Struggling with time to hire? Make sure you are following these key principles…
Time to hire is one of the most significant considerations for HR teams and hiring companies, and for good reason.
Lengthy hiring processes not only start to become very costly but they can also damage your brand/reputation in the market, lead to a high candidate churn rate and massively affect the productivity of HR teams.
So how can you mitigate the risks of extended processes?
Keep the interview process simple but effective – anything below C-suite should be kept to a maximum of 3 stages.
Effective hiring managers will perform an initial background/screening call, a more in-depth competency-based interview (which could be scenario based, role play, presentation etc. dependant on the role) and then a further competency based or rubber stamp meeting with senior stakeholders (potentially shifting to in-person if previous stages were remote).
Keep candidates engaged in the process – this should be a focus from the outset with selling the opportunity to the candidates in the correct way and maintaining the momentum by keeping in regular contact with the candidates and not extending the time to feedback post interview.
Additionally, the gaps between interviews should be kept to a minimum, at a max there should be a week’s gap, this is plenty of time for preparation on both sides.
There will be other factors you have to manage such as holidays and other internal considerations. But if you really have the appetite to hire you should have planned based on these at the start and have processes in place to mitigate risk.
Benchmark your salary ranges – It’s a competitive market for the best talent, so if you aren’t being competitive with your salary range you won’t be competitive with the talent you can attract.
Don’t get me wrong there are so many other considerations when taking a new role, and sometimes - if the wider package, growth opportunities, and progression is good - candidates will consider a side-step or even backwards. But it’s important to understand market trends, particularly if you want to secure the best candidates ahead of your competitors.
Use the help of a specialist recruitment agency – recruiters aren’t everyone’s cup of tea and there are some real cowboys out there. But a good agency can help you improve all 3 of the aforementioned areas and more. Of course, internal talent teams will provide the same function, but if you are managing a higher volume of roles than the capacity of your talent team, then an external recruiter can be a valuable resource.
If your business doesn’t have a talent function, you can do a certain amount of hiring through your own networks, but this can become unsustainable when your workload increases and you are running multiple hiring processes - which is one of the root causes for slower hiring. A good recruiter will take the stress of finding relevant candidates, keeping them engaged, and keeping time to hire down out of your hands when time is tight for you and you’re responding to multiple business pressures.
Any recruiter worth their salt knows that it’s not just about filling jobs and would be happy to consult you on how to streamline your hiring processes.
At PIE we pride ourselves on our no BS approach, so if you’re looking for honest advice on how you can improve your hiring processes, we would be happy to chat.
