounts for actual hiring costs, such as paying recruiters and hiring managers, assessments, and resources during the hiring process. 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). Not to mention it can take up to six months to recover the money spent on a single new hire.
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. With this in mind, 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.
Ultimately, your company reduces costs in terms of time spent by hiring managers in the interview process. With an average rate of $33 dollars (hourly wage for hiring managers in the U.S.) for every hour stalled in the hiring process, your savings quickly stack up.
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.
Quality of hire has been a KPI of rising importance for HR professionals. LinkedIn found that 88% of employers agree quality of hire is the most important metric to track, yet less than half have a means to currently track, let alone a strategy to improve it. It’s not surprising that a study by Crosschq Q found the average quality of hire on a scale of 0-100 is a score of just 73.
A key takeaway from Crosschq Q’s Quality of Hire report reinforces the importance of consistently striving to improve your hiring process.
“What is important is that the organization sets a baseline Quality of Hire, continually measures it, and improves it over time by identifying the areas of strength, weakness, and opportunity in their hiring processes.”
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.
