The sometimes seemingly unending time-to-hire can alienate the candidate and bring your company unnecessary costs. Today we want to show you how you can optimize this KPI and shorten your recruiting process without losing quality!
The decision quality does not increase only once with the time it takes to make a decision, but depends on the selection methods!
What is time-to-hire?
Time-to-hire is a ratio that reflects the time period until a new position is filled. It should therefore provide information about how time-efficient the recruiting is. There are two different positions. Some define the time-to-hire from the date of the vacancy to filling the position, the other only by the first placing the job ad until filling the position. Both seem valid, the first time includes the efficiency of earlier process steps.
The disadvantages of a long time-to-hire are varied and (negatively) long lasting:
- Suitable candidates may back out
- Bad publicity of your company in relation to applicants may damage your employer brand
- Longer vacancies simply cost money
3 tips to shorten your time-to-hire
1. Create a clear competence profile
Talk to the relevant department and clarify the following questions regarding the vacancy:
- What are the specific tasks and activities of the future employee?
- What skills / skills / experience are necessary to complete the tasks and activities?
- What can be learned / what do candidates need to bring?
- What distinguishes good employees to less suitable employees in critical situations?
2. Simplify the application process
For example, give the candidates the opportunity to upload their LinkedIn profile, instead of having to type into a troublesome online form.
3. Fast and valid preselection
There are some ways you can fine tune your selection process to shorten your time-to-hire:
-Pre-Screening: What’s the point of having 30 minute phone calls with 15 candidates, only to realise afterwards that only five are suitable? Try using a more efficient, but thorough way of candidate screening. For example, use video interviews.
-Reject sequential methods and combine selection steps, particularly in the preselection. Eg. receiving applications → asynchronous video interview + online assessment → final selection stage
The goal here is to use complementary methods to gain a complete image of the candidate and to test all skills needed for the job. The results of the methods are considered then summarised. For example, online assessments provide information on analytical and cognitive skills, asynchronous video interviews test articulateness, language skills or motivation. The result of the combination: time-to-hire is considerably reduced. To read more about preselection best practice, take a look here.
There are, as you can see, some tweaks you can make to reduce your time-to-hire. Many are also linked together with innovations on the HR market. Decision makers cannot afford to put off their decisions when it comes to questioning existing processes and pinpointing where the bottlenecks are.
To learn more about how asynchronous video interviewing can help your pre-selection, schedule a consultation call with our experts or check out these basic information.
