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Which Recruitment Metrics Are Right For You – Time to Fill?

Would you say that you are proud of the efficiency with which your company approaches the hiring process? Do you get excited about the opportunity to welcome new teammates onboard; or…you can admit it…does it make you cringe just a little bit thinking about how long it will take to get everything ready, round up all the interviewers to be involved and pore through all the applications? It all comes down to Time to Fill. In this second installment of my series about determining which HR KPIs work for your company, we’ll examine this telling metric.

In my previous blog about Cost per Hire, I indicated that there is generally a direct relationship between CPH and Time to Fill…in particular, as it relates to the cost of your staff members’ time to be involved in a drawn out hiring process. Take too much time to hire and the business could suffer due to lower productivity, and rush through the process and risk hiring the wrong candidate which will just negatively impact your turnover metric down the road.

How critical time to fill is relative to other HR metrics for your organization only you can determine, but consider this: just because you are a small or medium-sized organization doesn’t mean that you should get by with fewer steps in a shorter hiring process. Small companies can’t afford to “wing it” as it really can take the whole village to hire and onboard a new employee. Any size company can be diligent in making the many steps involved in the recruiting process turnkey; however.

Where Do You Spend Your Time to Hire?

If you’re like me, you manage by what you measure. And when I’m trying to lose a few pounds you can bet I’m recording my calories on my FitBit app…or if our household wants to save up for the next remodeling project, we’re entering our daily expenses into a spreadsheet. Even if I choose to indulge myself every once in awhile, overall by watching my behavior I change it for the better. Having the data in front of me helps me more intimately consider cause and effect. The same is true for the hiring process. Its easy to let a day turn into days and days into weeks when you are progressing through various milestones such as applicant review and interview scheduling without really monitoring your timeframe closely. That can easily translate into disengaged applicants that pursue other companies…and its a vicious cycle, your process then becomes even longer.

A Well-Oiled Time to Fill Machine

So, in the spirit of hiring introspection, let’s look at some basic hiring process stages and ideas for making them thorough, yet as time sensitive as possible.

Job description development

    • Have up to date job templates for frequently hired positions in place and then use them as a base from which to create more specific job listings
    • Use the job listing as an opportunity to set clear expectations about role requirements so that certain candidates self-select out of the process if its clear it won’t be the right fit
    • Create a Job Success Factors page to accompany the job description to paint a more vivid picture about a day in the life of this position

Post jobs to external boards & social media

Review applications and resumes

  • Set aside blocks of time throughout your week dedicated to application review so it doesn’t fall by the wayside
  • Use filters attached to job-specific screening questions to quickly view only applicants that meet basic qualifications
  • Have a comprehensive list of applicant status codes or dispositions already in place so that its easy to assign and continuously update applicants’ place in the hiring process

Conduct pre-screens

Applicant correspondence

Prepare notes & feedback

  • Use a form or otherwise standardize the manner in which you present candidate information to others – people will get used to quickly looking in certain places for certain information
  • Highlight applicants who are the best prospects to hiring managers by sharing their electronic records – keep it timely by requesting others’ response by a certain date/time in your notes or subject line

Pre-employment testing & assessment

Schedule coordination for in-house interviews

  • Request access to the calendars of others involved in the hiring process internally so that you may quickly see when they are/aren’t available
  • At the onset of the hiring process, reserve blocks of time on potential interviewers’ calendars in advance so that you know you can count on them tentatively being available during those times (even if it is a few weeks out)
  • Utilize video conferencing tools (i.e. basic ones could include Skype, Google Hangouts or GoToMeeting to name just a few) to schedule interviews earlier than they might be otherwise if the candidate were to have to travel to your office

Collect hiring manager feedback

Candidate communication – yays & nays

  • Engage applicants by proactively communicating to them about their status in your selection process
  • This can be done quickly by using email templates that include personalization strings (to populate the first name of the person and the position to which he/she applied, for example) and the ability to update applicant records in mass groupings within an ATS

Extend conditional offer of employment

  • Again, have a template for the language you typically use in offer letters/packages ready to go in an existing template
  • Give the candidate a clear deadline for responding
  • Explain the process of collecting information necessary to conduct background/reference checks, etc. in advance to the candidate should he/she accept

Conduct background and/or reference checks

  • Utilize a web-based form for collecting information necessary to run checks…embed the URL address for the secure form into a template in your ATS and quickly invite applicants right from the applicant record
  • Alternatively, check if your provider has a web services integration with your background check and/or reference check resource

Coordinate onboarding logistics with staff

  • Create an email distribution list of all the employees in your organization who should be involved in the onboarding of a new employee – that way, a quick message and/or checklist can be initiated with these people when the time is right simply by emailing one address
  • Incorporate employee onboarding software into your process so that, based on the division to which the new employee is hired, the appropriate staff members are automatically prompted of onboarding process and receive notification when new hire paperwork forms must be approved and/or electronically countersigned

Finalize start date details with new hire

  • Communicate with new hire to confirm start date and if onboarding software is in place, go ahead and explain that applicant will be receiving email prompting him/her to login and approve and sign various employment paperwork files

If you aren’t already employing many of these tips in your process, before you start consider documenting your average time to fill. Then, once some additional time-saving measures are put into place and in action over a period of a few months, measure your average time to fill metric again and see to what extent your organization’s efficiency has improved on that front. Share the success with your team and your CFO…as quantitative KPI info like this is exactly what you need to justify the cost/time involved with future process improvements. The ROI is there when you can create a turnkey process based on sound fundamentals.

ExactHire’s hiring software applications help small and medium-sized companies automate and improve the recruiting and onboarding processes. For more information on how our tools can impact your time-to-fill KPI, please visit our resources page or contact us.

Which Recruitment Metrics Are Right For You – Cost Per Hire?

In the age of Big Data, we have access to crunch numbers and draw insightful conclusions in many situations. The recruiting and human resources realm is no exception thanks to ATS, HRIS, LMS…and many other alphabet soup acronyms. But sometimes having that much information at our fingertips can be disabling and intimidating if we aren’t sure which metrics are worth our attention for our specific company. And let’s say you do know which KPIs will serve you well…how do you then decide on appropriate benchmarks for each metric for your business?

It may not be as simple as relying on comparisons for your industry because many factors can come into play such as your company size, geographic area, organizational culture, compensation and benefits package, number of steps in the hiring process and brand reputation. But, you’ve got to start somewhere…and as my favorite high school Composition teacher Mr. Barlowe often reminded me, “you’ve got to know the rules before you can break the rules!” Or for our purposes…know the meaning of various metrics before deciding which ones to throw out the window.

With that in mind, this blog series will provide a run-down of some metrics, AND mitigating factors, that might influence your decision on whether each could be a powerful piece in your recruitment dashboard. First, we’ll examine…

Cost Per Hire (CPH)

The average costs associated with hiring an employee for your company are comprised of both tangible expenses and the opportunity costs of various individuals’ time tied up in the selection process. While its easier to calculate the former by tallying expenses such as external job board postings, staffing firm services and criminal background check fees, figuring the cost of your staff members’ time is a little trickier as it varies with individual role and employee. While I’ll focus on some quick basics in this blog, for a comprehensive look at the CPH metric, check out this collaborative effort between ANSI and SHRM.

Why Hiring Costs Matter

CFOs love numbers like this as it directly relates to the bottom line and, over time, can keep you honest if recruiting expenses begin to inflate without generating improved efficiency in the selection process and/or quality of hire. You can use it to look for trends over time and across positions, as well as give your hiring managers a gentle nudge urging them to make up their mind more quickly if their indecision (or lack of sense or urgency to responding to applicants quickly) affects this indicator. Here are just a few examples of items that may contribute to your cost per hire calculations:

The cost of time to…

  • Write a job description
  • Push a job listing to various external job boards (will vary depending on hiring software that may or may not be in place) – and maybe you’ll need time to research which job boards will be best suited for your role, too.
  • Review applications and conduct phone interviews. An applicant tracking system (ATS) – though an expense – might save one enough time in shortening the screening process to be worth it.
  • Develop interview questions
  • Correspond with applicants to schedule interviews and send rejection notices
  • Prepare materials to recap applicants’ initial pre-screen for hiring managers
  • Make up for any revenue lost from stakeholders involved in the process that were pulled away from any normal money-generating activities
  • Coordinate the logistics involved with onboarding a new employee prior to their start date

The hard cost for…

Mitigating Factors for CPH Benchmarking

There is a direct relationship between cost per hire and time to fill (another metric to be discussed in the next installment of this series). So, the longer it takes you to find someone for a position, the higher your cost per hire figure will climb. However, while keeping expenses in line should naturally be important, you probably don’t want to pinch pennies so much that you are unable to successfully hire the right individuals. Here are some potential factors to consider:

  • If you historically just can’t find enough applicants for a position that is open frequently, then it’s reasonable to expect that your company might need to fork up the money for paid job boards or booths at job fairs.
  • If certain positions in your industry are uber-competitive, then grab your share of the limited candidate supply by considering a signing bonus.
  • Despite time being money, if you have previously rushed through the selection process to fill a seat with a warm body, then slowing down to make sure you find the right candidate for not only the position, but the company culture, just makes sense.
  • If you are a small company, it may be hard not to have a CPH that is especially weighed down by the opportunity cost of employees’ time. With fewer people on the team, everyone must wear many hats and contribute a great deal of time to the hiring process. Each new employee is that much more critical in a small business that may not be able to afford to make hiring mistakes.

Cost per hire may very well be an important element in your analysis of recruiting efforts. Looking at the fluctuations to this metric over time for your specific organization will allow you to make the appropriate adjustments and decisions to propel your business forward.

HireCentric applicant tracking software from ExactHire is specifically geared toward the SMB market. For more information on how this tool can impact your CPH, please visit our resources page or contact us.

Checklist: Use Metrics to Improve the Applicant Screening Funnel

Efficiency is my middle name…or I strive for it to be anyway. I prefer to follow processes, and as my co-workers know, when they don’t exist, I’ll create my own even if they are only applicable to me. As you might guess, I’m an 8 (on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being the most likely to follow policies and work within the rules) on the Manageability scale of the ProfileXT (PXT) assessment. I love organization, spreadsheets and color-coding!

But why?

Of course I’m biased, but I’ll say because processes beget consistency, data and therefore the ability to benchmark. And, “big data” allows you to analyze and improve, right? Well, to some extent…but so often when we have the data, we fail to actually do something with it. We forget the improvement part in the strife to collect the data in the first place. We’re proud of our shiny color-coded bar graphs, but now we’re spent from all the data analysis effort.

Good news. Another great thing about processes is that you can put one in place for executing change as a result of your data analytics! Build it in as a step in your checklist and then it will more likely get done. In this blog, I’ll discuss executing change as a result of metrics you collect during each stage of an average candidate screening funnel when recruiting potential future employees.

First Stage – Screen Employment Application Answers

This is the step in which you, as the recruiter, review application submissions for specific positions by candidates in order to deem them qualified or not qualified for the position (i.e. do their answers indicate that they meet your minimum basic requirements for the role?). With the aid of an adequate applicant tracking system (ATS), and your own previous due diligence in thoughtful question design, you can include screening questions that prompt applicants to answer in such a way that will automatically qualify or flag them. Thanks to this automation feature, your time is optimized as you take a closer look at only the applicants who have met basic minimum requirements.

Your ATS will provide you metrics that quantify how many applications are being received, as well as how many make it past this initial screening stage (among other data). But now for the evaluation and improvement part…which applicants made it through the screening question filter, but based on your own personal review of data collected from their resume or other answers, are actually not qualified after all? Ask yourself the questions below and then use your answers to enact change with the goal of firming up this stage of the recruiting process.

Lessons Learned:

  • Did you include enough (or too much) information about the job itself in the job listing description? Could providing different information better set expectations with applicants about what is required and help them to self-select out of the application process if they are unlikely to have the qualifications necessary?
  • Did you gather information from the resume that made it clear that the applicant did not have enough previous experience in a certain area…information that you might have collected had you already put a specific required screening question in place that would prompt the applicant to provide an answer?
  • Where can you record feedback about these “misses” in terms of applicants that should have been flagged by the system? Use it as an opportunity to create additional applicant status codes/dispositions, if necessary, or record more applicant notes in your ATS.
  • Did you receive enough applications to offer you a sufficient number of qualified candidates at this stage of the screening process?
    • Do you need to push the job to more external niche job boards and/or social media sites? How will that impact your recruiting budget for future open requisitions? Do you need to redesign your job requisition form to prompt managers to allocate a portion of their budget to paid advertising for open jobs?
    • Do you have an employee referral incentive program in place? If so, consider bumping up the incentive for hard-to-fill positions, and ensure that your applicant tracking system makes it easy for applicants to name a referring employee during the application process. If you don’t have a referral incentive program yet, start one today!

Second Stage – Conduct Phone Screens

At this stage, recruiters have narrowed down their list of resumes and now must conduct phone interviews in order to determine which of the qualified applicants will be invited for an in-person interview. A great deal of “cutting” can occur at this step, depending on the number of applicants you have, and efforts should be focused on verifying, for each interviewee, that information on the employment application is true, as well as assessing the candidate’s likelihood of being a fit for the company culture. This will also be the candidate’s first opportunity to ask you questions; and, the quality and depth of these questions will often be a factor to determining the candidate’s likelihood of progressing in the process (i.e. based on the questions asked is it evident that he/she prepared; does applicant care enough to ask questions, etc.). Select the candidates who will move on to the next step and then take pause to evaluate your efforts.

Lessons Learned:

  • Which phone screen candidates should NOT have made it to this step of the process due to a lack of skills or previous experience? What about their answers or background could have been fleshed out at the point of the application?
    • Or, what other phone interview questions could be revised/added in order to more quickly determine that this candidate is not a fit earlier in the phone screen conversation?
    • Would the introduction of any job skill tests at the point of application minimize the misfire?
  • For the stars of this round, what makes them more qualified than the others? Where did the star prospects find out about the position so that you can replicate the use of that ad source for future positions?
  • Based on the questions that the interviewees ask you, what additional career-related content can your team create and share with visitors to your jobs portal? Use this technique as another way to better set expectations with future potential applicants, as well as a means to test whether interviewees take time to review resources available to them and prepare for an interview.

Third Stage – The In-House Interview

In this step, you and/or your hiring managers will meet with just a few final interviewees in person to truly understand how their past performance and experience will complement the needs of your open job. Candidates at this stage will have the right skills and experience, but now your team will need to better assess their runway potential and further clarify that their interests and motivations will allow them to thrive in the position. More exposure to this candidate during this step will allow your staff to feel more confident about whether the candidate’s personality and behavioral hard-wiring are well suited for the position and management structure in place. Depending on your company policy, you may or may not have utilized social media screening efforts to verify the candidate’s experience, values and attitude with mutual network contacts. When you are ready to extend an offer of employment, take time to gauge the effectiveness of this round.

Lessons Learned:

  • Were there any final interviewees that were out of place in this round and should have been halted at the phone screen phase? If so, for what reasons?
    • Reevaluate your phone screen questions to capture candidate feedback potentially related to such reasons next time.
    • Use manager feedback in survey form within your applicant tracking software to record peer ratings and comments, and then look for trends that allow you to unearth not-so-obvious missteps at the point of the phone screen.
  • Rather than go with your gut, is it time to introduce a cognitive and/or behavioral assessment to give you a window into more objective, validated information about the interviewee’s motivations, interests and tendencies going into the final interviews?

Fourth Stage – Point of Conditional Employment Offer

Now that you have selected a finalist, at this stage you extend a conditional offer of employment and hope for an acceptance. Depending on your organization, local laws and an evaluation of the job, you may opt to conduct a background check on the candidate with his/her consent.

Lessons Learned:

  • If he/she rejects…
    • What are his/her reasons for declining the offer? Based on trending in answers across various open positions, you might need to make some changes to a variety of areas such as job listing content, company benefits, compensation, management structure, time-to-hire and your overall recruitment brand.
  • If he/she accepts, but then later fails on the job…
    • At the point of failure, what do you know now that you wish you knew then during the interview process? Hopefully this circumstance is continuously minimized due to an ongoing attention to executing change as a result of recruiting metrics and exit interview data collected. This step incorporates all the previous considerations for tightening up the screening and interviewing process, but might also include:
      • onboarding process improvement
      • manager training
      • an adjustment to benchmarks in place for any skills tests and employee assessments
      • employee focus groups

Fifth Stage – Big Picture & Future Planning

It is evident that a sizable task list can be accumulated just from paying more attention to what isn’t working in your recruiting funnel. However, building this incredibly important exercise into your routine will make your work more productive and stress-free in the future as you more quickly engage top talent to join your team and stay for the long haul. But its not over after the post mortem following the offer stage, don’t forget to apply what you learned by making adjustments to the job evaluation process for your next open positions – before they are open and you get caught up in the hustle and bustle of filling numerous jobs at once. Update those job descriptions and screening questions now. Explore new job referral sources and look at the conversion rates for your existing ones.

Stay honest by sharing your milestone goals with other stakeholders and set yourself a deadline for each lessons learned goal. These process reengineering efforts can only improve the quality of candidate you are receiving relative to your time and effort spent, as well as your time to hire. Plus, gain the ability to better predict the number of adequate candidates you should expect at each stage of the funnel based on your first-stage numbers.

How do you keep yourself on task and accountable to enacting real change based on metrics in your organization? We’d love to know!

For more information about ExactHire’s hiring solutions, please visit our resources page or contact us today.

Image credit: Lighting Sequence by Kevin Dooley (contact)

How Does Hiring Software Reduce Time To Hire?

Moving to a paperless hiring process can offer many compelling benefits to a small business, such as the ability to access data in a web-based environment, easy accessibility to social recruiting, and a reduction in the time it takes to hire employees. In this blog, I’ll outline ways in which hiring software implementation can improve recruiting and employee onboarding efficiency by and reducing time-to-hire. I’ll consider the time to hire calculation to include all steps from realizing the need for a job opening, to the time that an employee has started work–the initial onboarding process.

Easy External Job Posting

Can you quantify how much time you’ve spent uploading and formatting your job listings in external job board accounts in the past? And, I’m not just talking about the big paid boards like Monster, Dice and CareerBuilder, but also job posting portals at entities such as colleges and universities, as well as state workforce development and unemployment offices. An applicant tracking system should have an efficient means by which you can post your job listings to multiple external job boards with just a few clicks. Think about how much time this enhancement will save you when multiple job opportunities are available with your organization.

Source More Applicants Sooner With Social Media

Many times, organizations’ recruitment activities for some jobs can drag on multiple weeks, if not months, due to low applicant volume. If you are not receiving enough submitted applications, the odds are against you in terms of finding the right fit amidst a small applicant population. Utilizing social recruiting tools available in your ATS can greatly expand the reach and awareness for your job listings in a short period of time; and, since other potential applicants will hear about your postings from their trusted social media contacts/friends, you will be more likely to convert applications from this type of ad source.

Clarity For Your Applicant Management

Hiring software allows HR professionals to easily view lists of applicants for an employment opportunity in one screen, as well as narrow such lists using filtering criteria. This ease of use makes it quickly apparent which applicants have not yet been assigned a status to describe their level of qualification and/or placement in the selection process. Being able to quickly identify gaps allows recruiters to process applications in such a way that applicants won’t fall through the cracks and individuals can be moved through the process in a relatively short amount of time.

Be Responsive To Applicants

Even if your company receives a particularly high volume of applicants for each job, it can still be easy to protect your recruitment brand by sending personalized correspondence to each applicant when using an applicant tracking system. Your hiring software application should allow you to select groups of applicants based on certain criteria, and to then send mass email messages using existing templates. These templates should include the ability to automatically insert personalization strings so that the applicant still feels like a person and not a number when interacting with your organization in regards to the all-important employment decision.

Automation tools that help you to communicate to applicants rapidly will only encourage the top applicants to afford the same courtesy of responsiveness to your organization, as well. And, the faster stakeholders communicate with one another, the faster the overall time to hire for a position will end up being, as well.

Incorporate Assessments Into The Process Earlier

Sometimes the number of interviewing stages involved in the selection process for a job can become bloated…this might occur when a business fails to get enough objective information about the candidate up front. Particularly for frontline roles in your company, considering an employee assessment that is embedded right into your employment application might be just the resource your recruiters need to unearth more job fit-related information about applicants near the front half of the hiring process. As a result, perhaps one or two extra steps can be eliminated from the recruitment cycle.

Accessible Interview Feedback For Hiring Managers

It is hard enough to schedule interviews if you have two to three staff members involved, but it can be just as painful to get interviewees together to share feedback post-interview. A customized survey option in your recruiting software can allow managers to independently record answers to specific survey-style questions directly on an applicant’s record at their earliest convenience. These comments can be made visible to all participants and even provide score averages across all interviewees. Access to this data can move hiring decisions along more quickly so that the new employee can get hired as soon as possible.

Onboarding Process Head Start

Using employee onboarding software technology during the hiring process allows organizations to easily export, organize and process data that may be required for other HRIS and/or payroll applications in the company. By avoiding the pitfalls of manual entry, HR staff can operate more efficiently knowing that employee records won’t be missing required fields or have illegible information that requires more back and forth between the onboarding team and the new hire. After all, the last thing that a company wants to do during the onboarding process is take so long that the new hire starts to regret his/her decision to join the organization in the first place.

If you’d like more information about how ExactHire’s hiring software solutions might help improve your company’s average time-to-hire, please visit our resources section or schedule a demo today.

Image credit: Time by JD (contact)

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