You’ll Hire More Top Talent
If there is one thing you can be certain of, it’s that top talent with in-demand skills have options. If one of these candidates are actively looking to make a change, they have multiple companies vying for their attention. And, let’s be honest, in the world of tech even if they aren’t actively looking they still have multiple companies vying for their attention. They’re in demand. That’s really the bottom line. But what that means for speeding up your hiring process, is that these candidates aren’t going to sit through drawn-out hiring processes and they’ll most likely end up with other offers before your process ends if your process is drawn out.
What happens when these top candidates then end up dropping out of your process is one of two things: you either end up hiring your second, third or even fourth option or you need to restart your entire hiring process from scratch. So you either end up spending even more time or you end up with a candidate who you had reason to not pin as your first choice. A speedy hiring process avoids both and makes sure you end up with your top choice right from the start.
Increase Offer Acceptance Rates
This expands on the problem of candidates receiving other offers while they’re in your process. If a candidate does get an offer from another company before you make your offer, there’s likely a chance you’re going to need to make a more compelling offer to ensure that yours gets accepted. What you want is for a candidate to have a smooth, effective and quick hiring process with you, and that the candidates chooses to accept your offer, for your companies’ values. This makes sure that they’re more likely to accept yours for three reasons: your fast hiring process would’ve left a good impression on them, they are intrinsically motivated to work at your company, they are not just in it for the highest paycheck. When top talent end up with multiple offers at once, you may also end up in a bidding war over the candidate when the other company matches or increases their offer in line with the offer you made.
Maintain Your Team Morale
You’re hiring for a role because there is workload for this person to take on. Whether that workload is there because somebody has resigned, because your company is scaling or because you promoted someone is kind of irrelevant, what matters is that the work is there. While you’re looking for the person to do that work, other team members are stepping in. These other team members you hired to do their own work and while they will probably be happy stepping in for a while, you don’t want to overload them for an extended period of time. The shorter your hiring process, the less pressure you’re placing on your current team and therefore it’s easier to ensure your team’s morale stays high.
Save on Costs
A speedy hiring process can save you more than you may initially think. There are many indirect and direct costs of an unfilled role that you can save when you have a fast hiring process. Here again, it’s important to emphasise that balance between speed and quality – you have to ensure that you’re hiring the right person and not just hiring fast. According to the US Department of Labour, a bad hire costs you approximately 30% of their annual salary. Hiring the right person, fast means that you have someone bringing in the revenue that that role directly relates to a lot faster. You also save a lot of money on indirect costs like time. The time it takes interviewers to interview candidates, the time spent discussing candidates, the time spent to identify new candidates if your original candidates drop out during the process, the time your employees don’t have to spend stepping in for the work this new candidate would be doing, etc.
Improve Your Employer Brand
When it comes to attracting top talent, we know that a good employer brand is essential. When you have a speedy hiring process where candidates have a good experience, it reflects well on your employer brand. In an age where Glassdoor and other review sites have a specific section for interview experiences, you need to make sure that the experiences candidates have with your company are good experiences. You also have to consider the simple and powerful effect of word-of-mouth. People in the same industry know each other and the smaller, more specialised that industry or specific skillset becomes, the more close-knit those communities tend to become. People talk to each other and ask about each other’s experiences. You want to make sure that when your company name comes up in those circles, your potential new hire only hears good things about you.
With the clear advantages to faster hiring processes and the 50% increase in hiring time since 2010 comes an opportunity for companies to really get ahead by simply speeding up their process. If you need any further motivation to spend some time focusing on this, consider that according to a report by OfferZen on developers in the Netherlands, 25% of developers mentioned delays in hiring processes and 22% mentioned too many steps in a hiring process as top pain points. Speeding up hiring processes while maintaining the quality of hires doesn’t need to be a daunting task. More often than not, it’s small tweaks to your current hiring process that can make a massive difference in ensuring you’re getting all of the advantages we’ve described in this article.
