Dr John Sullivan Talent Management Thought Leadership

This two-part in-depth article covers the how-to steps that corporate recruiters can use to speed up their hiring process. Speed of hire is an important topic for recruiting leaders because without it you won’t be able to successfully land high-quality candidates who are in and out of the job market quickly. This article is a follow up to last week’s companion article “The Top 12 Reasons Why Slow Hiring Severely Damages Recruiting And Business Results.”

How Much Money Slow Hiring Costs a Firm

Of course costs vary depending on the organization and the job, but as a rule of thumb, I estimate that the “on job performance” of those you hire into competitive jobs decreases by as much as 1 percent for every extra day that you delay a hiring decision. So if you add just 10 days to your normal average time to fill, you can expect the “on the job performance” of your new hire to drop by 10 percent. For a firm like Amazon, a 10 percent drop in its average revenue per employee of $750,000 would mean a loss of $75,000 for every new hire. Obviously this amount is many times higher than the standard cost per hire and it is a significant dollar loss that is almost always unreported.

Steps in the Hiring Process That Are the Biggest Bottlenecks to Hiring Speed

In order to improve your speed of hire, you must first identify the unnecessarily slow segments of your current hiring process that create bottlenecks and delays. You can identify those slow elements quite easily with the use of a recruiting process map that contains the minimum, the average, and the maximum number of days that are required for each step in the process over the last year. The steps that contain a large amount of “variation in time” are the ones that you should examine first. The goal is to determine if you can permanently reduce the time that a “bottleneck step” takes to at least the minimum number of days that have occurred at least occasionally in the past. Of course which steps are the most frequent bottlenecks vary with the organization, but in my almost 20 years of work on speed of hire, I have found the biggest bottleneck recruiting steps to be:

1. The interview scheduling step
2. The resume screening steps
3. The approval process for new job requisitions
4. The added step of having to reopen a search with more realistic job specifications Read More »