With recruiting being such a human-based process, it is easy to forget that metrics are incredibly important to building a successful recruiting team and hiring process.
There are many data points that can make or break your hiring operations, but time-to-hire is one of the most critical.
To your executive team, this specific metric may signify: your ability to properly vet and sell candidates, your attentiveness and speed, and a representation (good or bad) of your candidate experience.
So what are some ways to decrease your time to hire?
Create a streamlined process
Before all else, you need to make sure the decision makers for each individual hire are on board for creating a streamlined process.
By doing your due diligence ahead of time, you will cut down on the time between stages in the process.
Before you even start sourcing and interviewing, be sure to create solid ‘scorecards’ so the Q&A for the interview is an accurate representation of the role you are trying to hire for, this will ultimately will lead to quicker decision making down the line.
Reduce feedback loops & move fast
In addition to this, confirm with the entire interview team the expectations around the timeline and feedback loops. Employees conducting interviews should be expected to submit feedback from interview sessions within 48 hours, but ideally 24.
The longer you wait, the less accurate the interview feedback will be relayed.
You also need to be hyper-aware of the things that may be slowing you down. Be sure to take a look at all aspects of your process from A to Z.
It could be that your timing between sending an invitation for an interview and it actually being scheduled is far too long. Perhaps you may be having an issue with feedback being inputted within the 24-48 hour time frame.
Whatever the case may be, take a look at your funnel metrics to determine the slowest parts of your process and choose to implement changes to those first.
This will help with short-term gains in regards to a faster time-to-hire.
Passive candidates
If you are working with passive candidates you must be excellent at story telling and selling
candidates on the opportunity to officially get them going in the rest of the process.
Remember, for the time-to-hire metric, the clock starts ticking the second you have engaged with the candidate.
Companies like Woo can help you with these cases, given the passive candidates on Woo have still signed up for the service and are likely be be more responsive than cold outreaching on a site like LinkedIn.
Many candidates, unless it is clearly not a good fit, will not leave an offer on the table if it is a great opportunity. Regardless of your company’s hiring location, there is always competition in the game.
The faster you move, the higher chance you have at success in landing top talent.
