10 Dec How you can reduce time to hire by 24 days

Data from recruitment software provider Workable finds the average time to hire in the US to be 24 days. In today’s competitive talent market, the best candidates are estimated to be on the market for only 10 days. Compare this to the Society for Human Resource Management’s estimate of 9 days to start screening candidates after a job is opened. This shows a clear need to reduce time to hire.

Clearly this bottlenecking presents a serious problem.

The solution? You have to improve your recruitment efficiency, and this is done by reducing the time to hire. Here are three ways to do so at each stage of the candidate journey.

1. Integrate your Applicant Tracking System (ATS)

If you’re getting hundreds of applications for a job posting, then sourcing is probably not going to be a problem for you. But you need an ATS to help manage this volume.

To automate the flow from sourcing to screening you need to integrate your ATS with an assessment platform. This allows you to skip the time it takes to manually search for candidates and send bespoke assessment emails to.

A seamless flow between sourcing and screening has the potential to reduce time to hire by 9 days.

2. Use an automated screening platform

There is a trade-off if you wish to obtain comprehensive candidate information in the screening process. Each assessment will increase the time to hire.

But assessments that last on average 15 to 30 mins shouldn’t add much more than that to the screening timeframe. Having an assessment platform that packages a comprehensive suit of logical, numerical and personality and allows you to easily implement these tests en masse will cut down the administrative downtime between bespoke assessments.

The new generation of screening automation tools are using AI. AI recruiting software learns what successful hires look like based on historical recruiting decisions and then applies that knowledge to new candidates to automatically and objectively screen, grade, and rank them.

An automation system to consolidate components of the screening process has the potential to reduce time to hire by 6 days.

3. Use an automated interview tool

In person interviewing can take up a quarter of the time to hire.

You can greatly speed up this process by using video interviews that allow you to set or even pre-record question items. These automated interviews can be done by the candidate in their own time and place, which removes the administrative obstacles in scheduling face to face dates.

If you use an integrated platform you can further reduce time spent in the interviewing stage. By using outreach automation tools, you can send video interview requests to candidates your screening automation tools identify as good matches.

These outreach automation tools integrate with major email and calendar providers and auto-email or auto-text candidates, which greatly speeds up the interview scheduling process.

If you want to retain the face to face element, video interviewing can still offer a major increase in efficiency. It can be used as a selection tool to whittle down candidates for a meet and greet.

A video interview whether to replace or support the interviewing stage has the potential to reduce time to hire by 6 days.

Increasing efficiency in hiring doesn’t always compromise the quality of hire. By targeting each stage of the candidate journey you can weed out all the administrative downtime.

Through integrating your ATS to your assessment provider, automating the screening and interview processes you can cut down the time to hire by up to 24 days.