These days, hiring professionals are under more pressure than ever before to bring in talent efficiently as the competitive market evolves rapidly. Many of these professionals use recruiting metrics to improve the experience of job candidates and streamline the hiring process. One such metric is time to hire. Here are ways to effectively reduce time to hire.

What is Time to Hire?

Time to hire is a common metric to determine the number of days between a candidate’s application to the time that candidate accepts a job offer. It measures your recruiting efficiency and speed. It is important to attract top candidates and keep their attention, so if your hiring process is too long, you may be missing out on some immense talent.

Keeping track of your average time to hire can help you to shorten your processes to prevent a top candidate from losing interest. If your process is long, tedious, and unorganized, your candidates may assume the rest of your company is just as inefficient. It should be a top priority to smooth out your hiring practices and shorten your time to hire to avoid losing those candidates from going elsewhere.

9 Ways to Reduce Time to Hire

Thankfully, it is possible to reduce time to hire. First you should evaluate just how long on average it is taking your team to get new talent into the business. Even the best and most efficient processes can always benefit from tweaking them to reduce your time to hire.

1. Structure your Hiring Process

Establishing a step-by-step, consistent process for hiring will improve the flow of your recruitment. This usually includes placing an effective job listing to attract the most qualified candidates, screening, interviewing, and making the offer.

Once you have the process laid out, you can evaluate which steps are necessary and which may be redundant. Perhaps you only need one interview with the candidate, instead of three, for example.

2. Pay Attention to Your KPIs​

Your key performance indicators (KPI) are metrics that can assist you in staying on top of data surrounding your hiring.

Time to hire is just one of them, and combined with all the others, valuable information is available for you to make the best decisions for your recruitment department. You should be able to see if an area in your process is slowing things down and make changes, as necessary.

3. Update your Career Page

Most active job seekers and some passive ones will want to visit your career site before applying to an opening. Information potential job candidates need to make the decision to send in their resumes should be added on the site.

Job openings should be featured prominently and applying should be as easy as possible. You will want to highlight your company’s culture and any benefits and perks. By keeping information clear and informative, you'll get applications faster and reduce time to hire.

4. Write a Better Job Listing

The same goes for the actual job post. Just as compelling as your career page should be, your job listings should also reflect the company’s culture, benefits, and an accurate description of the job.

Candidates want to know they are applying for a job that meets their income requirements, so be sure to state the pay range in the listing. The job description should be concise and honest in the scope of job responsibilities. Potential candidates should know why your company is worth working for.

5. Use an Application Tracking System (ATS)

This recruitment software will automate your hiring and onboarding, which will streamline all the processes and reduce time to hire. This can increase efficiency and reduce human error. It will assist in structuring your process, providing constant data in real time, so you are making the best decisions using the most updated information.

6. Consider Online Testing

Most jobs require common skills that can be tested online. Eliminating candidates that do not have the necessary skills can save much time. An online platform where testing is available as the applicants’ schedules allow can reduce the number of interviews needed by one.

7. Communicate with Candidates

Modern job seekers want timely interaction with the recruitment team, especially the highest quality talent, who may be entertaining several different opportunities. Ways to communicate with these candidates include text messaging and email, but if you want to stand out to these individuals, consider not using a standard form letter. By personalizing these messages, your company and recruiting team will stand out and be more favorable to the talent you are wishing to attract. Effective communication will help you reduce time to hire.

8. Employee Referrals

Encouraging referrals is another way to reduce your time to hire. By offering an incentive to recommend quality candidates who will fit into your company or department saves time and money.

Providing a good environment for your current employees will naturally cause word of mouth advertising for free. When friends and family see a happy worker, they may consider applying for a position there too. Accepting a job working for a well-reputed company with someone they already know and trust is an easy decision.

9. Recruit Trough Social Media

By advertising your open positions on social media instead of traditional job boards, you’ll reach a whooping 80% of all passive job seekers out there. Passive talents are people who are not actively searching for a new job, but are open to applying for new exciting job opportunities when presented to them. So by targeting your social media recruitment ads towards the right kind of candidates, you’ll definitely save more time in the recruitment process.

Do you fill high amounts of positions every year? Then an automation software that helps you publish instant social media job ads, could be the recruitment marketing strategy for you. Learn more on how Jobtip's automation software can help you cut a tremendous amount of time to hire.

Conclusion

With these 9 ways in your back pocket, you should be able to cut down your recruitment department’s time to hire. This is a metric that is extremely impactful to your business, and essential to attracting the highest quality of talent. Implementing these suggestions will save your company time, lower expenses, and bring in the employees your business needs to succeed at recruiting.