Hiring someone for a job takes several steps. In an organization’s desire to optimize the hiring process and outcome, it is important to measure the recruiting metrics from the very beginning to the very end. In other words, measure from the creation of the job requisition to your best candidate’s acceptance of an offer.
Time to Fill is the oft-used, overall term for how long it takes to go through all the steps from beginning to end that lead to your best job candidate accepting an offer. Quality of Hire, assessed at acceptance of the job offer and while the new hire is on the job, should not be sacrificed for efficiency in the hiring process. In the long run the time saving will not be worth it. Here we will review each step of Time to Fill for hiring someone and how to measure it.
The first step in hiring someone is creating a job requisition and getting it approved, a metric called Time to Approval. Sometimes measurement of this initial time to approval step is omitted. It shouldn’t be. How long it takes to go through the job requisition approval process should be included as an important part of learning how long it is going to take to move a candidate from one stage to the next. Understanding the speed of the requisition approval process will help you be prepared for how much workload your recruiters should expect.
Some companies only require going to one’s immediate manager for approval for job requisitions while others require every job requisition to go all the way to the top of the company for approval. Measuring the length of the job requisition approval process can help alleviate difficulties and improve efficiency by shortening the time to hire. This step ends with the job listing being published.
Time to Hire is the part of Time to Fill that measures the time from your best candidate applying for a position to your best candidate accepting the job offer. This shows how effective your hiring team is at quickly finding the best candidate. Move quickly. If the process takes too long your best candidate may lose interest.
Measure how long it takes to move a candidate from one stage to the next. Break down the time to hire into several stages, including CV screening, phone interview, assessment, in-person interview, offer, etc. How long does it take to go from one stage to the next? Quality of Applicant is a valuable thing to measure. Track the quality of your applicants since this can affect how long it takes to find the best one.
Other valuable metrics such as Cost to Hire and Candidate Satisfaction for measuring the acquisition of talent are “non-temporal.”
How to Measure Time to Fill
- Segment your measurements for more detail. Segment by role, by department, and by new, full-time employees vs. replacement full-time employees. Different roles can take different amounts of time to hire.
- Be consistent. Measure the same way each time you go through the hiring process so you can compare. Compare how long your hiring process takes to industry averages. Check out Glassdoor for a comparison of industry average hiring times.
- Decide where you will track your metrics. You may want to invest in a good applicant tracking system (ATS) and do the tracking completely in the ATS, with time stamps for each action. The hiring manager will create a job requisition in the ATS and let the workflow handle the approval. Or you may want to us an ATS combined with a collaboration and document management platform. Your team may have to collect information from several sources and have different departments build the approval workflow. You could see the workflow status and approval dates.
- Train recruiters and hiring managers as to how to interview. Use effective email templates to shorten scheduling time and reduce your time to fill. Provide regular weekly or monthly reports and highlight any bottlenecks in the system.
With an effective, comprehensive and consistent strategy you will get a sense of how successful and efficient you are at hiring talent and will be able to improve upon your process each time around.