5 Simple Tricks to Improve Your Time to Hire

As we showed in Why Time to Hire is Your Most Crucial Metric, time to hire can act as a powerful compass for your recruiting team in the land of high-volume hiring. A sluggish hiring process can cost you time, money, and quality candidates. Below are some steps you can take to optimize your process.

1. Have a clear map of your hiring process

It is incredibly difficult to diagnose problems in your hiring process without a clear visual of all its steps. Flow chart, hiring journey map, call it what you will, this visual will be the drawing board your team uses to find and eliminate inefficiencies.

Start by listing out every touchpoint your team and your candidates have. From applicant channels to paperwork that needs to be signed by a hiring manager, get it all down! Next, order it in a way that makes the most visual sense to you. Below is an example of one we like. Once your various steps are written down, dive more deeply into each step. How is it running? Are there things that can be automated? Is any piece of it repetitive or just not really that important?

2. Invest in a good ATS

We mentioned automation in the section above, and an Applicant Tracking System is often an irreplaceable player in this regard. A great ATS will not only help you build out and manage the steps in your hiring process, it will support a faster paced candidate movement through that process by automating (and therefore simplifying for you) things like scheduling, messaging, candidate progression for pass or fail assessments, and more. This will allow you to not only build a great hiring process for one of your jobs, but also scale it as your company and its workforce grows.

3. Automate candidate communication and assessment

Consistent communication is key to keeping your candidates engaged and up-to-date during their progression through the hiring process. Sending hundreds of update messages to candidates, however, is not a high-value use of a recruiter’s time.

This is where automations with messaging comes in. The ability to automate many of these messages—such as updates about a candidate’s progression to the next stage or an invitation to schedule an interview—can save a lot of time and energy in your process, and avoid delayed updates or candidates slipping through the cracks. Look for a messaging automation feature, as well as the ability to send SMS messages when deciding on your ATS: nearly 90% of jobseekers apply on mobile and text messages have a 98% open rate compared to 22% for email.

Next, using assessment software as much as possible within those messages will save your recruiters time on asking extra interview questions, inputting data manually for things like background checks, and reviewing forms without clear scoring methods. A benefit to these software as well is that they can often sync with your ATS to add their results directly to applicant profiles.

4. Make interview scheduling quick

To reduce the dull, time-burning process of the back-and-forth availability check, set up a candidate-led scheduling feature. All your recruiters need to do is add in their availability, and then candidates can quickly look at open times to select one that works for them. This reduces your message number from 3 or more to a maximum of 2 easily-automated messages–one with the scheduling link and one with a confirmation of their day and time.

5. Make the most of your data

Data is often a direct indicator of areas for improvement not only for your team’s time to hire, but across many aspects of your hiring process. Well-presented data, a key feature in your ATS, will show you the average time it takes candidates to move between different stages to help you identify bottlenecks in your process, or even point out which sections of your process suffer from the highest rates of drop-off. Data can also help you and your team hold yourselves accountable by providing objective metrics to use as benchmarks and trackers for reaching goals and improving consistently.