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Shortening Time-to-Fill for a New Hire
When you have urgent hiring needs, reducing the time it takes to hire a candidate is invaluable to your business. The timeline to identify and onboard a new candidate is often referred to as “time to hire” or “time to fill,” and reducing this timeline can make life a lot easier for everyone on your team.
How do you decrease your time to hire? Seeing how crucial it is for securing top talent and maintaining efficiency, at Corporate Navigators we do our utmost to position clients to make faster and more on-target hiring choices. Here are some effective strategies that you can do to streamline the hiring process and shorten your time-to-fill.
Decreasing Time-to-Fill: Tips and Tricks
Shortening your time-to-fill a role is important when you need to keep operations running in your organization. Here are some best practices to assist you in your recruiting efforts.
1. Carefully Screen Active Candidates
When you post your job online, make sure you carefully vet every applicant. The better you can vet these active candidates, the more you can increase your chances of interviewing on-target applicants.
It also helps to make your job descriptions as clear, specific, and updated as possible. While this won’t prevent all off-target applicants, a well-crafted job description can encourage more on-target candidates to apply.
However, since over 70% of eligible candidates are already employed, you’d be missing out on a lot of qualified professionals if you left yourself to the mercy of an open job post. Not saying there aren’t great active candidates out there, but an open job post will undoubtedly produce a mixed bag of results.
Knowing where to find passive candidates, or individuals who are currently employed but open to new opportunities, can greatly increase your chances of finding on-target candidates.
2. Identify on-Target Passive Candidates with Recruiting Research
The simplest and most effective way to find passive candidates is to hire a recruitment research firm. Recruitment Researchers and Candidate Developers from these firms will continuously source and engage with potential candidates that meet your criteria, handing you over names as soon as they become available. This method opens up a whole new talent pool: passive candidates.
Passive candidates are an incredible asset to companies who are searching for a desirable set of criteria that can be hard to find in the open job market. Recruitment firms can find these candidates by looking into companies and contacting professionals who currently work in the roles that clients need to fill. This is a much easier process to find potential candidates who have the skills and background required to meet a role’s demands.
3. Use an Applicant Tracking System for Active Candidates(ATS)
If you plan on being open to active applicants, then prepare yourself for an influx of resumes and cover letters. It helps to automate some of the initial screening with Applicant Tracking Software (ATS) so that you don’t run into many dead ends during your candidate search.
First, you can optimize your ATS system to automate repetitive tasks, manage candidate pipelines efficiently, and track applicant progress seamlessly. Using this software correctly, you can make the recruitment and hiring process easier by automatically sorting and ranking resumes to rule out off-target applicants.
4. Expedite and Streamline the Candidate’s Journey
Nobody prefers a hiring process that goes on for several months, so dragging out the process can result in losing interested, on-target candidates, increasing your time-to-fill. Having an efficient and speedy hiring process can protect you from losing good candidates. Here are a couple of tips on streamlining your candidates’ journey.
- Eliminate Hiring Bottlenecks: Identify and address any delays in the recruitment process, such as lengthy approval processes, too many interviews and assessments, or communication gaps between key hiring personnel.
- Conduct Parallel Processing: If you have multiple hiring needs, conduct activities like interviews, reference checks, and background screenings at the same time rather than sequentially, wherever possible.
- Communicate: Whether you want to move forward with a candidate or need to let them know you’re not interested, it’s important to communicate your intentions as soon as possible.
5. Leverage Professional Networks
It goes without saying that filling roles is also a faster process if you can get someone you know and trust to step into it. For instance, if you worked with someone who is qualified and they have no obstacles joining your organization, send them an offer and see what they say! Or, if they aren’t qualified, they may know someone who is.
6. Train Your Hiring Managers Effectively
Educating your hiring managers on identifying qualified candidates can also save you a lot of grief. Teach them to use efficient interviewing techniques, assessment criteria, and the importance of timely decision-making. In addition, ensure the hiring process has plenty of oversight. Foster collaboration between HR, hiring managers, and other relevant departments to expedite decision-making and ensure everyone is on the same page.
Also, keep your hiring managers accountable by tracking key metrics such as time to hire and candidate drop-off rates. All these stats can indicate what you’re doing well and what you need to improve. Allowing candidates to give feedback can assist with this improvement plan.
Reduce Your Time-to-Fill
By implementing these 6 strategies, recruiters and companies can potentially reduce the time it takes to hire while enhancing the quality of hires and improving their hiring process. Contact Corporate Navigators today if you’d like to establish a pipeline of passive candidates to be ready for your next hiring need.
