Time to Fill Metrics: How to Fill Roles Faster & Improve Recruitment Efficiency
Has the time to fill metrics genuinely improved over the years?
I think back to my days as a recruiter, you filled jobs by posting adverts. That was 15 years ago. The saying was: “Post and pray” because you never knew what would come back.
The average time to fill a role, as we advised the business, was 30 days.
Even then, time to fill had flexibility because of the ‘war on talent’. It was challenging to fill roles faster. Skilled people. The ‘right’ talent. When we needed to fill positions faster than usual, we would engage a 3rd party recruiting agency to assist. However, that was costly.
- So, even with the proper sourcing tools in hand – the business just needed to wait. Here were the reasons that recruiters gave for not delivering quickly:
- We’ve had a really low response rate
The calibre of applications aren’t quite right
Our salaries aren’t fitting with what is the average time to fill a position in the market demands.
Sound familiar?
Reasons, and perhaps excuses. And the business just had to wait.
Fast forward 15 years, and from my observations, we are still seeing similar time to fill metrics.
According to Job Vite – average time to fill a position remains anywhere between 25 (retail) or 48 (hospitality) days (when I read this, I nearly fell off my chair!). This is surprising since technology has come such a long way since then.
Why are hiring managers waiting this long for these high-volume skills? And the wait will undoubtedly be increased due to the volumes of applications – thanks to C-19. What is the cost associated with waiting? A straightforward formula I found published by Hudson (for non-revenue generating employees) is:
(Total Company Annual Revenue) ÷ (Number of Employees) ÷ 365 = Daily Lost Revenue
Here’s a working example. Let’s take a retailer. They generate 2.9 billion in revenues and have 11,000 employees. This means that their daily lost revenue PER vacant position is $722.
If it takes 25 days to fill this position, then it costs the business $18,057 in lost revenue. The time it is taking to fill roles is costing the business too much. Speed is of the essence.
Volume recruiting and time-to-fill considerations:
I’ve observed talent teams who recruit in high volume scenarios, grappling with time to fill metrics; spending hours screening thousands of CV’s – with inherent biases creeping in by the 13th CV. Then fatigue sets in. And by the 135th CV, unconscious biases have turned into bold conscious judgments:
- Their CV is not long enough – “reject”
- Their CV is too short – “reject”
- The layout of their CV wasn’t professional enough – “reject”
- Don’t put education at the back, have it at the front – “reject”
- They are not descriptive enough – “reject”
- They do not have enough retail experience – “reject”. And what even is this arbitrary average time to fill a position based on years of experience? If you have hit the two-year mark within a profession, how does that automatically make you qualified?
In the context of volume recruiting, keeping your process consistent and aiming to fill roles faster is a challenge. The quality of the screening process diminishes as the average time to fill increases.
If it takes 6 seconds to review a CV, that’s 1.6 hours to get through 1000, impacting your time to fill metrics.
Then there is the phone screen. If you only took 30 into this stage and spoke to them for 10 minutes each, then it will take the recruiter five hours.
And time to fill is not concentrated nor time-bound to one session – it elapses. You aren’t sitting for 1.6 hours at a time nor can you schedule back-to-back phone screens, so the realistic time to fill frame for this is about a week.
From there, it’s coordinating Hiring Manager interviews, conducting their interviews, getting feedback, making decisions, giving offers, taking reference checks, and finalizing compliance steps to fill positions faster. This is where you question, “what is the average time to fill a position?” as it ends up being a long and drawn-out process.
By automating the first pre-screening steps recruiters can seriously slash the time it takes to fill.
Plus they can drive a far better process. How? By getting a trustworthy understanding of the candidate and their personality modelled against the organisations’ success DNA (the “Success DNA” is the profile of what success looks like in your organisation).
When candidates apply their first step is an automated interview.
It takes 15-20 minutes to complete, and all candidates receive a personality assessment based on what they wrote (which they love).
Personality can be deduced from the text that candidates write (scientifically proven) and then there is also the feedback from thousands of candidates talking to the accuracy of these personality assessments.
Here’s a tiny sample of all the feedback >>
What took weeks to get to the interview stage can now be done in minutes following an application.
For Talent Acquisition to build its credibility in the business, it needs to demonstrate its impact on the bottom line and provide tangible solutions to address this need for speed. Tools like Sapia can help with solving for these speed and cost challenges, and the benefits of providing a consistent, bias-free candidate experience are just the icing on the cake.
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