Successful growth requires the right methods and right implementation. When your firm starts new initiatives, measuring the right metrics can allow you to tweak your efforts in many ways to maximize results.
We’re examining the most important recruiting and talent acquisition metrics for any recruiting and staffing professional to know & measure. The first metric we’ll look at is time to fill and how it affects your firm and how to optimize your efforts.
How Do You Measure Time to Fill?
For recruiting and staffing firms, time to fill can be defined as the time it takes for your team to fill a position for a client. Knowing how much time you need on average helps to identify the demand for candidates when building a talent pipeline, estimate the bandwidth of your team, and reveal a position that may have stagnated.
Like all effective metrics, clean data requires consistency. To measure time to fill you must first decide when the time to fill starts. Does it start the day client sends a requisition? Or does it start when you receive approval to fill a position? You must also decide when that time ends. Some firms measure until an offer has been made, or accepted, or until the new employee starts. Whatever you choose, make sure you keep it the same every time.
Why is it Important?
Longer time to fill periods may lead to a higher cost per hire figures, as more expensive recruiting practices may be employed after a position has gone unfilled for too long. Successful firms must have lean and effective processes to narrow the gap in the hiring time. Competition for top candidates is tough, and as both clients and candidates want to act quickly, a long time to fill can cause your firm to miss the boat.
As with many other metrics, it is often better to measure your time to fill over set time periods, and develop in-house benchmark data, rather than comparing with industry peers. Other companies may not measure time to fill in the same way, and they may not be using the same recruitment practices.
How Can You Improve Your Time to Fill?
Reducing your time to fill gives your firm a competitive recruiting advantage if you can make offers to candidates faster than your competitors. Just as there are many pieces to a talent search, there are many components of the search that could be increasing your time to hire.
Luckily, time to fill may be the easiest recruiting metric to improve because there are so many recruiting software tools you can use to automate tasks slowing down your recruiting workflow. Tools like Crelate’s ATS or CRM can give you valuable reports and analytics to identify bottlenecks in your hiring process. The key is to consistently utilize the tools you are measuring because missing data will skew your metrics.
