Strategies to Reduce Your Time to Hire
A company’s average time to hire is one of the most crucial recruiting metrics for enhancing organizational performance and reducing recruiting costs. Although it can be challenging to measure, doing so can provide valuable insights into your overall recruitment process and its various components.
The longer a position sits vacant, the more it costs your company—both in terms of recruitment expenses and lost revenue due to reduced productivity. For example, unfilled sales roles or key leadership positions can directly impact your bottom line. In nearly every case, reducing the time to hire should be a top priority for your talent acquisition team.
In the following sections, we’ll explore the impacts of time to hire beyond recruiting and share actionable strategies to help you lower it effectively in the year ahead.
What Is Time to Hire and Why Does it Matter?
Time to hire measures the total time between when a candidate enters your talent pipeline and when they accept
an offer. If a candidate submits an application on July 1 and accepts your offer on July 29, the time to hire is 28 days.
While you never want to sacrifice quality for speed, streamlining your process can improve the outcomes for both your organization and your candidates. Reducing time to hire has significant benefits:
- Cost reduction: Every additional day a position remains vacant adds to your recruitment marketing and job board fees while draining productivity.
- Improved candidate experience: Glassdoor reports that 60% of job seekers find a lengthy hiring process frustrating. Conversely, a fast and respectful process leaves a lasting positive impression, improving your talent pool for future roles.
- Competitive advantage: According to LinkedIn’s Global Talent Trends, top candidates are off the market within 10 days. A slow process could result in losing high-caliber candidates to competitors.
The average time to hire varies by industry and region. The answer depends on whom you ask and how it’s measured, but most estimates place it between four and six weeks.
While this may seem like a relatively tight timeline, the difference between hiring a candidate in 28 days and 40 days can be astounding. For instance, if you’re trying to hire a sales representative responsible for generating $1 million a year in contracts, the lost revenue from just a 12-day delay would total about $33,000.
Although your specific bottom-line impact may not be so clear-cut, it is still beneficial to work on incremental improvements to your hiring time to enhance your recruiting efficiency, reduce costs, and offer a better candidate experience.
Understanding how your hiring timelines measure against industry standards can help you set realistic goals. Here are some time to hire benchmarks to consider:
- Transportation: 25 days
- Technology: 28 days
- Manufacturing: 30 days
- Financial Services: 45 days
- Healthcare: 49 days
If your organization’s hiring time exceeds these benchmarks, it’s time to identify and address inefficiencies.
Key Metrics to Monitor
To effectively reduce time to hire, track these essential metrics:
Time to screen screen: The time between receiving an application and conducting the first screening.
Time to interview: The time between screening and scheduling interviews.
Offer acceptance rate: The percentage of candidates who accept your job offers, which may highlight issues with role alignment, compensation, or delays.
Time to fill: The time between approving a job requisition and the offer being accepted. While different from time to hire, this metric can reveal broader inefficiencies in your hiring funnel.
Related: The Importance of Data-Driven Hiring
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7 Steps for Reducing Time to Hire
1. Build and maintain talent pipeline
Proactively building a talent pipeline can shorten the hiring process by weeks. Keep a database of qualified candidates sourced from previous openings, networking events, or social media. According to Workable, companies with strong talent pipelines fill roles 40% faster. Internal candidates can also speed up hiring; raising awareness of open positions through employee referral programs is a cost-effective strategy.
2. Optimize your job postings
Well-crafted job postings attract qualified candidates and minimize the time spent screening unqualified applicants. Include clear job responsibilities, qualifications, and a salary range to ensure alignment early in the process. Adding a closing date for applications can encourage prompt responses.
Related: How to Write a Job Description
3. Use automation tools
Automating repetitive tasks, like resume screening, interview scheduling, and follow-up emails, can save significant time. Tools like applicant tracking systems (ATS) with automation features can streamline workflows. CareerBuilder reports that 75% of recruiters who use automation experience shorter hiring cycles.
Recruiting Chatbots can help you prequalify candidates for specific roles before they apply. Scheduling tools make it easy for candidates and interviewers to find mutually acceptable time slots, eliminating the need for lengthy email threads proposing time slots. Software that automates reference checks can save time spent on manual calling. At the same time, drip campaigns can prompt applicants to complete digital assessments like personality surveys and skills tests.
4. Leverage pre-employment assessments
Pre-employment assessments screen candidates for skills, culture fit, and personality traits before moving them forward. By identifying the most qualified candidates earlier, you can save time while maintaining accuracy in hiring decisions.
5. Integrate your technology stack
Make sure your recruiting tools operate together seamlessly. For example, candidates from your website should flow directly into your ATS, which should connect with your email platform for automated follow-ups and your calendar for scheduling. Integration minimizes manual steps and speeds up the overall process.
6. Streamline internal processes
Internal delays, such as waiting for interview feedback, often prolong hiring timelines. Establish deadlines for each hiring stage and ensure accountability among stakeholders.
Limit the number of interview rounds and utilize structured interviews that include standardized questions and scoring criteria. This method guarantees quicker, fairer decision-making and minimizes the time spent on deliberation.
7. Enlist the help of a staffing partner
To fully optimize your average time to hire, enlist the services of a professional staffing firm. Working with a recruiting agency is a proven way to hire faster and more economically, especially when hiring for volume, project-based needs, or hard-to-fill positions.
Closing Thoughts
Reducing time to hire is about more than just speed; it involves creating a hiring process that is efficient, candidate-friendly, and aligned with your organization’s goals. By leveraging automation, maintaining a talent pipeline, and utilizing data-driven insights, you can attract and secure top talent before your competitors can. Investing in these strategies will yield better hires, lower costs, and a stronger reputation in the talent market.
4 Corner Resources helps companies of all sizes find competent, highly skilled workers that meet their technical needs and match their organizational culture. If you need help hiring faster, contact our recruiting experts today.
