Time-to-hire: how to reduce selection times

Time-to-hire is the time that elapses between the moment in which we define the need to acquire a talent to the one in which the profile is physically hired.

In the absence of supporting tools and technologies, the recruitment and selection process are often very long and negatively impacting both on the job of the recruiter (who conducts research) and for the internal client (who must solve a contingent problem).

If on the recruiter side, the reduction of time is sometimes a marginal problem and less impacting in the short term, for the internal customer the direct selection cost is often n times less than the losses generated by the absence of a specific professional figure. We do not necessarily speak of C-level, we trivially think of skilled workers without whom the manufacturing plants – perhaps in a continuous cycle – cannot work.
Time-to-hire has a huge impact on the economy and on the competitiveness of organizations.

Why are the selection times so long?
Let’s try to unpack some macro phases and identify for each which are the critical points and how we can solve them.

The first publishing platform must inevitably be our company website. All of the studies say that the best source of recruitment in terms of “candidates hired / cost incurred” is the company website.

The reason? If I am working and want to change the first searches will be within my sectoral chain; these are candidates who have a natural matching.

Once the offer has been published on the site, it must be spread on the web; a process that, done manually, is really long and expensive: you need to go to the individual job portals and social channels to repost the offer, in exactly the same way you did for your site.
These activities can be done simultaneously, with a few clicks, thanks to the use of multiposting software or multiposting tools integrated in the management software

Collecting incoming CVs seems a trivial action but often represents the most tiring and expensive activity, in terms of time and resources. The application format is the focal point of our collection: the absence of an information collection tool, or its incompleteness, determines a significant increase in the work of the recruiter. This is because if the format is not well structured, each new candidate – let’s assume only those that arouse a first interest – will need to manually request a series of additional information in order to proceed with the selection.

No less tiring is the job of collecting information after activating a multiposting system but the dedicated tool is not complete. An effective multiposting tool has as its peculiarity a system for sending offers and one for receiving candidates; if the reception phase is not foreseen or is only partial, the recruiters will be forced to visit each single platform, manually download the CVs and bring them back to their work environment. We are talking about an incalculable time.

The selection process consists of several activities – more or less expensive – that involve recruiters and candidates. Let’s analyze some of them:

• Soft and hard skills tests (such as language tests). By now many recruiters are abandoning paper tests and are turning to online testing platforms. The problem is that, as in the case of multiposting, if there is no integration between the platform and our Applicant system, we risk having to duplicate the verification times due to the multiplication of information that we already manage.
• Video recruiting. The use of video interview systems has the dual function of reducing the number of one-to-one interviews that are not always necessary and giving candidates the opportunity to present themselves in the best way. Even in this case, if we use video recruiting tools that are not integrated in our management system, we will have to manually combine and analyze information from different sources, inevitably lengthening the selection times.

Evaluation is the only qualitative step that requires human intervention; a step to which, unfortunately, we currently devote much less time than necessary. The reason? Too much energy is used in data entry and information processing jobs.

Technologies designed and integrated within organizations, such as the JobArch Application Ranking System, can significantly reduce selection times and restore professionalism to recruiters who will thus be able to devote more time to qualifying work, leaving the machine the repetitive time activities.