by John Boring
CEO, Accelerate Mobile Apps, Inc. Talentron.com
If you’re like most companies who hire professional-grade talent, two of the metrics you watch are the length of time it takes to fill positions, commonly referred to as “Time to Fill” and “Quality of Hire”. Which is most important?
Which Hiring Metrics to Watch
This is a reasonable question and especially given the pressure from hiring managers when positions are on the critical path to revenue or they go unfilled for extended periods of time. For this reason, the metric of Time to Fill is built into most Applicant Tracking Systems and the minds of every recruiter as a critical measurement to watch. This is partially due to how easy it is to track. Starting with the date a requisition is opened and ending with the date the candidate was hired can make for basic measurement parameters.
In our ongoing research for Talentron we often ask the question of Talent Acquisition professionals, “What measurements do you track most consistently?” It is not surprising that they always mention the Time to Fill metric in their answers. Obviously, Time to Fill is not the only metric that gets mentioned to us. Other things are measured such as Cost of filling a position, candidate diversity and sources, in addition to Quality of Hire, but Time to Fill is by far the most mentioned metric.
Over the last five years, it would appear that there has been a shift in what’s important in hiring. According to CEB, the average amount of time it takes to fill a position in the US is over 60 business days. This is almost a month longer than it was just five years ago.
More Is Not Better
With the length of the interview cycles increasing it would appear that companies are more concerned with Quality of Hire than in the past. However, there is no proof that merely taking longer to make the hiring decision or adding multiple rounds of interviews with each candidate will improve your hiring decisions.
If you’re like most companies, most of your managers are poor to mediocre interviewers and your hiring process needs work. If this is the case, your best path is not to let multiple rounds of interviews or extended decision making muddy up an already haphazard process.
Conducting more than two rounds of interviews could be severely impacting your recruiting operation. Make these two rounds as in depth as you can and involve as many people as you like, but stick with two. Adding additional rounds to the interview process has not proven to be more effective. In fact, in the CEB report on recruiting efficiency says that for every week you cut off of your interviewing process by eliminating additional rounds, you save $2000.
If the Quality of Hiring is the goal you are after, start by recognizing that the goal is an elusive one, and this is why most companies only aspire to use the metric.
Measuring Quality of Hire
We cannot immediately measure the quality of hiring. It can only be shown over time, typically six to twelve months. What’s important here is to be consistent in the period you decide to use and the method you choose to use to measure quality.
If you want to take a more proactive approach to improving your interview and hiring process, consider the following.
Focus first on improving the difficulty of your interviews, not the number of interviews conducted. This is an easy and efficient way to improve your quality of hiring.
Studies by Glassdoor.com have shown that increasing the level of difficulty of the interview increases the level of employee engagement. The easiest way to do this is to train managers in the effective use of behavioral interview questions. This technique has been shown to make for a more difficult interview and a more challenging hiring experience for the candidate.
Behavioral interviewing is a method of interviewing based on the belief that a candidate’s most recent past behavior and performance is the best predictor of their future behavior or performance.
After a thorough behavioral interview, every interviewer should have learned specific examples of work or situations faced by the candidate that demonstrate their ability to do the job you have in mind. Then, you should record these examples on an interview evaluation form and submitted to the hiring manager. To dig out the examples from the conversation, interviewers should always listen for the Problem or situation the candidate faced. Next you should discuss the Actions they took to resolve the problem/situation they faced. Finally, you want to uncover the Results that they achieved. We call this the PAR model…. Problem, Action, Result.
And the best practice is for the hiring team to meet and discuss their opinions and their interview experience with the team. Ideally, these meetings are short and can take as little as 15 minutes, but this is where you make the hiring decision.
Resist the temptation to do one more round of interviews.
The Takeaway
With hiring decisions taking longer today than five years ago, there is a general belief in business that quality trumps speed. You can have both Time to Fill and Quality of Hire without sacrificing your employer branding by including behavioral interview questions.
