How to Reduce Time to Hire Without Lowering Candidate Quality

With accurate job descriptions, an effective screening process, applicant tracking system, quality interview management and communication with applicants you can have confidence your recruitment team will find suitable candidates.

The time to hire is the amount of time between a candidate entering the recruitment process and accepting your job offer. It tells employers how efficient their hiring teams are at finding the right candidates.

A long time to hire can cause problems such as:

• Losing quality candidates – Candidates may accept an offer from a company with a faster time to hire.
• Incurring extra costs – Long hiring periods can cause increased time for recruiters, extra interviews and administration.
• Lower productivity – Current employees may be put under extra pressure.
• Longer time to get things done – Key projects and activities may be slowed down due to key roles not being filled.

However you don’t want to compromise on background checks, relevant experience or selecting candidates without properly assessing them. Make your hiring process run more efficiently.

Businesses can improve their hiring process by identifying areas where they are losing time and improving those areas.

1. Clear Job Descriptions

Having a vague job description means that people who are not a good match will apply. This will cause delays in screening and more work for your recruiters.

Ensure that your job descriptions are clear and well detailed. Ensure you mention:

• Responsibilities
• Qualifications
• Skills (both technical and soft)
• Salary range, location and working pattern.
• When they can expect to start.

Split the essential criteria from the desirable criteria. This will help candidates see if they are a good fit and will help your recruiters to focus on the right candidates.

2. Streamline Screening

Manually sifting through hundreds of candidates can cause delays especially if you have multiple roles to fill.

Have set criteria to help streamline the screening process. Ensure you’re looking to select candidates based on skills relevant to the role, experience, qualifications and role requirements.

By asking set screening questions your recruiters will be able to identify candidates who are a good fit.

Top Tip – Having a checklist to assess candidates will make it easier to compare candidates and reduce delays.

3. Applicant Tracking System

An applicant tracking system will help your recruiters keep track of all the applications. Depending on the functionality it can help your team:

• Keep all candidate information in one place.
• Keep track of where they are with their application and interviews.
• Search for candidates based on relevant criteria.
• Help with organisation for your recruiters.
• Keep track of your communications.

Instead of having multiple spreadsheets and emails your hiring team will have everything in one place.

4. Efficient Interview Scheduling

Interviews can cause delays in your hiring process. Often co-ordinating between candidates, recruiters and department managers causes delays.

To help with this:

• Have set interview times each week.
• Ensure interviewers know when they’re available.
• Use online tools.
• Have combined interviews where possible.
• Make sure they know what to expect.

A well planned interview timetable will make things easier for everyone.

5. Communication

Candidates enjoy knowing where they are with their applications.

If they don’t receive quick responses they may lose interest in the role. Set times for your recruiters to communicate with candidates:

• Acknowledgement of application.
• Update on screening.
• Interview confirmation.
• Feedback.
• Final selection and offer.

By allowing candidates to stay informed throughout the process, even if you are slow to make your decisions, this will help keep your candidates engaged and increase the perception of professionalism.

6. Make Fast Quality Hiring Decisions

Sometimes there can be delays caused by slow decision making by the hiring managers after receiving feedback.

Before starting your recruitment process it is important to know who will be making decisions.

Who will be interviewing? Who will be assessing? Who has final approval?

Having a shared scorecard for candidates will help hiring managers compare candidates based on the same criteria.

This will help to make quicker decisions.

7. Build a Talent Pool

You don’t always have to start the recruitment process when you have a vacancy. Businesses can build relationships with the right candidates for roles they regularly have.

Your talent pool may consist of:

• Previously shortlisted candidates.
• Professionals showing interest.
• Referrals from employees.
• Industry specific talent pool.
• Candidates from previous recruitment campaigns.

Having an organised talent pool will help reduce time to source when you have similar roles available. However, ensure that you check the candidates information and interest before contacting them.

8. Use a Recruitment Specialist

Some organisations don’t have the resources or contacts within the industry to source specialised or urgent roles quickly.

Using a recruitment specialist can help you reach the right talent pools, have structured screening and expert knowledge.

If you’d like to learn more about how we approach our recruitment and workforce solutions please visit our page.

To help reduce your time to hire you’ll need to track various recruitment metrics.

By regularly reviewing these metrics your recruiters will be able to identify where delays are occurring. For example if they’re quickly screening candidates but taking a long time to approve offers then the problem may be with the decision making process.

To have an efficient hiring strategy you need to ensure that you have a good talent source, candidates are assessed, communication is good and you have good workforce planning.

Elite Maverick provides recruitment and staffing solutions including permanent recruitment, contract/temporary staffing, executive search and bulk hiring. We can help organisations with different workforce needs.

If you’re looking for structured help with your hiring process please view our recruitment and staffing solutions.

This depends on the role, how quickly you need to recruit, the level of experience required and the resources you have available. You may also want to consider how they filter candidates, communicate with and co-ordinate with.

A logical process will ensure that everyone knows what needs to be done.

After every major recruitment campaign you should review this process. If you’re regularly experiencing delays in one area you may need extra resources, clearer ownership or a simpler process.

If you’d like to talk to us about any specific hiring issues or workforce needs please visit our contact page.

There are various ways that you can reduce your time-to-hire by optimising your whole recruitment process. Having clear job descriptions, efficient screening, effective interview processes and quick communication will ensure that you don’t miss out on any quality candidates. Keeping a track of your recruitment metric will help to identify any bottlenecks and ensure that using the right hiring strategy and support you can build great teams.

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