Dr John Sullivan Talent Management Thought Leadership
This article is in response to a recent social media discussion on the use of the “time to fill” metric. Its goal is to urge you to switch to the more effective “Need-on-Date” metric.
Just-In-Time Hiring Is The Ideal Approach
If you’re familiar with the business term “just-in-time,” then you should realize that’s exactly when your hiring should be completed—not too early or not too late. Instead, new hires should start “just-in-time” and “right when they are needed.”
Of course, in recruiting, we call our version of JIT processes by different names, including “time to fill,” “hire by date,” “right time hiring,” or, more accurately, hiring to meet the designated “Need-on-Date.” I prefer the “Need-on-Date” label because it reveals the precise date that the hiring manager has determined that they need the talent to begin work.
In direct contrast to the NOD, the alternative time-based metrics “time to fill” and “hire by date” unfortunately allow you to hire “prematurely” well before the person is actually needed. This premature hiring will result in a lot of standing around, wasted salary costs, and the fact that more new hires will quit.
The name “Need-on-Date” or NOD is short for “the date when the talent is needed.”
What Is The “Need-on-Date” Metric? (NOD)
In my view, smart recruiting leaders must learn to follow the standard business practices of all strategic units that provide other functions with resources and that is to provide these essential resources as close as possible to when they are needed (and not before or after).
In recruiting, that means that all of your critical jobs need to be filled close to their “Need-on-Date” (NOD). This “Need-on-Date” metric measures the percentage of all hires that actually start within 3 days of the date the manager specified.
In contrast, the more commonly used time-based metric “time to fill” (TTF) merely measures the average number of days it takes to complete the hiring process. So, the TTF metric doesn’t address whether the new hire occurred too early or too late. Incidentally, the need-on-date metric differs slightly from the related but flawed “hire by date” metric. Where the important word to note is “by” because “by” might also mean hiring well before the date when the talent is actually needed.
Realize that knowing the number of hours that a flight was in the air doesn’t tell you anything about whether the flight actually arrived at the gate on time. Any more than knowing the number of days that it took to hire someone reveals anything about whether they were hired at the right time, too early, or too late!
Yes, Weak Recruiting Practices Hurt Business Performance
Before you begin trying to improve the timing of your hiring, you should know whether more timely hiring has a significant business impact. And the answer is yes. Nearly 30% report that weak recruiting practices (including mistimed hiring) have “slowed sales or compromised product quality, leading to project delays and lower business performance.”
Fortunately, that means you can lower your turnover and salary costs and increase your productivity and business results. If you begin using this more effective “Need-on-Date” metric.
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What’s Wrong With The “Time To Fill” Metric (And why the NOD metric is more effective)
While it isn’t yet widely used, smart talent leaders should begin learning the advantages of adopting this much more effective “Need-on-Date” metric. Even though the more commonly used ‘time to fill’ metric (TTF) can actually speed up your hiring, it accomplishes that goal while simultaneously creating some painful recruiting and business problems. Below, I have listed the top five problems associated with the TTF metric. There are also multiple reasons why the NOD is the superior time-based recruiting metric.
The “time to fill” metric may actually increase expensive “premature hiring” – both the “ time to fill” and the “hire by date” metrics fail to count early or premature hiring as a problem. That is a huge mistake because of the frustration that “waiting around for the work to start” can cause among both finalists and new hires. One way to handle premature hiring that is not yet needed on the job is to delay the starting date. However, that pause before starting work may force the delayed hire to sit around uncomfortably for weeks without income. The delayed starting date will also likely cause some finalists who already said yes to accept an alternative offer from one of your competitors that they had interviewed with. A second problematic option for premature hires is to place the individual immediately on your payroll. This option will cost you many “wasted salary dollars” because the new hire will be paid while not producing anything. And even though they are being paid, that same waiting around frustration and boredom may also result in the idle new hire quitting and accepting an alternative offer. You should also note that this premature hiring increases the chances that the manager, the facilities, the required training or the job will not be ready for them on their start date.
The time to fill metric is so broad that it can obscure slow hiring in some of your critical jobs – unfortunately, the time to fill metric is a bit of a generalization. It only reveals the average time to fill all jobs. And because it is an average, reporting that single number may hide the fact that your hiring may be much slower in some of your most impactful strategic job families. Hiding a lower time to fill in strategic areas may have severe negative consequences. The largest problem will be that you will begin losing top candidates in your strategic jobs. Because strategic and mission-critical jobs need to be filled much faster than your average job. That means that no matter what time metric you utilize, you must separately report your on-time performance for your average and most critical and hard-to-fill jobs.
Unfortunately, the time to fill metric doesn’t tell the manager when the employee will actually start work – the traditional TTF metric can confuse hiring managers. This metric only covers the number of days it takes to complete the hiring process, which isn’t enough. Hiring managers really need to know the number of days before the new hire can actually start the job. Fortunately, the alternative NOD metric automatically assumes that there will be a two-week delay between each offer acceptance and the person’s start date.
Everyone is more likely to avoid “delayed hiring” if they know it’s real costs – to most, it’s obvious that hiring a candidate weeks after they were actually needed on the job can be expensive. This “delayed hiring” can result in lower team productivity and costly project delays (both in this project and dependent projects). Any delayed hiring will likely also mean that the current team members will need to continue filling in and doing overtime work. These strains may increase team turnover, which could have been prevented by meeting the “Need-on-Date.” You should also note that one final consequence of delayed hiring is that your late-starting employees might need to be rushed through both their orientation and training. Weak preparation may negatively impact their time to productivity, early turnover rates, and on-the-job error rates.
Meeting your “time to fill” target number of days might still mean you won’t complete your hiring in time. In recruiting, we face many cases where the start of the hiring process has been delayed due to a variety of administrative issues. That means that because of the delayed start of the process, some new hires won’t be available by the date they are needed. Simply because the total number of days remaining before the new hire must start the job may already be lower than the days in your time to fill target. The solution to this dilemma is for you to develop an accelerated quick-hire process that can be applied to every delayed critical job. This quick hire process will allow you to shorten your hiring process for a job. You need to shorten the hiring process to the point where the number of days it takes is equal to (or lower than) the number of days remaining before the new hire must start.
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“Need-on-Date” Implementation Tips
If you’re seriously considering implementing your own NOD metric, here are some tips that you should consider.
- Continue calculating both metrics – If you’re already calculating a TTF metric, it makes sense to continue calculating it along with your new NOD metric. And when you see that the old TTF metric no longer adds value, drop it.
- Prioritize your most impactful jobs – First, you must identify your high-impact jobs that must be filled by their “Need-on-Date.” Then, for each job family, develop a separate metric that measures and reports the percentage of the time when the need-on-date target for these high-impact jobs was met.
- Also, develop a talent pipeline – You can decrease your hiring time if you develop and use a pre-need talent pipeline. This pipeline should contain prescreened potential candidates for your highest-impact jobs. Then, you can use this pipeline to improve the sourcing and hiring speed of these critical jobs.
- Realize that the NOD metric will make your recruiters more effective – The NOD measure may also improve the effectiveness of your recruiters. It encourages them to complete all hires when they are actually needed rather than blindly attempting to fill all jobs faster, no matter how unnecessary that speed may be.
- Track the impact of the “Need-on-Date” metric on your hiring results – You won’t be able to continually improve your NOD hiring without using performance metrics. So, track and then report whether using this NOD metric improves manager satisfaction with the timing of your hiring process. Also, track whether this metric improves new-hire turnover.
Note: You can find my original, in-depth article covering the use of need on dates here.
Final Thoughts
In my practice, I have noticed that it has only been within the last decade that most corporate recruiting functions have fully accepted the importance of fast hiring. In my view, it’s time for smart recruiting managers to refine their hiring speed and timing further. So that their time-based metrics directly drive an increase in the percentage of jobs that are filled close to their Need-on-Date. At the same time, it will reduce the number of new hires who must be labeled premature or delayed.
Note for the reader
This is the latest post from Dr. John Sullivan, who was labeled “the Michael Jordan of Hiring” by Fast Company Magazine. Please help to spread his ideas by sharing this with your team/network and by posting it on your favorite social media.
