These days, the average time it takes a business to hire a candidate is about 43 days (Jobvite). Some industries or positions may fall under that average while others take a little longer. However, a survey revealed that top candidates who know their value to a company will lose interest after 14 days (Robert Half).
Additionally, 77% of senior-level applicants in a Cronofy survey said that a bad recruitment experience negatively affects their perception of a business. The faster you move, the better chance you have of hiring the right candidate and avoiding a bad reputation. But, this can be a hurdle when you have bottlenecks in your recruitment process.
Effects of a Delayed Recruitment Process
The impact of a delayed recruitment process runs deep and goes beyond affecting a company’s revenue. Below are a few additional reasons why vacant positions in your organization could be costing you.
1. Low Productivity and Revenue
The right candidates contribute significantly to the growth of a company. Inadequate human resources stall projects, lower productivity, and negatively affect current employees’ morale. Teams have to work extra hard to hit targets, which can be frustrating. Overall, the longer your hiring process delays, the more revenue the company loses.
2. Ruins Company Reputation
This has everything to do with your company branding and how the public perceives you. What do past job seekers say about your company? People can find reviews on major job-hunting sites about any company. You’ll most likely have a bad reputation if your company has a history of delaying the hiring process.
3. High Cost of Hiring
A long recruitment process overstretches a company’s spending on finding the right talent. Unfulfilled positions draw away money from the business to advertise vacancies and interview successful applicants. You may actually be losing more money twice. One is in the advertising and conducting interviews, and two is in low productivity and revenue for the business.
To help you expedite your process, we’ve identified a few speed traps, if you will, that often hold up the time to hire so you can be sure to avoid them.
Speed Trap #1: Small Teams with a Loose Process
Typically, small-to-medium enterprises or SMEs need only a limited number of employees to operate smoothly. However, during hiring, businesses often receive a large number of applicants, which can take a toll on recruiters. This is especially true for those with inadequate recruiting personnel.
Here’s a tip: Creating a structured process for hiring and assigning a capable hiring team can help relieve the burden for an HR team of one (or a few).
Speed Trap #2: Evaluating Required Skills
Unclear roles and required skills in a job advertisement also contribute to an unusually long hire time. Some roles require top-level skills, especially more technical positions. So, they take unusually longer to fill, unlike entry-level or mid-level and less technical positions. Technical and senior job roles typically take longer to fill due to the high scrutiny and screening required.
Unclear roles and skill requirements attract hundreds of applicants, which you have to sieve out before finding the right talent. This can take so much of your valuable time. The ripple effect is seen in your productivity and loss of revenue over time.
Here’s a tip: Creating a well-defined job description (before it’s posted), candidate evaluation process and structured interviews can help eliminate this bottleneck.
Speed Trap #3: Limited Resources & Lack of Branding
Without adequate time and money, running job ads can be daunting. It can limit hiring managers’ access to the right talent for the advertised vacancies.
A company’s brand plays a significant role in the recruitment process. According to a Glassdoor study, 86% of employees and job seekers research company reviews and ratings before applying for a job.
Here’s a tip: You may never find the right candidates for your vacant position if little or nothing is known about your company. Frequently check your online presence and what people say about you if you want to make your recruitment process hassle-free.
How to Solve Delayed Hiring Challenges
Knowing the causes of delays in the hiring process and the cost your company pays goes a long way. If you’re struggling to find and hire the right candidates for your company, we’ve provided a few tips above that can help.
But even more important is a way to outsmart the problem, especially before your competitors do. If you’re wondering how to go about it, this is where AI recruiting could be helpful. Wondering why you should consider automating what you can and introduce AI to your recruiting process? AI-powered recruiting makes work easier for hiring managers, recruiters, and talent acquisition teams.
Take Paycor Smart Sourcing — it can help expand and diversify the talent pool from multiple sources that otherwise may be missed. And you no longer need to select a talent source for every job. Paycor Smart Sourcing will make that decision for you and will add soft suggestions, ensuring you are reaching all types of candidates and leveraging the best sources for every role.
AI recruiting tools can also create highly sophisticated searches, composed of hundreds of keywords that are practically impossible for humans to enter. Paycor Smart Sourcing eliminates manual keyword search. It automatically creates a search, using your job description. It then uses every relevant job title, skill and job requirements, assigning them with the appropriate weight. Then it refines the search, using your feedback. Even candidates that have rare job titles, but the right skills, will be included in the search results.
An AI recruitment solution is the best bet if you desire to speed up the sourcing, recruiting, and hiring process without feeling like you’re rushing and hiring a bad fit.
A good place to start is with Paycor Smart Sourcing. If you like what you’ve read so far, request a demo today!
Sources
https://info.cronofy.com/hubfs/Candidate_Expectations_Report_2021.pdf
https://www.glassdoor.com/employers/blog/most-important-employer-branding-statistics/