A successful recruitment process is difficult to achieve. While finding the right talent is hard, it becomes even harder when filling an urgent position.
Studies show that the average length of the hiring process is 28 days. Time to hire is the critical factor in the whole recruitment process. A long time to hire can impact your hiring negatively. This is why it’s essential to measure your time to hire. This article discusses what is time to hire and everything you need to know to improve your hiring.
What is Time-to-Hire?
Time-to-hire is a common hiring metric. It refers to the time taken from the time a candidate applied for a job to that same candidate accepting a job offer. Time to hire is the most important metric for HR and hiring managers to create an effective recruiting strategy.
This metric gives you valuable information about your recruitment process. Let’s see what those are.
Efficiency: Time-to-hire metric helps you understand the speed of your hiring process. If the time-to-hire is long, it indicates a slow recruiting process and inefficient resources.
Candidate Experience: Time-to-hire metric also represents candidate experience. A good candidate experience can also improve your time-to-hire. Furthermore, a faster time-to-hire makes the candidate experience better.
Recruitment Challenges: As discussed in the above two metrics, a longer time-to-hire indicates challenges in the recruitment process. This metric helps recruiters and hiring managers look into the recruitment strategy.
What is the Average Time to Hire?
The average time-to-hire fluctuates based on industry and role. A Glassdoor survey reports that time-to-hire typically takes from 10 to 53 days. According to LinkedIn, the time-to-hire is one month, and SHRM found that 36 days is the average time to hire.
How to Measure Time-to-Hire?
Time to hire can be measured by calculating the number of days between a job seeker applying for a job and the same candidate accepting the offer for the job.
For example, consider the day you posted an open job as Day 1. A candidate submitted their application on Day 6, and they accepted the offer on Day 21.
The time to hire is 15 days.
Suppose you hire four employees at 14, 18, 28, and 35 days. The average time to hire is 14 + 18 + 28 + 35 / 4 = 23.75 days.
Why do you need to Measure Time-to-Hire?
As you already know by now, that time-to-hire is a critical metric in the recruitment lifecycle, and measuring it is also crucial for the success of your hiring process. Measuring time-to-hire helps you revise your hiring strategy and reallocate your effort and budget to improve your recruitment.
Let’s see the key benefits of measuring time to hire.
1. Improves Sourcing Efficiency
Measuring time to hire helps recruiters understand where most of the time is spent when recruiting. A longer or higher time to hire means challenges with candidate sourcing. Sourcing consumes the most time in recruiting. Not getting enough applications or irrelevant profiles can take your recruiters’ time and energy. This may also lead to poor quality of hires.
Hence, you need to review the time spent on sourcing, interviewing, and engaging candidates and the time spent on each candidate to ensure a smooth recruitment process. By measuring the time to hire, you can build a strong recruitment funnel and a high-quality talent pool.
2. Helps you Build a Strong Talent Pipeline
As said above, analyzing your time-to-hire metric can help you build a robust candidate pool. When you know how much time you spend on each recruiting activity, you also know the areas where you lack.
Having a candidate pipeline already saves you a lot of time when making your next time. However, this could only happen when you provide a good candidate experience. Measuring and improving your time to hire will boost candidate experience. And when you provide great candidate experience, people are likely to re-apply for your jobs.
3. Highlights Recruiting Challenges
Majorly, the time-to-hire metric brings an opportunity to find the bottlenecks in your hiring process and save you recruitment costs and efforts. A longer time to fill a position, more interview rounds, candidate drop-outs, and longer waiting times are the reasons for a higher time to hire.
When you correctly measure this metric, you will understand what draws you back so that you can improve the process better.
Pro Tip: For a successful and smooth recruitment process, break down the process into small segments.
4. Improves Overall Efficiency of the Recruitment Process
As the difficulty of the position you’re hiring for increases, the time to hire goes up. Sometimes, it isn’t easy to analyze or review each stage of recruitment when hiring for such high-level positions.
However, the process becomes easier when you rationalize the process by measuring the time to hire metric, defining objectives and expectations, and drawing a clear roadmap.
Wrapping Up
In today’s rapidly changing, candidate-driven market, companies must provide a great candidate experience right from the start of their journey. Time-to-hire is the key metric that impacts candidate experience and their interest in joining your company.
Measure and reduce the time-to-hire to improve the candidate experience and quality of the hiring process.
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