Time-to-hire: the race against costs

Time-to-hire describes the period from a vacancy arising to the open position being filled. For many companies it is an important KPI. Two factors weigh heavily: the labour market situation in a particular industry or region, and the efficiency of the recruiting process at the hiring company. What a company can influence directly and at short notice is above all the efficiency and professionalism of its own process. The tighter the labour market, the more decisive fast response times and clear, comprehensible selection and decision-making processes become.

How long may filling a position take?

Various surveys put the average time-to-hire at between two and four months. Finding and selecting qualified specialists and executives sometimes takes considerably longer.
In a Forsa study commissioned by Xing E-Recruiting, 200 HR directors from companies with more than 200 employees were asked about time-to-hire. Around 70 per cent said it had risen over the previous five years. The remaining 30 per cent were dealing with a sharp increase. More than 70 per cent of the HR leaders surveyed expect the trend to continue and time-to-hire to keep climbing. Far more important for the individual candidate than the length of time a position stays open, though, is how they experience the selection process. How candidates rate their own experience after submitting an application, the candidate journey, is often the decisive factor for top candidates in particular.

What does it cost?

Many companies look only at the budget needed for the search itself. Those costs come from placing job ads on job boards, from social media activity or from engaging executive search consultants. The opportunity costs, the benefit forgone through lost revenue and the like while a position sits unfilled, are likely to be considerably higher, especially for key and bottleneck roles.

What can be done?

Companies have plenty of options for countering rising time-to-fill and speeding up their processes. Contacts in HR and in the hiring department need to be easy for interested candidates to reach. Prompt first interviews by phone or video would shorten response times considerably without much effort. Where a candidate looks like a fit, a decision should follow without notable delay, on the basis of a detailed interview or an individual assessment, or both.
Because this apparently seems impossible for many companies, given the lack of time and the workload of decision-makers in HR and the departments, those companies lose attractiveness through long response times and delays that candidates often find impossible to understand. Feeling undervalued or unsure how long the process will run, the best candidates not infrequently decide to withdraw from a procedure that may already be well advanced but looks opaque and open-ended.

A good consultant can help

Preparing the ground for a positive candidate journey is core business for a good executive search consultant. A professional consultant with industry experience should also be well placed to identify suitable candidates on the basis of a thoroughly worked-out requirements analysis, and to provide a reasoned shortlist covering the expertise, personality and motivation of the candidates they recommend. The consultant's value lies above all in the ability to find the top candidates in the market who are not actively looking, to get them interested in the vacancy and to motivate them to enter the process. In many companies, the people responsible simply do not have the time or the expertise that alone requires.
Beyond that, it is the consultant's job to keep an eye on the selection process through to a signed contract, in the interest of a positive candidate journey, and to steer it or at least influence it where needed. Only that genuinely takes the load off decision-makers in HR and the departments.
Engaging an executive search consultant does not just save resources and nerves. It can bring down time-to-hire considerably, and the costs that come with it. The condition is commitment on both sides and a willingness to let real trust develop between the consultant and the decision-makers in the company.