Want To Optimize Your Hiring? Focus On SPEED

Hired recently hosted recruiters from two dozen leading San Francisco start-ups (including Lookout, Clearslide and Getaround) – to present and discuss findings around time-to-hire based on thousands of data points we’ve gathered during the course of the year.

The conclusion? Time is even more important than you think.

Companies that optimize their recruiting process for speed win over and over again. Let’s take a look at how long the best talent is on the market for:

The most popular candidates on Hired are available for just a smidgen under 16 days, before they’ve found a new job. If your process on average is taking over 16 days from introduction-to-decision, you are moving too slow for the best and most in-demand talent. 

Needless to say, start-ups that can write offer letters faster find themselves in fewer multi-offer situations and ultimately have a much higher acceptance rate.

You’re wasting thousands of dollars in time, every time someone you’re engaged with accepts an offer before you’ve made your final decision or put them through the full interview process. Ultimately, this boils down to running a fast process and minimizing the time between interview steps. Where do you rank in the industry?

Keeping the momentum going, and minimizing downtime as much as possible. One favorite tactic is to book the 2nd round interviews at the end of the first conversation. This avoids a messy and drawn our process that often occurs over email as you both juggle your schedules to find a suitable time that works for both parties.

When analyzing the data by company size, we’ve found that smaller companies are consistently able to move faster. The 25% fastest seed stage companies are making decisions in under 7 days!

As a best-practice, we recommend all tech companies track speed-to-hire as one of the core metrics for their recruiting function and work to bring it down over time.