In a recent study of 30,000 hires, we found exactly where the most time is wasted in hiring… and this is how you’re going to get the lead out.

It likely comes as no surprise that ‘interviewing’ is the longest stage of the hiring process, taking almost half of the total time to hire, according to our recent study of 30,000 hires from multiple industries, disciplines, and countries.

The interview process is fraught with schedules to coordinate, goals to align, and feedback to share, which is why recruiters often struggle to shepherd candidates through this step in a timely manner. The bottom line is that the interview stage involves the most people, and is critical to vetting the candidate’s competency and fit for the role. However, the importance of interviewing doesn’t mean it should create bottlenecks in your hiring process. In fact, a lagging screening process can actually undermine the effectiveness of your team’s hiring in general – candidates have a poor experience, hiring teams become fatigued, and top applicants may find other opportunities.

In our study, we found that the average interview process takes 9 days, while the fastest 25 percent of hires complete the interview process in 3 days, and the slowest 10 percent need a whopping 18 days.

See the full study here, including time-to-interview compared to the rest of the hiring stages.

It’s clear that time-to-interview is a universal pain point for hiring teams, but there is hope. Recruiters can set the stage for efficiency by going through this checklist in advance to boost their hiring metrics, and hire the best talent before your competition does.

1.

Create Urgency: Establish a clear timeline for hiring the open position, and present a clear value proposition to your team as to why it makes sense to onboard by a particular date. Maybe the company will need this role filled in order to hit the quarter goals or to support a new project. If your hiring team understands how this new person will help them, they are more likely to be proactive about the process.

Our study found that companies are especially slow when it comes to internal hires and referrals – which take on average of 14 and 17 days, respectively. Hiring managers tend not to feel the same urgency with ‘familiar’ candidates, so make sure to monitor their progress more closely.

2.

Establish Clear Plan of Action (PoA): Determine the types of interviews that need to take place in order to assess the candidate’s competency for the role, create an order for the evaluations, assign hiring team members to each round, and decide roughly how many candidates should make it through each stage of the interview process.

3.

Get Feedback: Make sure everyone on the hiring team knows what type of feedback they need to provide post-interview, and where it should be recorded (applicant tracking system [ATS], Slack, email, etc.). Consider scheduling an extra 10 minutes at the end of the interview for your team to fill out individual or group evaluations.

4.

Avoid the Scheduling Black Hole: Scheduling is where your PoA will really come into play. If you’ve already established who needs to be in which interviews (executive leadership, team lead, department head, etc.) then it’s time to take advantage of your ATS’ scheduling capabilities or even Google Calendars to find a time that works for everyone. Just don’t start an email thread – everyone knows that’s a bad idea.

Feedback will also play a role in scheduling. The faster you know which candidates should progress to the next round, the faster you can schedule their next interview, so don’t hop over step four.

5.

Interview Alternatives: During the PoA stage you will determine the types of interviews your team will conduct, but it never hurts to consider alternatives to the traditional in-person meetings. Many recruiters will start off with a phone screen, move to online evaluation, and talk via video chat before inviting the candidate into the office. These methods allow recruiters to establish a rapport with candidates before committing to a live visit, and provide a great alternative for out-of-town applicants or hiring team members who work remotely.

Check out our marketplace to search online evaluations and assessment tools for everything from coding to soft skills.

6.

Use Your Tech: In our study, we found that hiring managers who made use of our mobile app hired an average of two days faster than those who only used their desktop computer, so make sure your hiring team is aware of the tech tools available to them. As a recruiter, you have the best understanding/knowledge of the types of resources available to you and your hiring team – don’t take that knowledge for granted!

With all the small steps it takes to make a hire, it can be hard to pinpoint where the process is dragging, we did some digging and this is what we found!

Last year the average time-to-hire was 23.8 days, up from 13 days in 2010 according to Glassdoor findings. This lag time is a problem because it costs your company revenue, and makes for a bad candidate experience. Though a variety of factors play a role in the time-to-hire metric, including low unemployment and a lack of skilled workers, or just workers in general, there are steps your organization can take in order to reduce that time and stop costing themselves precious resources, not to mention their reputation.

Costs of protracted time-to-hire:

• Loss of revenue: Every day a job goes unfilled you lose the revenue that an employee would have generated.
• Internal Resentment: Burning out current employees who have to cover the work of the open position.
• Bad Candidate Experience: Candidates feel nervous, frustrated, or in the dark.

• Opportunity Loss: Candidates may take your slowness as a sign of poor company communication, and take another offer.

To identify an action plan for more efficient recruiting we went to the numbers! Hiring is a multi-step process, involving many departments, so we looked at 30,000 hires to isolate each step and locate the problem area. Here’s what we found: There are four basic steps in the talent acquisition flow – view application, review candidates, interview, and offer. And it’s these two final steps that are causing TA teams to stall out.

So who did we survey?

We looked at 30,000 hires from SmartRecruiters last year from small, large or enterprise companies in Financial Services, Education Management, Health Care, Retail, and Information/Technology Services. In the interest of delivering the most relevant information, we omitted the extreme outlier cases. You may notice that our average time to hire is 4.8 days shorter than the average gleaned from Glassdoor, this is most likely because all our data comes from organizations using an applicant tracking system (ATS), whereas the above survey includes teams working without this technology

Let’s go to the numbers:

Average: 19 days

• 1 day to see an application
• 3 days in review
• 9 days to  interview
• 6 days to make an offer

Fastest 25 percent: 5 days

• Less than 1 day to see an application
• Less than 1 day in review
• 3 days to interview
• 1 (next) day to make an offer

Slowest 10 percent: 85 days

• 11 days to see an application
• 18 days in review
• 30 days to interview
• 26 days to make an offer

Interviews are the slowest step no matter what type of company. Quicker alternatives to multiple in-person interviews could be phone screenings, video interviewing, and/or online assessments! A quick win for hiring managers using Smartrecruiters was making use of the mobile app, which cut the hiring process by an average of two days when compared to those using their desktop computer exclusively!

Surprising takeaways and expert commentary:

Lengthy hiring processes could be hurting more than helping when it comes to tech talent! As expected high-volume low-skill hiring, like retail, is done much faster than information/technology services, however, that time could be hurting you more than you think. Engagement expert from WilsonHCG, Paul Dodd says.

“In regards to tech, there are a ton of aptitudes, skills, and knowledge that needs to be verified, and depending on the latest & greatest profile, with things like java stack or hadoop, your talent pool is small. Any, one professional would possibly have two or three offers so if you aren’t fast enough, the opportunity cost for not having them on your team could be significant.”

Internal and referral candidates take longer to hire. Internal candidates spent an average of 14 days in the interview stage and referrals 17, while the offer stage took 8 days for internal candidates and 4 days (which is actually below average) for referrals.  Perhaps the familiar nature of these candidates make the time factor seem less urgent, but “This is a huge miss,” warns Katherine Moening, marketing manager for Click Boarding.

“Current employees can make, or break, your hiring game. Provide them with the same level of care and attention as new hires during the hiring and onboarding process – and they’ll become champions for your business and your brand. Treat them as less urgent, and they’ll go find someone that’ll treat them better.”

It takes more time to reject a qualified candidate, who was interviewed, than to make the hire by a factor of over 3 days. When you have your pick of qualified candidates it can be hard to tell one they didn’t make the cut, but remember timely communication is key to keeping rejected candidates in your candidate relationship management system (CRM) talent pool for the next position that opens up!

Learn more about this survey by reading our in-depth unpacking in “Terminal Velocity: Where Most Hiring Time is Spent, Stalled and Saved“.

Founded in 2004, Tipico is the leading sports-betting provider in Germany. The company has quickly grown and employs more than 600 people, thanks to their Talent Acquisition Team. Meet one of the Managers behind the charge.

For Antonio Arias Lopez, becoming TA Manager at Tipico last October just made sense. He’s a football fanatic and a total HR head. How often do those two passions intersect? Since his appointment, Lopez has been hard at work with his most notable contributions being the reduction of time to hire by 50 percent year over year, hiring 40 percent more staff with only a 15 percent bump in hours-worked by his team, reducing agency hires by 80 percent, and quintupling the number of tech applicants.

We sit down with him following his “All the Ways to Assess” session at Hiring Success 18 Europe. Read on as Lopez opens up about the strategies that yielded such incredible results for his team, how he implements tech, and why he thinks the future of recruiting lies within the gig economy.

You joined Tipico last October, what about their employer brand made you want to work there?

Three reasons: Number one was football. I’ve always been a massive fan (I am a proud holder of my Real Oviedo season pass since 2003). Two, the great work was done by Jonathan Pace, our HR Marketing man, which made Tipico really attractive with videos of the beautiful offices in Malta, fantastic employee events, and really high Kununu/Glassdoor scores. Three, SmartRecruiters. In my previous role, I had done a deep analysis of all the systems available in the market and SmartRecruiters was at the top. So, when I saw this was the system the role was hosted on, I knew that I would not need to spend months getting budget and implementing a new ATS.

What is your favorite part about working in HR, and what would you say is your specialty?

I’m a recruiter, through and through. I get people good jobs in the most efficient and fastest way possible while making sure both candidates and hiring managers are happy.  To me, the best part of the job is working with people and making an impact in their lives.

Everyone has his/her hiring success stories. It’s motivating to remember when I enabled someone to go from a boring job to handling experiments in the international space station – or to take people out of long-term unemployment into senior engineering positions.

In your opinion, what is the role of technology in HR?

It’s an enabler, not a threat. It may replace “tasks” but not many people. I don’t understand people who are afraid of tech. In every team I’ve managed we became more productive thanks to tech, and no jobs were lost. On the contrary, people could develop themselves and we could spend more time doing what recruiters need to – be out there talking to people about jobs.

What is something your HR department does you think all should?

I put a big emphasis on my teams getting together. I have ten people spread across four locations, and we make quarterly meetups where we look at ourselves and bring experts in to train us. It takes money, but it shows good ROI. The flow of communication is better and team members work together to solve problems unprompted. Our team is at the point where I can get a Maltese recruiter to fill a Munich job, because they know each other’s roles.

What do you think the next big thing in talent acquisition will be and why?

For business and recruiters, it will be a shift towards filling skills gaps, not just seats.

Whereas before, someone who needed an excel expert for four hours would look at an expensive training for an already burdened employee, now, the global gig economy posits a new solution to that problem – just hire an excel expert for four hours!

We need to lose the fear of using freelancers, and find a way to bring freelance recruitment in-house.