The Importance of Speed of Hire

September 18th, 2008 | Conspired by Tim

In this day and age it cannot be stressed more that speed is critical to the success of hire.  But how do we increase the speed of a hire?  If hiring is left to the last priority you certainly wont have speed.  And you wont hire.  Nor will you hire if very well if hiring is left to a single person.  Here are some tips to increase the speed of a hire:

Use a system

  • The system has to be formalized and reliable.  Make sure that everyone knows the rules and everyone sticks to the processes that you have put in place.

Make decisions and stick to them

  • Nothing is worse than flip flopping on decisions.  Decisions need to be made with the best information possible, but don’t flip flop, it sends a bad message to the candidate and everyone else may be involved

Set expectations

  • If candidates, recruiters and advisers don’t know what they are expected of, neither will you.  Make a plan.  Also your team has to be on the same level when hiring.  Establish a mutual criteria or measurement point from which you will evaluate a candidate.  This could be as simple as  a numbered list of qualities.

Measure recruitment agencies

  • There are so many agencies around, you must keep track of the good ones. which ones delivered on what they said? Some suggestions of performance to track are:number of candidates per week or how many resources they are investing to find you great candidates.

2 Responses to “The Importance of Speed of Hire”

  1. Steve Brown, on September 22nd, 2008 at 2:42 pm Said:

    I think you could go a step further in relation to tracking the performance of recruitment suppliers Tim. You can compare the suppliers against such tangible quality outputs such as:

    • Number of CVs sent per vacancy (2)

    • Number of CVs per interview ratio (3 : 1)

    • Number of interviews per placement ratio (2.5 : 1)

    • Ratio of offers to appointments (1.5 : 1)

    • Days to fill vacancy against SLA

    • Client satisfaction surveys

    • Monitoring effort on placed candidates on 3, 6 and 12 monthly cycle

    You are going to get verifiable stats on the comparable merits of your suppliers and arrive at a more manageable list of suppliers accordingly. The numbers in parenthesis could be seen as ideals.

  2. Tim, on October 6th, 2008 at 1:21 pm Said:

    Thanks Steve, good points here. We always aimed to start simple and then evolve to this type of analytics. Thanks, will take note.

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