Here's How Measuring Time To Hire Is Hurting Your Recruiting

June 5, 2015 at 6:30 AM by Kathleen de Lara

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In recruiting, being good at your job has traditionally been broken down into three key metrics – how much you’re spending to find people, how long it takes to fill a position, and how well an employee performs in the role.

Open roles equate to a team running at less than full speed, hurting the company’s goals and culture in the long run. Who wants to continually attempt to do more with less resources? Building a pipeline of talent is a timeless, common challenge even for the most skillful hiring teams. Reducing how long it takes to get someone from the other end of the interviewing table into a seat in the office has been idealized as the key hiring metric to boast. The number of people a team hires in a quarter overshadows what happens after the fact. Are these people actually fit for the company? Now? In a month? How about next year?

Evaluate how your team defines success to avoid these common (and costly) hiring gaffes.

Rushing to fill openings rather than to fulfill hiring needs

Keeping track of how long it takes to hire doesn’t offer teams the info it needs to adjust their sourcing and recruiting strategies. Placing a person in an empty chair is just the tip of the iceberg. Ultimately, the hiring goal boils down to quality over quantity, and if someone who looks good on paper and interviews well translates to someone who’ll do well on the job, there’s a disconnect in the hiring tactics and end goal. Recruit and hire keeping in mind the overall business intents, not just hiring objectives.

Excluding qualified candidates and shrinking the candidate pool

To keep up with each role’s time to hire goals, recruiting teams may set up fixed, precise hiring timelines, turning away interested, skilled applicants from making it to the screening stage. What’s worse is if your team sticks to their hard deadlines and trashes resumes coming in after the date, the company is missing out on creating a pipeline of potential candidates to reach out to in the future.

Hampering company culture and the way the team develops

Riffing off our first point, finding someone who’ll help the team meet its business goals comes in two parts. Are they a fit for the team? Throwing in wildcard, albeit skilled, people to fill open roles is a careless way to grow the company. How does this person interact with your colleagues and their future coworkers? Does their management or work style mix well with others on the team? Keep in mind the team’s goals for cultivating its culture, and whether the hire will set you back or propel new ideas and diversity.

While growing the team, lining up the recruiting means and ends is essential to hiring and retaining talented people. Consider how much the team is willing to trade their hiring speed goals for hiring quality. Where’s the overlap? Track time to hire with quality of the hire as an ongoing process and you’ll be able to hone in on a formula that works for the team, instead of using blind benchmarks.

Looking for more ways to refine the hiring process? Watch our webinar with Jobvite, Techniques for Improving Communication Between Recruiters and Hiring Managers

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