Time-to-Hire: All You Need to Know About This Metric

With a myriad of interviews, screening tests, and what not, recruiters tend to increase their recruiting time without even realizing the repercussions. Every step in the hiring process adds up to the overall hiring time. Be it the quality of tools, rounds of interviews, phone assessment, or quality of skill tests.

This is why you must take special care of time-to-hire metrics while gauging your overall recruiting performance. Unlike other HR metrics such as employee engagement and employee satisfaction, this metric gives concrete insights into the hiring process in the form of numbers and stats. To understand how exactly it benefits the overall recruiting process and how one can optimize to gain maximum returns, let’s first understand what this metric entails.

Defining Time-to-Hire
How It is Different from Time-to-Fill Metric
Calculating Average Time-to-Hire
Tracking and Optimizing Time-to-Hire Metric

Defining Time-to-Hire

Time to hire calculates the time it takes a candidate to accept your job offer from the day they enter into your talent pipeline. In short, it’s the time between the day the candidate applied for the job to the day they got hired.

How It Is Different From Time-to-Fill Metric?

The time-to-hire metric is often interchangeably used with time to fill metric, which is incorrect. A major difference between both the metrics is the starting point.

Time to fill calculates the time of the entire hiring process from job application to job acceptance whereas time to hire starts from the time the hire enters the talent pipeline i.e., the talent comes in contact with the recruiter for the hiring process. In cases of time to fill, the starting point could start from the moment a hiring manager submits a job opening for approval, HR or Finance approves a job opening or a recruiter advertises a job opening.

Calculating Average Time to Hire

You can calculate the average time to hire by adding up the days it took to hire and dividing it by the number of hires. To illustrate, if you hired 4 candidates, in 10, 20, 25, and 30 days then your average time to hire is (10+20+25+30)/4 = 21.25 days. This means, on average it takes you around 21 days to hire a candidate.

The average time to hire varies as per industry. If you are hiring for a niche, tech field that requires specialized interviews and assessments, then time-to-hire for such roles would be high due to the specific nature of the job. Whereas, hiring for less niche or experienced roles would reduce the time to hire significantly. According to a report, the average time to hire a construction worker was 12.7 days whereas for engineering roles it was as high as 60.

Tracking and Optimizing Time to Hire Metric

Tracking and optimizing go hand in hand. The more you track, the more you can optimize the process. For this, we bring a list of recommended action items that would help to better track and optimize your time-to-hire metric.

1. Break Down Your Hiring Process

Segregate your hiring process into different stages. This way you can individually measure the time invested on every hiring stage and can utilize these numbers to understand what’s causing your team to spend such a large amount of time on one process than another. Once understood, you can use the resulting analysis to look for better alternatives and tools.

2. Follow a Data-driven Approach

Data provides enhanced process visibility and efficiency. More than ever, it is being used to improve processes and performance. This is why you must never leave this important aspect behind when optimizing your time-to-hire metric. To start with, use the data to find out,

How long your current processes are taking?
What is the quality of hire you’re yielding?
How long it takes to move between two stages?
How much your time-to-hire varies w.r.t to the average hiring time of your industry?

After gathering answers to these questions, evaluate whether they’re on par with industry standards. If not, get your best minds to work and start reinventing your strategies to meet the industry standards.

For instance, Google used a data-driven approach to cut down their hiring time by about two weeks. The data presented that Google spent more than the required time in interviewing candidates. After analyzing, Google decided to cut down the round of interviews from 10-15 to 4. The number 4 was decided based on the analysis that panels of just four interviewers made the same hiring decision as panels of more than four interviewers.

3. Invest in Applicant Tracking System

A good ATS is a boon for every recruiter. It makes the whole recruiting process way more structured and smoother. From adding candidates to the pipeline to confirming their joining, everything goes smooth when handling the processes on ATS.

Moreover, with added features like interview scheduling, application integration, SMS notifications, and more, you can manage all your processes from one place without losing track. This structured tool vastly simplifies your recruiting process and cuts down the overall hiring time to a minimum.

4. Use Assessment Software

Manual assessment of every candidate can eat a large chunk of your recruiting time. According to stats, IQ test adds 2.6 to 4.4 days, whereas personality tests can take 0.9 to 1.3 days on average.

Using assessment software can cut down this time to nearly half without losing the grip on the quality. A good skill assessment software can further bring this time down by providing intelligent skill tests that can evaluate a candidate for multiple skills at the same time.

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