Businesses are feeling the pressure of an ongoing struggle for top talent. In a tight labor market, there’s a lot you can do to win over the best candidates, like offering good benefits and competitive compensation and building your employer brand. 

But those things will only get you so far, if you’re not also focusing on reducing your time to hire. 

Moving slowly in a hiring process means that you won’t get the opportunity to engage your best candidates and get them excited about working for you . They’ll move on to other opportunities with companies that contacted them first, got them into interviews sooner, and made them an offer. 

Are you hiring fast enough to secure the best talent for your team?

In this article, we’re looking at how quickly businesses are hiring so that you can see how you compare. We’ll also share some of our best tips for reducing your time to hire. 

Key takeaways: 

• Time to hire is an overall metric for how long it takes to complete a hiring process from the initial job post to an accepted offer. 
• In 2022, employers in our study took an average of 16 days to hire, but we believe that shaving this number down to 5 is crucial for beating the competition for top talent. 
• You can improve your time to hire by automating candidate communication, utilizing text recruiting, and letting candidates self-schedule interviews. 

How fast should you be hiring? 

We define “time to hire” as the amount of time it takes you to fully complete a hiring process – from initial job posting to accepted offer. 

When thinking about hiring faster, you might be wondering how quickly other companies are hiring. In our Recruiting Metrics Report, we’ve found that employers are shaving down their time to hire a little each year. 

In 2020, the average time to hire was 24.7 days, and in 2021, that number dropped to 18.4 days. This means that employers were hiring 6.3 days (nearly a week!) faster than they were the previous year. And in 2022? Employers took just 16.3 days.

Employers have made great progress speeding up their time to hire over the years. But is it enough in today’s labor market? Or should you be trying to hire even faster to lock down the best candidates? 

The 24-48-5 Rule 

We’d like to challenge you to speed up your process even more. 

We recommend following the 24-48-5 Rule: Contact applicants within 24 hours. Schedule an interview within 48 hours, and hire within 5 days. You can put your business at a significant advantage if you contact them fast, before the competition scoops them up.

CareerPlug President, Jenny Leman advises that “taking more than 5 days to hire causes a dramatic drop off in an employer’s ability to close the hire with the right applicant.” 

Taking longer than 5 days limits your options for great employees. It could also be costing you money in lost revenue. It’s estimated that a job vacancy costs companies an average of $95 per day! 

How to reduce your time to hire

Hiring in 5 days? Depending on your current hiring process, that might sound like a bit of a stretch. But unprecedented competition for talent means you might have to do things differently than you’ve done before. Here are some ways you can try to hit those goals of contacting and hiring candidates. 

Speed up candidate communication 

Contacting candidates within 24 hours is a great goal for employers, and candidates appreciate it, too! In a recent survey of job seekers, we found that applicants consider prompt and frequent communication to be a major factor in a great candidate experience. 

So how do you reach out to candidates within 24 hours without being glued to your phone or computer all day? 

An applicant tracking system can help. With an ATS, you can set certain parameters around your application, and get notified when someone that checks all your boxes applies. Once you’re notified, you can reach out to that candidate right away. 

You can even automate some of your candidate communication for more instant results. With CareerPlug, you can automatically send interview invitations to candidates that meet your criteria, and automate sending polite rejection emails to those that don’t, saving you even more time.  

Use text recruiting 

Another way to streamline candidate communication is with text recruiting. Even if you are reaching out to candidates within 24 hours, if you’re using email, they may not see it. 

Sending candidates a text is a faster way to get a response and engage them early.  The proof is in the data: 

• Email has only a 20% open rate – compared to text messages, which have a 98% open rate. 
• The average email gets a response about 6% of the time. The average text message has a 45% response rate. 
• 68% of recent job seekers told us that they’ve been contacted by an employer via text message during the hiring process. 84% of those job seekers said their experience with text recruiting was positive. 

The video below shows text recruiting in action, and is a great example of how it can improve your time to hire: 

Automate interview scheduling 

If you’ve ever experienced the countless back and forth emails with candidates trying to figure out a time that works for both of you to meet, or played endless games of phone tag, then scheduling an interview within 48 hours may sound like an impossible task. 

That’s why automated interview scheduling is a game changer for businesses, and the best way to hit the goal of getting interviews scheduled instantly after someone applies. 

Automated interview scheduling eliminates the back and forth with candidates, by simply sending them a link so that they can self-schedule an interview. You sync your calendar, candidates see your open time slots, and choose a time to interview that works for them. The interview automatically shows up on your calendar. 

CareerPlug clients that use Autopilot, our automated interview scheduler, have cut their interview scheduling time by up to 91%. Less time scheduling interviews means a quicker time to hire, and better chance of making those right hires for your team. 

Conclusion 

Being a great place to work will help you attract job seekers to your open roles, but in order to turn them into hires, you have to move quickly. 

For the past three years, CareerPlug clients have hired a little faster than the year before, shaving their time to hire down to around 16 days in 2022. This is great, but to really beat the competition, we recommend aiming to turn an applicant into a hire within 5 days. 

You can do this more easily by improving your communication with automations and text recruiting and letting candidates self-schedule their interviews.