Few realize that increasing your hiring speed often has the second-largest impact on hiring results (after referral hires). Most track time to fill, but few recruiting leaders calculate the high correlation between your hiring speed for top talent and their resulting on-the-job performance after they become a new hire. To put the relationship simply, slow hiring decisions mean that most of your top applicants will lose interest or accept a faster “bird in hand” offer long before your firm gets around to a decision. And that slowness means that you’ll have to select from the remaining “not-in-demand candidates” which unavoidably, will result in a large number of mediocre hires.
Time to fill now averages 44 calendar days, an increase of 50 percent since 2010 (Source: CEB). So, if your executives aren’t sold on the need for faster hiring, show them this 20+ list of the severe and real damage that occurs when you hire slower than your talent competitors do. The most impactful damages are listed first under each category.
If you want to know even more about proven actions that you can take to speed up your hiring, please join Dr. John Sullivanat the workshop he is leading on that topic at the Fall ERE recruiting conference.
The Economic Costs of Slow Hiring
The most compelling reasons for speeding up your hiring process are based on the tremendous cost associated with losing top candidates because your hiring process is too slow. The most significant economic costs are highlighted below.
- Lower-quality hires— because top candidates may be gone within 10 says. Slow hiring guarantees you will hire weaker performers, who are of course the only ones still available after 30+ days. If these lower-quality hires stay for years, you must add the cost of these multiple years of lower performance to your total cost of slow hiring.
- Direct revenue loss— the most obvious cost will be the un-retrievable revenue lost due to long position vacancies in revenue-generating positions. Not only will position vacancies in sales jobs cost you revenue, but may also cause you to lose customers
- Lower productivity — you lose the opportunity to get work done when a position is vacant for even a single day. Having multiple vacancies as a result of slow hiring will dramatically impact the productivity in individual jobs and throughout the whole team.
- Loss of innovators— because most firms target innovators and machine-learning professionals, they are gone the fastest. Slow hiring will mean that you will experience permanent talent shortages in these critical areas.
To read more on Dr. Sullivan’s fascinating article from ERE on how slow hiring is negatively affecting your business, click here.
Merito Group is a small women-owned business providing excellence in outsourced talent acquisition solutions including retained executive search, RPO, and consulting services. Looking to hire exceptional talent? Contact us by email or 703-734-6340. To view our current career opportunities click here.