In today’s tight labor market, top job seekers get taken off the market quickly. This means it’s critical for all employers to have an efficient hiring process in place to avoid losing top talent to other job opportunities. Many organizations not only lack a standardized hiring process, but also don’t have access to the right hiring data to hold managers accountable to improving over time.
Does your team have an understanding of your total time to hire and when candidates are getting held up in your hiring process? If not, you’re likely missing out on qualified candidates to employers with more efficient hiring in place.
Below, we’ve outlined how your team can tap into hiring data to hold managers accountable, outline actionable steps to improve your hiring process and, as a result, hire qualified employees.
1. Measure and Speed up Your Time to Hire
Data from the Society for Human Resources Professionals (SHRM) found that the average hiring time for employers across industries is 36 days. But the most qualified job seekers receive job offers within 10 days, so if you have a lengthy hiring process, you’ll lose the most qualified candidates along the way. According to Hireology data, retail automotive dealerships lost about one in five applicants and healthcare organizations lost just over 10 percent of applicants in the first half of 2019 simply because they were never reviewed or were reviewed too late.
Beyond losing qualified candidates, open roles cause productivity on your team to take a hit. Hireology data found that the average business loses $1,000 in gross profit for each day a role is open. This means it’s important for your team to take proactive steps to measure and speed up your time to hire.
The right hiring data can help you better understand your total hiring time by highlighting such time as: percentage of applicants reviewed, overall time to review and time spent in each hiring step.
Armed with this data, your team can have insight into when candidates are getting held up in the hiring process – and identify steps to improve. For example, one or more of your hiring managers might have a low applicant review rate. To address this issue, you can consider tapping into prescreen surveys to automate initial candidate review – and ensure all candidates are being reviewed. By speeding up steps where candidates tend to get held up, you can decrease your overall time to hire, securing quality candidates and driving profitability.
2. Complete All Hiring Steps
Your team shouldn’t skip crucial hiring steps simply to speed up the hiring process. By skipping steps, this can result in hiring candidates who aren’t a fit for your team and can even pose a compliance risk.
In addition to measuring and improving your time to hire, you can also leverage hiring data to ensure your team members complete all steps of the hiring process – also known as process adherence. This hiring data gives you transparency into such numbers as: percentage of hiring steps completed, percentage of hires who completed all steps and percentage of candidates with skipped steps.
A candidate might pass your prescreen survey and interview process with flying colors, prompting your team to rush into extending an offer before the candidate receives a competing offer. But this can lead to missing critical steps in the hiring process – such as completing reference and background checks – which can lead to serious consequences down the road.
Hiring data related to process adherence helps you hold hiring managers accountable to following to each step in the process for every candidate. Doing so will help you rest assured knowing each candidate is truly qualified before extending an offer.
3. Set and Aim to Meet Goals
Once your team has transparency into your total hiring time, process adherence and key areas for improvement, you can outline actionable steps for continuous improvement.
Embracing hiring data gives you the opportunity to set goals and improve these numbers over time. Research shows that goal-setting can improve employee performance by 25 percent and the same is true when it comes to holding your team accountable to improving your hiring process.
Last year, Hireology launched Insights Goals, which enables Hireology users to set a hiring velocity goal based on their industry average or a specific time frame.
Following the launch of Insights Goals, Hireology customers have seen several key success metrics, including:
- Time to review is twice as fast for organizations who set goals
- Time to hire is 10 days faster for organizations who set goals
- Insights users who set goals review applicants at a rate 20 percent higher than those who don’t set goals
With measurable goals in place, you can hold your team accountable to reviewing applicants regularly, which will ultimately help decrease your time to review and time to hire and, as a result, hire candidates who will drive results for your team.
Are you interested in learning more about how your team can make the most of hiring data to improve your hiring efficiency? Get your free process assessment today.
