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Hiring Best Practices Recruiter Tools Recruiting Metrics

Why is Time to Fill an Important Recruiting Metric

Breaking down Time To Fill

How can you measure the efficiency of recruiters? Well, it is the time to fill or time to hire that demonstrates how efficient the recruiter is. The long time opening of the job posting indicates the in productivity of the recruiting team. It indicates that the services are disrupted and the current employees are taking the burden of that extra job.

That is why; the accurate measurement of time to fill becomes necessary. The fellow managers should be able to provide realistic time frames in order to fill the vacant positions.

Moreover, the metric time to fill provides an insight into their own strategies, resource allocation and planning of budget. Longer time taken to fill the positions will result in higher cost per hiring.

How to calculate time to fill?

It is a simple calculation that helps in measuring the definite time period. It represents the time taken by the company to fill a position. However, the starting point or the reference point can be any of these three.

  • When the hiring manager submits the job opening for approval.
  • The job is approved by the HR or Finance.
  • The job posting is advertised by the recruiter.

The end of the time is marked by the moment when the candidate accepts the job offer. The starting point can be any as per your company policy but the ultimately target remains to fill the positions and teams consistently.

How to calculate average time to fill?

The average time to fill can be calculated with a simple formula. Adding all the time taken to fill the different positions and dividing it by the number of roles gives you the average time to fill. For example, if you hired for total four roles and it took 10, 20, 30 and 40 days respectively, then the average time to fill is

10 + 20 + 30 + 40 / 4 = 25

The positions that remain open for most of the times cannot be included in the calculation of time to fill or average time to fill. The opened positions will greatly inflate the average time to fill affecting the efficiency of your hiring process.

What is the ideal time to fill?

According to the Society of Human Resource and Management (SHRM), the average benchmark for time to fill is 42 days. It accounts to be 59 in the Engineering industry.

Different companies can have different time to fill irrespective of the efficiency of their recruitment process. You need to calculate it internally for the sake of your company.

How to reduce the time to fill?

These efficient recruitment strategies can effectively reduce your time to fill.

Take a look at the ideas:

Build a candidate database: It does not make sense to start looking for candidates from scratch every time you find an opening. Refer your ATS that may have a list of candidates who have made it to the final stages of hiring. Also, you may have data of the candidates who by chance, applied after the position was filled. This candidate database can be really helpful at the times of need.

Source actively: Passive candidates can help you build a great pipeline. Try to lay a strong foundation and build relationship with them. It will help you at the time of the job opening and you would be able to contact them directly.

Scrutinize your time to fill: Time to fill does not compromise of a single term; instead it is build from different layers. Time to interview, time to send application, phone screening and a few other processes. Analyze how long each stage takes and how can you improve it by decreasing the time taken.

Create an effective referral program: Keep sending the reminders of your job openings to your colleagues and offer your current employees with referral incentives. An email with the job descriptions and employee recommendations can be a great way to remind. The process will help to reduce your efforts on job advertising and resume the process of screening.

Use on-demand recruiting: At Vested, we understand how difficult it is to find the right candidates. This is why we started our company – to take away the stress from candidate sourcing so your HR team can focus on talent retention and other HR internal functions.

You can hire a traditional recruiter and pay as much as twenty percent of the first year salary for every hire. Or you can try Vested’s on demand subscription for only $999 a month.

The talent acquisition leaders need to well-versed with all the techniques to enhance their overall performance and speed up the process.

(photo from pexels.com)

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Recruiter Tools Recruiting Metrics

What is Time to Hire?

We always talk about quality of hire. The metrics is so important that we compare it to the most of recruitment. In the similar way, the time-to-hire can be considered as the father of the recruitment.

There are numerous of metrics when it comes to recruitments but nothing can be compared to the time-to-hire. Research says that more than 50% companies use this metric in to benchmark their candidate sourcing efforts.

The measurements that help us to measure the success of hiring track and optimize the process of hiring candidates of a company is known as recruitment metrics.

The process helps to evaluate whether the company is hiring the right candidates or not.

Time-to-hire is one of the most important recruitment measures indeed.

Here’s Andy talking about the importance of Time to Hire:

Define Time to Hire

There is a certain time frame between the moment when the candidate applies for the job and to the moment when he accepts the offer. This time frame is called time-to-hire.

A few people treat it same as the time to fill, however there is a difference. Time to fill refers to the time between the job opening and offer acceptance whereas time-to-fill is measured from the moment when the candidate enters the pipeline.

Time-to-hire is considered important because it refers to the speed of the hiring. It tells you how quickly the HR of the company can identify the right candidate for the structure. It is an indication of capability of your hiring team as well.

Why time-to-hire should be measured?

Measuring the time-to-hire is an effort to achieve the perfection. No process is ever perfect and really finished. Measuring this time frame is important because it helps to identify your room for improvement.

You can identify your shortcomings and weak spots in the process of hiring and implement improvements to make it better.

We have answered few common questions because our answers will help you to hold the process of recruiting more efficiently.

How long do you take to select the right candidate?

This is the most common aspect of hiring but, we often underestimate it. You need a fast recruiting team because a slow one will make you lose fast-moving (quality) candidates.

You will be surprised to know that a whopping 57% of employees lose interest in job if the process takes too much time. That is why; one has to calculate the certain time frame. You should know how long it takes to hire someone for a particular role.

Once you have found the right person, how long does it take you to move him in the process?

Recruitment includes different stages: CV screening, phone interview, assessment, in-person interview etc. Breaking down your time-to-hire according to these different stages will help you to calculate how long a candidate takes to move from one stage to another.

Will your time-to-hire change if you are hiring another candidate for the same role?

Tracking the time for a particular role of hiring will help you have an estimate how long will it take to recruit another candidate for the same role. Next time, your organization will have an idea about the particular time you will need to fill the seat.

Do you know how many resources you need to hire for a certain role?

This question is like an extension to the previous one. If you know how long the recruitment process will take when two persons are working on it, you will certainly know the effect of introducing one extra recruiter to the process.

How to measure time-to-hire?

We have illustrated a simple formula to calculate this time.

Time to hire = Day candidate accepted offer – Day candidate applied for the

position (entered the pipeline).

An example will help you to understand the formula in a better way.

Imagine your hiring team noticed a new job opening on Monday. You will count it as the day 1. Recruiters start their work, throw their magic and a candidate applies for the job on the day 13. After all the negotiation, he accepted the job offer on the day 28.

Time-to-frame here is, T = 28-13 = 15.

The formula will help you to calculate the time-to-frame for each frame and thus you can calculate average time as well.

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