Hiring velocity, also known as time to hire, measures how long the hiring process takes from posting a job through offer acceptance. Having a grasp on your hiring velocity – and taking steps to improve overall hiring speed – can ultimately help you build the best team possible while improving operational efficiencies.
The longer a position goes unfilled, the more productivity is disrupted as current employees spend time covering for the open role. Beyond this, the hiring and onboarding process, take time, potentially eating into margins as new staff ramp up to their full potential in the first 90 days. A slow, inefficient hiring process can also lead to a poor candidate experience, potentially losing top talent to other competitors.
Understanding your hiring velocity can help you secure top talent before your competition in several ways:
Speed Up Your Time To Review
Reviewing applicants on a daily basis instead of waiting several days for applications to build up can greatly improve your hiring process.
Hireology research shows applicants reviewed and acted upon within 12 hours are more likely to be hired. With insight into your hiring velocity, you can better understand the average time it takes for your team to review and act on job applicants, including which hiring managers and locations need to be more efficient in down top talent.
Review All Applicants
Some hiring managers make the mistake of choosing to move forward with the first quality candidate during the review process, rather than reviewing all applications the job receives. If this is the case at your organization, top candidates might be slipping through the cracks. Having a grasp on the total percentage of hires reviewed at all locations, or across all of your hiring managers, presents the opportunity to provide coaching to locations or managers reviewing applicants at a rate below the industry average.
Follow A Hiring Process
Gaining insight into hiring velocity can help you highlight the steps of your hiring process that can be more efficient. For example, the applicant review step might take you less than 24 hours, only for a first interview to be scheduled two weeks out. If this is the case, your top candidate will likely find another job well before you bring them in to talk to the team. By id
entifying which steps are slowing down your hiring process, you can focus on ways to ultimately improve your hiring velocity.
By following a set process for each and every candidate, you can ensure each step is completed and you move candidates through the hiring pipeline as quickly as possible. You can also hold employees accountable for completing each step of the process.
A standardized, repeatable hiring process is key to ensuring you’re following the steps needed to hire the best team while saving your organization time and money. Hiring velocity metrics are just a piece of what’s to come with Hireology’s new insights capabilities, set to be released in a few weeks. Insights will enable our customers to compare their performance in various steps of the hiring process against industry benchmarks, and identify key areas for improvement.
Interested in learning more about how to improve your hiring?
Download our eBook, “The 9 Elements Of A Well-Oiled Hiring Process.”
