How do you figure out what’s working and what’s not if you don’t measure it?
In simple terms, recruitment metrics are data you use to track your hiring success. They are critical because they help you assess whether your company is hiring the right people and improve your recruiting process over time.
Although there are many important metrics you can track, the most important of all must be time-to-hire. In this article, we’ll zoom in on this particular metric, which has a compounding effect on the others.
What is Time-to-Hire?
Time-to-hire is the number of days it takes between the moment that the candidate submits his job application, and the moment that the candidate is hired. It involves the specific pipeline of that successful candidate.
Time-to-Hire vs Time-to-Fill
Many recruiters and HR departments tend to conflate time-to-hire and time-to-fill, but they’re not the same thing: the former focuses on the HR team’s ability to hire the best candidate available, while the latter deals with how fast you posted the job advertisement and got a person to fill the seat.
Time-to-hire is an indication of the efficacy of your hiring process; time-to-fill is an indication of the efficiency of your hiring process.
Why should you measure Time-to-hire?
For non-executive positions in the Service Industry, for example, we have observed that it takes about 23 days for Time-to-Hire. In contrast, a quality candidate is only available for about 5 days before being hired.
This is highly inefficient; in high-volume recruitment, the focus is on hiring for a large number of positions quickly. It shouldn’t take 23 days to identify the best candidate and make an offer!
Relation to Cost per Hire and Quality per Hire
Time-to-hire is also an important HR metric due to its ability to affect other metrics; the ability to hire the best candidate quickly will affect the cost-per-hire and the quality-per-hire, as well as the candidate drop-out rate.
Let us explain with an example:
- One method to improve time-to-hire is to utilise Recruitment Process Automation (RPA) tools. By speeding up the sourcing, screening, and interviewing scheduling process, you can focus your time on interviewing shortlisted candidates. That will lead to more thorough interviews, which can mean the difference between hiring the right candidate and hiring the first candidate. In high-volume recruitment, this time saved will undoubtedly help you to hire better.
- By improving your time-to-hire (for example, from 23 days to 16 days), you reduce the cost-per-hire, as well as the time-to-fill. You reduce candidate drop-outs due to them accepting another role within that time frame.
- You also increase the quality of hire, because you hire the best candidate in less time. Candidates are also less frustrated over the time taken to hire them, leading to higher satisfaction among job candidates.
Key Takeways
Doesn’t this sound like a good situation? And it all starts with trying to improve your time-to-hire. That will snowball into bigger benefits for your team and company, and also save you time in terms of manual sourcing and screening.
Try out our GrabJobs Job Portal and improve your time-to-hire now!
