Time to Hire Metric and How Hiring Intelligence Can Help

In the U.S., it takes about 40 days to fill a position and just under $5,000 per hire on average. When 15 percent of those costs go directly toward recruitment efforts, the longer you take to hire an employee, the higher your overall costs will be. 

But timely hires mean little if you aren’t landing quality hires. In fact, the U.S. Department of Labor’s estimate for the cost of a bad hire is 30 percent of that employee’s salary, which is $15,000 a year on a $50,000 salary. 

This puts recruiters in a difficult position. On one hand, they want to improve their time-to-metric rate to decrease costs, enable productivity, and provide the support that their staff needs. At the same time, however, rushing the process can lead to poor hiring decisions and costly long-term hires.

The solution? Using hiring intelligence and hiring analytics to improve your recruiting practices. Below we’ll cover everything you need to know about improving your time to hire metric with the help of talent intelligence. 

What is time to hire?

Time to hire, not to be confused with time to fill, refers to how long it takes a candidate to get through the hiring process once they’ve entered your pipeline. Whether they’ve applied for a position or you reach out to them, the metric is an indication of how effective and seamless your hiring process is between application periods, interview panels, and other hiring steps. 

It’s important to have a healthy time-to-hire metric because quality candidates will often be applying to more than one job and deciding between several offers. A long time-to-hire rate could give your competitors a chance to make an attractive offer and secure a hire before you’ve gotten through your hiring funnel. 

What is a good time to hire metric?

What’s a good time to hire metric? It depends on what position you’re looking for, your location, and your hiring needs. Average rates for time to hire will vary depending on the role, but these LinkedIn numbers can give you a snapshot of what some time-to-hire averages look like. 

• Engineering–49 days
• Finance–46 days
• Information technology–44 days
• Healthcare provider–40 days
• Human resources–30 days
• Accounting/Auditing–37
• Customer service–34
• Administrative–33

A 2014 University of Chicago study showed longer wait times for larger companies. Companies with 5,000 or more employees took nearly 60 days on average to hire an employee, compared with the national average of 25 days at that time. 

It’s hard to give a fixed number that works for every company and every role, but if you can manage to complete a hire within 30 days, you are in the top 20-30 percent of companies for time to hire. 

How do you measure time to hire?

There’s a simple formula for calculating your time to hire: time to hire = day of accepted offer minus the day your candidate entered your pipeline. 

So if you open a job on October 1st, for example, October 1st is day one. Imagine a candidate caught wind of your job post and applied on October 10th. After going through all the hiring funnel steps, your candidate finally accepted the job on October 25th. To get your time-to-hire, you subtract 25 (the day of the accepted offer) from 10 (the day the candidate entered your pipeline), and you’re left with 15 days. So your time to hire for that individual is 15 days. 

How talent intelligence helps your time to hire

Talent intelligence helps synthesize the problems of quality of hire and time to hire by removing time-consuming manual processes while also improving your ability to source, reference check, and evaluate the quality of candidates. Advanced recruitment technologies, like Crosschq, can do this with the power of automation, data aggregation, and better data bases and sourcing networks. 

With Crosschq, you can speed up your time to hire (and maintain your quality of hire) with:

• Crosschq’s opt-in network of highly qualified and active candidates
• Time-saving enhanced search capabilities
• Candidate data enriched with soft skills, past education, performance, and more
• 360 reference check reporting that can gather candidate reports within 48 hours
• A 360 platform that reduces overall turnaround time reduction by 85 percent
• Customizable real-time alerts that provide you with the information you need when you need it

Crosschq and Your Time to Hire

Crosschq’s proprietary TalentWall technology will give you a bird’s-eye view of your pipeline and priorities, helping you to get a better pulse on the health of your pipeline. With streamlined assessments of your pipeline health, automated reference checking, and quality of hire analytics, you can reduce your time to hire without sacrificing your quality of hire metrics.

Try the Crosschq demo to hire better, faster, and more equitably today.