The average time to hire across industries is 31 business days, and trends show that number will continue to increase. Recruiters and HR professionals are under constant pressure to decrease their time to hire, but both internal and external factors make that difficult. Here are four things that slow down the hiring process, along with what recruiters can do to mitigate their impact.1. Tight Job Market
The unemployment rate dropped to 3.7 percent in September, and it continues to drop. While this is good news for the national economy, it makes recruiters’ jobs increasingly difficult. With a job force that is mostly employed, recruiters will most likely need to make their jobs attractive enough to convince applicants to leave their current jobs.
While recruiters can’t control the job market, they can help control their companies’ marketability. A great way to decrease your time to hire is to have quality candidates actively waiting to work for your company. Make applicants want to work for you by providing a strong company culture, special benefits, and unique jobs with room for growth. Your HR, public relations and marketing teams should work together to brand your company as a desirable place to work.
2. Incompatible Software
Software is helpful in the hiring process until the programs don’t effectively communicate with each other. Many companies have one program for job postings, one for lining up interviews, one for communicating with applicants and yet another for background screenings and reference checks. Often, recruiters have to enter the same data into each of these systems, which quickly increases the time to hire.
The better recruiters can sync these software programs, the faster the time to hire. For example, you can integrate your background screening software with your applicant tracking system. This way, recruiters can spend less time entering data and more time moving candidates along the hiring process.
3. Lengthy Interview Processes
There’s a trend for particularly competitive companies to have applicants go through multiple rounds of interviews. The benefit of additional interviews is, of course, a chance to get to know the candidate better, and for the candidate to meet different people in your company. However, each additional interview can add days to your time to hire, and they can frustrate your applicant.
At one point, Google’s time to hire averaged a whopping 90-180 days. They had candidates go through 25 interviews, which included all sorts of unique tests and non-traditional interview techniques. But Lazlo Block, the former Senior Vice President of People at Google, found the “Rule of Four” to be just as effective, in which he quickly ruled out applicants, and then only interviewed four people four times. This yielded at 86% success rate, proving that with interviews, quantity doesn’t equal quality.
4. Background Checks
Once recruiters reach the background and drug screening stage of the hiring process, they’re just about in the home stretch. But effective background checks can take time, and one piece of information can take a quick time to hire and suddenly hold it back a week if an applicant’s records aren’t easily accessible.
Verified First provides fully integrated background screening solutions for 100+ applicant tracking systems. With an average integration time of five minutes, Verified First uses patent-pending integration technology to slash your time to hire. Contact us for more information.
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