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Why You Should Assess the Time Your Company Takes to Fill a Position

Written by Daniela Costa | Mar 19, 2019 12:00:00 AM

As a Head of Recruitment, you need to keep an eye on recruitment metrics to assess your hiring process performance and ensure its efficiency. Attracting the best candidates is a top priority for competitive companies and you sure don’t want your organisation to fall short when it comes to talent acquisition.

Among the many important metrics to monitor, the time to fill a position is certainly one of the most relevant indicators of your recruitment process success. This metric consists of the amount of time it takes to fill a position in your company. Assessing the time to fill a position mainly allows you to understand whether your recruitment process is taking too long and if it needs to be improved.

How Can You Calculate the Time to Fill a Position?

The time to fill a position is the total of calendar days it takes your company to hire someone to a position. Usually, you should start counting the days since the day a job is opening until the day you hire a candidate for that position.

Bear in mind that the key to obtaining an accurate metric is to apply the same criteria to all of your jobs so that you can then calculate the average time to fill. Calculating how long it takes your company, on average, to fill a position will provide you with a clear picture of how your recruitment process is developing.

How can you calculate the average time to fill a position? It’s easy! Imagine that you’ve opened 6 jobs in the first trimester of 2019 and hired 6 people. To assess the time to fill a position during that period, start by adding the number of days it took you to make the hire for each job (33 + 41 + 28 + 31 + 39 + 42 = 214). Then divide the total of days by the number of hires ( 214/6 = 35,7). For this example, we would estimate that your time to fill a position for the first trimester of 2019 was 35,7 days.

How Can You Improve the Time to Fill a Position?

Once you look at the numbers, it’s only natural that you start planning ways to improve your hiring process and reduce the time your company takes to fill a position. The key is to outline a more efficient recruiting strategy.

To do so, first, you need to identify your recruitment process pain points in terms of time spend. What are the steps where your recruiting teams are wasting more time and why? Doing this assessment will allow you to gather important insights and implement the necessary changes and new procedures to improve the hiring process and reduce the time to fill a position.

In this regard, automating your recruiting workflow with recruitment software is possibly one of the best decisions you can make to turn your hiring process more efficient.

Here are 5 recruitment software features that help you reduce your time to fill a position and hire the right candidates faster:

1. Recruitment Analytics

Having an applicant tracking system (ATS) that includes analytics allows you to create reports to monitor key recruitment metrics, such as the time to fill a position, and provide useful insights to help you better manage your recruitment process. Using reports to assess your recruitment performance allows you to easily identify where you are wasting your recruitment time and spend, and where you should be using it instead to improve your results.

2. Automated Job Postings

The right ATS allows you to post your job openings to multiple job boards with just a few clicks, saving you a huge amount of time. Moreover, you can leverage your recruitment software to easily share jobs across your social media profiles and reach more and better candidates.

3. AI-Powered Candidate Screening

The automated, AI-based candidate screening is another huge time-saver feature that comes with the best recruitment software only. The AI-based process is more reliable and faster than traditional manual screening. Applicants that don’t match minimum job requirements are automatically screened out of the process and recruiters can focus on the best candidates without wasting time.

Sourcing candidates on your own CV database is another great way of saving time and delivering a more efficient recruiting process. An ATS that provides a candidate database with powerful searching and filtering features allows recruiters to find qualified candidates for new job openings faster. This naturally also helps to reduce the time to fill a position.

5. Automated Email Communication

Candidate engagement is one of the biggest pain points in recruitment. Manually communicating with hundreds of applicants may be humanly impossible and very time-consuming, but with a recruitment software, recruiters can send personalised mass emails to all candidates with a few clicks.

This not only provides a better candidate experience but also boosts your employer branding without taking much of the recruiter’s time. Moreover, if you use a system that includes email templates for scheduling video or in-person interviews and provide application follow-up, you’ll keep candidates continuously engaged until the end of the recruitment process.

Skeeled offers you the perfect opportunity to bring innovation and digitalisation to your hiring. Check our website or our LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook pages for further information.

Thanks for reading and see you next time!

Your team here at skeeled