As recruiters, it’s one of our top priorities to fill vacancies with the best talent as quickly as possible. If you take too long to hire, you could miss out on the best candidates and increase your expenses. 

With long-winded recruitment processes, jobseeker frustration grows which harms your brand’s image. And at a time when the job market is tight with record-high employment and fierce competition across the board, you can’t afford to lag behind.

What is Time to Hire?

Time to hire is one of the best-known recruitment metrics. It’s the time elapsed between when you first engage a candidate and when they’re hired. Simply put, you measure the number of days between application and job acceptance.  

When deciding how to measure time to hire you can also start counting from the time you screen candidates. It’s best to be consistent in start time selection to avoid skewed data.

By measuring your time to hire, you’ll get an overview of where there may be inefficient processes or bottlenecks holding your recruiters back. You’ll also be able to get a feeling for whether or not you’re providing a good candidate experience – for example, a job offer delivered within two weeks will leave a better impression than an offer delivered after two months.

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How Long Should Time to Hire Be?

The answer is: It depends. Sorry! We know that’s not really what you want to hear.

The average nationwide is 36 to 42 days. Factors like location, skill level needed, and the recruiting organization all impact hiring times. A Glassdoor survey uncovered these interesting facts:

  • The U.S. city with the longest time to hire is the nation’s capital, Washington, with its concentration of government workers. The fastest hiring processes are in Kansas City, Mo., a manufacturing center and transportation hub.
  • A bar or restaurant needing help can hire in eight days or faster, while a university averages 60 days to hire a professor.
  • Businesses have some degree of control over the length of their hiring process.

Our top nine strategies will show you how to improve time to hire and retention rates without compromising on quality.

1. Improve Your Employer Brand

Today, finding and hiring the workers you need is like marketing. You have to sell your organization to prospective employees to entice them to apply. The need to sell yourself increases markedly as you recruit for the younger generations who have an invested interest in your company culture.

A robust and positive employer brand motivates 75% of job seekers to apply, but 86% of women and 67% of men refuse to consider working at a company with a poor reputation.

Grow a positive employer brand through traditional and social media. You can use press releases and posts highlighting your commitment to sustainability, diversity, and improving workplace perks, or featuring star employees. 

Virtual interview taking place between male and female

2. Improve Your Careers Page

Having an outstanding careers page can really entice new applicants to apply for your job vacancies. 

Your careers page is a window into your company for the 96% of job seekers who say transparency is essential. Take advantage of the opportunity to shine by:

  • Displaying your brand prominently so that readers feel your presence through logos, fonts, colors, and style.
  • Telling prospective employees who you are and what your business is about with a mission statement at the top of the page.
  • Showing what it’s like to work for you by including employee-centered testimonials, pictures, and videos.
  • Highlight your sustainability, diversity and inclusion, and flexible working policies.
  • Talking about career growth opportunities.
  • Include an FAQ section to help answer any questions applicants might have,

Building an exceptional careers page gets your candidates’ experience off to a winning start. A good first impression motivates job seekers to move on through your recruiting funnel.

3. Evaluate Your Current Recruiting Funnel

Analyze each step of your hiring process to determine what needs improving. The crucial funnel steps are:

  1. Sourcing candidates
  2. Screening applicants
  3. Shortlisting applicants
  4. Interviewing candidates
  5. Skills testing
  6. Offering the job
  7. Onboarding

Digital tools, like a recruiting metrics dashboard, make it easy to track the key metrics for each step. At the very least, you’ll need to know the correct data for:

  • Time to hire
  • Cost of hire
  • Quality of hire
  • Source of hire

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4. Implement a Structured Hiring Process

Structured hiring creates a defined approach to the hiring process and ensures that candidates are all evaluated in the same way. You’ll get a streamlined workflow, measurable data, and employees who fit job requirements.

The steps to creating a hiring structure are:

  1. Define the job duties, responsibilities, and necessary skills clearly.
  2. Decide on the criteria you’ll use to create an evaluation scorecard. An applicant tracking system (ATS) can use readily determined criteria like education, salary expectations and experience to eliminate unqualified applicants. 
  3. Plan the interview process to ensure participation from critical stakeholders.  
  4. Create an interview kit that contains the questions interviewers will ask to ensure all interviewees are treated fairly.
  5. Evaluate the interviewed candidates, make a hiring decision and shortlist actions needed to make a job offer.

An applicant tracking system (ATS) is invaluable for finding, tracking, evaluating, and shortlisting candidates to interview.

5. Use Employee Recommendations

Asking your current employees to recommend candidates speeds the hiring process and reduces the expense of sourcing. Numerous studies have shown that both the quality of hires and retention rates improve when current employees are consulted.

LinkedIn reports that the number one way people find new jobs is through referrals. Nearly 50% of employers say referrals are their most important source of quality hires.

Offering employees an incentive for successful referrals could become a standard business practice.

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6. Improve Job Descriptions

When writing your job description, it’s important to focus on what’s in it for the job seeker. Use the first paragraph to tell why people should work for you. Segue to the role’s challenges and the importance of the job. People want to know how they’ll be able to make a difference. 

There are numerous benefits brought about by having a diverse workforce. If you want to tap into these benefits then you need a job advert that encourages this. 

It is far too easy to, unintentionally, include words that have male or female associations as well as putting off those from other cultures. Of course, there is far more to diversity than just these two examples, but what can you do to ensure that your job post encourages the very best talent, regardless of sex, race, culture, sexual orientation, or any other factor?

  • Check pronouns – consider using ’s/he’, ‘they’, or ‘you’.
  • Avoid gender charged words – words such as ‘analyze’ and ‘determine’ are shown to have male traits whereas ‘collaborate’ and ‘support’ are shown to appeal to female applicants. You could even invest in tech, like Oleeo’s Intelligent Writing, that flags gender biased terms in your job descriptions and suggests gender-neutral alternatives.
  • Check your use of superlatives – terms such as ‘expert’ and ‘world-class’ have been shown to turn off female applicants.
  • Review requirements – if you have ‘must haves’ and ‘nice to haves’, lose the latter. Females tend only to apply for jobs where they hit 100% of the requirements. Men will do so if they hit 60% or more.
  • Show your commitment to equality and diversity – it’s not enough to assume that applicants know that the NHS is committed to equality, inclusion, and diversity. Your job post needs to tell them so.
  • Company values – as part of recruitment, there is a need to share your company values within the job post – such as your sustainability or diversity policy. Infuse these into your posts to demonstrate what you’re all about.
  • Flexibility – the pandemic has seen a shift towards flexible working and a hybrid approach combining time at home with time in the office. While not all approaches will be appropriate for many roles in the NHS, use your job post to show just what you do offer. 

The-power-to-scale-tailored-communications7. Provide an Exceptional Candidate Experience

Job applicants begin to form their opinion of your organization immediately. Providing a fast, seamless application process will cut your dropout rate and improve candidate quality.

60% of Gen Z job hunters will not spend more than 15 minutes applying for a job. Shorten your application form by only asking for necessary information. You can ask later for a cover letter, recommendations, or other documents that are time-consuming to prepare.

Optimize for mobile because 58% of job seekers do their searching on their phone while 35% apply on mobile. It’s also critical to answer questions in real-time by having an FAQ section with responses to common questions or incorporate a chatbot for an interactive experience.

Enabling application through social media is appreciated by users, and your ATS gets the information it needs to proceed with processing. 

LinkedIn’s Easy Apply feature allows applicants to auto-populate your form with information drawn from their LinkedIn profile. The tool communicates directly with your ATS, instantly sorting out top applicants.

Follow up before your competitors do with personal communication to the best candidates. People want a quick, easy application process, but they also appreciate human interaction. 

8. Improve Collaboration With Hiring Managers

Communication is the key to forming an effective partnership between hiring managers and recruiters. Hiring managers get qualified personnel when they need them. And recruiters can do their job more efficiently.

The process begins with a clear job description. Recruiters need the job title, purpose, duties, responsibilities, required qualifications, additional qualifications, working conditions, and timeline.

The entire team needs to have access to information throughout the hiring process. If your team scatters its work out across several platforms, it will be challenging to provide that access. Using one end-to-end system that provides all the necessary functions will simplify communication.

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9. Use an Intelligent, All-Inclusive Applicant Tracking System (ATS)

An ATS is a digital hiring tool that tracks and organizes the job applicant journey from employer branding at the beginning through to employee onboarding. 

Using an ATS enables effective team communication and significantly reduces hiring time and the number of HR employees needed. Here are the critical, must-have ATS functions:

Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Having AI in every step of your hiring process enables your entire team to do more with less strain. 

An especially valuable AI function is its ability to evaluate the characteristics of your company’s top-performing employees to compare to your applicants. You can quickly pinpoint and communicate with the best candidates. AI can also help with these other crucial tasks.

Bulk Processing

Decrease workloads and shorten time-to-hire with bulk processing to automate workflows, post job ads, schedule interviews, and nurture candidates.

Creating Inclusive Experiences

Tailored workflows boost employer brand experiences for diverse candidate roles or types. Applicants feel the application process speaks directly to them personally through email, text, and chat.

Growing Diversity

Achieve diversity goals by removing bias throughout the hiring process with AI-powered intelligent writing, selection, and assessment.

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How Oleeo Can Help 

When working on improving your time-to-hire, Oleeo’s premier ATS software, Oleeo Recruit, is indispensable. It gives your team the power to work smarter and faster and automatically engages the best job seekers, helping you hire them before your competition snaps them up.