We all know that it’s tough to find good talent to fill our vacancies right now. Whether you’re trying to do it yourself or via recruitment services, the days when you could accept someone’s resignation, take a few days to ponder on the ramifications to the business, chat with HR about re-configuring the role, and take another week to draft up a job description all before commencing the recruitment process are long gone. Or are they?
They certainly should be! But increasingly we are hearing stories from both recruiters and hiring managers about frustrations at the length of time it is taking to fill vacancies right now.
Measuring Time To Hire
In the recruitment industry there is a key metric used by corporate Talent Acquisition teams to measure success: Time to Hire. It’s right up there with Cost per Hire and Quality of Hire as one of the top metrics measuring the success, strength and health of your company hiring process. If you’re taking too long to make a decision, or putting too many obstacles in the way, then your competition will hire the candidate before you and it’s your resources that will get stretched.
JOYN is a data-driven recruitment model that combines the human expertise of recruitment professionals with cutting edge technology to augment their work, so we thought we would take a look at how our own Time to Hire performance was tracking for our own clients.
Pleasingly, we found that, in a period when everyone is bemoaning how long it is taking to find good people, our JOYN Recruitment Consultants have managed to buck the trend.
Over the past 12 months JOYN clients have actually been finding their staff recruitment assignments completed increasingly quickly as they utilise the experience and recruitment know-how of their JOYN Consultants to get results with greater efficiency:
Top Tips from JOYN Recruiters
So, we thought we would ask our community of JOYN Consultants how they are doing it, and for their top pieces of advice to enable companies to speed up their recruitment processes and reduce the all-important Time To Hire:
Write a great advert and start a passive search immediately. Get the client on board – they need to be committed to the process and understand that a tight market requires quick action and not waiting for a ‘shortlist’. Then ensure constant communication between hiring manager and candidates.
Jane Sears
It’s about forward planning. Yes, if you need to get the approval for budget from ELT, a parent company or worse-still (gasps…) an overseas approver GET THE APPROVAL DONE BEFORE YOU START HIRING or at least, confirm a timeframe for it to happen (and tell the candidate about this stage of the process). I’ve seen recruiters find a client the right candidate, in the right place, for the right salary – and then seen them lose them because an HR Director in a different time zone doesn’t feel the need to prioritise the approval.
Matthew Templar
An employer needs to be more flexible than ever with their requirements – you may not get the unicorn you could have secured previously so if they tick 8 out of 10 boxes I would interview and not let that be a deal breaker or wait three weeks to “see what else comes in”.
Vanessa Abetz
Get any social media up and going ASAP to give it time to penetrate. Putting posts up in FB Groups can take a while if the moderators aren’t vigilant with this, so the quicker you can get social media set up, the quicker it will go out to market.
Katie Eleftheriou
Once in the process it is key to engage with applicable candidates as soon as they come through – waiting a few days before making first contact slows things down and usually results in missing out in this market.
Melissa Budd
Be able to articulate your ‘Why’. Why should a candidate come and join your company? What do you offer? It’s a highly competitive market. If you are not selling you will not attract the candidate you want to.
Bob Walker
Have interview slots sorted with hiring manager pre advert closing so you do not waste time trying to find interview dates post advert close and lose candidates who may be interviewing elsewhere.
Emma Grigor
If there are strong candidates in the mix and the client is happy that there is definitely a hire in the final round, then it will prove beneficial to reference check the candidates in advance of that round, so they are ready to receive an offer with the process complete and there are (assuming) no issues with them.
Anna Newman
(once our borders reopen)… Ensure clients are accredited by immigration. Then Ta Da, more candidates!
Nick Wallwork
One of the issues I have come across is the client not responding in a timely fashion and in the meantime the great applicant has been offered and accepted elsewhere. I think ‘prepping’ the client with some urgency is what is called for – and say if a good candidate comes by we have to grab them or you may be waiting for some time…
Carol Abernethy
Engage Your Own JOYN Recruitment Consultant
JOYN is a community of over 50 expert Recruitment and HR Consultants, some of whom you have heard from above. We combine human expertise with tech smarts to achieve better hires at half the cost.
If you would like to learn more about our model, or engage with your own JOYN Consultant to turbo-charge your recruitment process, please get in touch today.
