A prolonged hiring process could be costing you quality talent — here’s how to streamline it to reduce your time-to-hire and enhance candidate experience.
A prolonged hiring process could be costing you quality talent — here’s how to streamline it to reduce your time-to-hire and enhance candidate experience.

4 Ways to Reduce Time-to-Hire

Emily Bogin |

A prolonged hiring process could be costing you quality talent — here’s how to streamline it.

Once you’ve attracted the right candidates to your talent community with optimized engagement and recruitment strategies, it’s critical to keep applicants engaged with a quick, intuitive hiring process — or risk candidate drop-off (which your competitors will happily pick up). 

A Glassdoor study shows that most companies have an 80% drop-off rate during the application process – which means that most applicants reject their potential employers before they are even brought in to interview. To understand where your engagement and hiring strategy could be losing you quality candidates (and how to fix it), it’s key to consider the evolving priorities and pain points of today’s workforce. 

Don’t Fall Victim to Applicant “Drop-Off”

One of the main reasons for applicant drop-off is application complexity: no one wants to fill out endless form fields, repetitive information, or write an essay – especially for the applicants who are applying to multiple jobs at once. A People Management survey reveals that over three-quarters of job applicants will quit an application (or consider quitting an application) on account of its length and complexity. These candidates need simple, fast applications and speedy turnaround times, or they lose interest, and the work you put into engaging and recruiting the right candidates goes to waste.

Those with extra complex, confusing, or pedantic applications risk alienating their potential employees – and while 81% of candidates will share their positive experiences with people they know, 72% will share their negative experiences as well. 

This means that your hiring strategy has a direct impact on your brand reputation – and by focusing on the end-user experience and creating a simple, straightforward, and friendly process, you compound your recruitment success with every recruiter’s favorite way to hire: by referrals. Not to mention, decreasing your time-to-hire can help:

Ensure Cost Efficiency: Don’t pay for extended job advertisements, candidate screenings, interviews, and internal resources dedicated to the hiring process. 

Minimize Productivity Loss: Fill crucial roles promptly so that your team doesn’t fall victim to understaffing, uneven workloads, knowledge gaps, and more.

Elevate Resilience: A shorter time-to-hire means that your organization can quickly and effectively respond to changing business requirements and seize new opportunities.

Build an arsenal of application tools and strategies

A pain-free application is a huge resource for recruiters, but it is only one tool in an arsenal of strategies that ensure applicants apply, interview, and get hired as efficiently as possible. We know that speed is critical throughout the hiring process, and mobile accessibility and ease of application are top of mind for candidates. A recent report indicates that 67% of candidates complete their application on a mobile device, and our own clients have seen that when paired with a conversational AI chatbot, application drop-off rates have been as low as 12%, time-to-apply decreased by up to 84%, and recruiters saw a decrease in time-to-hire of up to 23%. 

As recruiters compete for top talent, hiring managers find themselves leveraging the technologies that will land them the best candidates and reduce the time they would otherwise spend painstakingly reviewing resumes and applications. The right talent management platform reduces complexity for applicants by streamlining the application, making it mobile-friendly, and optimizing assessments – and each of these advantages increase your HR team’s efficiency. After all, automatically-scheduled interviews don’t just help the applicant – they also free up time for the hiring managers, who no longer spend hours rearranging their schedules. 

In our latest checklist, we’ve identified and strategized four key components to an elevated application process – one that is automated, efficient, and easy for applicants and hiring managers. Learn how you can reduce time to hire with features like: 

  • Accelerated application processes
  • Easy assessments
  • Automated interview scheduling
  • Instant job letters

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