Time to fill: 6 strategies to hire faster

By Eli Landes Recruiting Social recruiting Spotlight Talent acquisition

Reducing time to fill is one of the top goals for all talent acquisition teams, no matter the industry. For recruiting to remain efficient and competitive, it’s essential to continuously work towards reducing the amount of time it takes to find candidates.

Plus, as recruiting slowly shifts from the Great Resignation to the Great Rehire, faster and more agile recruitment teams will find themselves snatching up the candidates other teams will be simply too slow to catch.

And so, without any further ado, here are some ways to reduce time to hire.

1. Invest in both social recruiting and employee advocacy strategies

High time to fill is often due to an ineffective, leaky talent funnel. Social recruiting and employee advocacy both build a strong and highly-effective funnel that reaches both more candidates as well as qualified and passive candidates, allowing you to find more and better candidates faster.

We’ve talked about why social media hiring and employee advocacy is so effective before, but in short, it’s because:

Over 70% of Americans are on social media. That includes passive candidates, who aren’t on job boards.
The network effect of social media allows you to build a funnel that’s always growing.
Today’s candidates care about employer brand, and social media is the #1 place they go to research it.
Building your reach beyond your own social media channel through employee advocacy allows you to tap into an exponentially larger network and reach far more candidates than you’d be able to otherwise.

An example of a classic social recruiting post.

2. Automate your social recruiting & employee advocacy strategies

Of course, manually running a social media recruiting or employee advocacy strategy can take a lot of time—as in, hundreds if not thousands of hours a year. Which is exactly the thing you want to be saving in the first place. Automating them allows you to harness the power of social recruiting without getting bogged down in all the manual tasks.

These first two strategies, therefore, go hand in hand. Social recruiting and employee advocacy help you build a stronger and more efficient talent funnel, which automating them allows you to do that, well, automatically.

3. Build a ready talent pool

Too many talent acquisition teams only think about recruiting when it’s time to actually recruit. That’s a mistake. The best way to speed up recruiting during a time of need is to be laying the foundations in quiet times. By building a pool of talent waiting for your next job to open, you save time in finding candidates once those jobs do open.

Here are some tips to build a talent pool:

Invest in organic, “always on” recruiting methods (like social media recruiting & employee advocacy) over or in addition to paid resources like job posts and ads. While ads and job posts might help you find active candidates in the moment, they don’t do much to build a talent pool. Organic media does.
Build and maintain a database of potential candidates that you can reach out to about jobs they might be a fit for.
Build interest in the places future candidates frequent. Examples are colleges, trade schools, industry-specific events, and so on.

4. Automate redundant and manual tasks

Much of recruiting involves dealing with redundant, manual tasks that need to get done, but don’t necessarily have to get done by you. Automating these tasks allows you to get back all the time you’d otherwise be wasting doing them yourself.

Examples include:

Scheduling interviews.
Responding to and following up with candidates.
Posting your jobs to various job sites.
Posting social media posts

5. Express your unique employer brand message

Though employer brand and talent acquisition aren’t always talked of in the same sentence, the truth is that they go hand in hand. A compelling employer brand makes every step of your recruiting process faster and more efficient. Instead of having to scrounge for candidates that often aren’t even good fits for your roles, you can have qualified candidates coming to you.

Here are some essential tips to consider when broadcasting your employer brand:

What: Show what it’s like to really work for your company. What your culture is like, what your values are, even what your challenges are. As Bryan Adams of Ph.Creative likes to say, showing your “brand of difficult”—those challenging areas of your employer brand that only make the work more rewarding—you might turn off candidates that would never have been a good fit for your brand, but you attract the candidates who are looking for exactly what you’re offering.
Where: Like we mentioned earlier, social media is the now the #1 place candidates go to research an employer brand. That doesn’t mean you can forget the obvious places, like your website—an attractive careers page that highlights your benefits, culture, and so on is a given. But that’s not enough. You need to be showing your employer brand on social media as well if you want it to catch attention.
How: There are so many ways you can broadcast your employer brand, especially on social media. Like:
- Employee spotlights and stories.
- Posts about your culture.
- DEI posts.
- Thought leadership posts.

An example of an employer brand post on social media.

6. Use metrics to assess your weak areas

But remember: When it comes to improving time to hire, it’s important to assess what specifically is taking the most time for you, so you can take steps to fix those issues. If you’re a small company with just a handful of staff, you might be able to assess that manually. For larger companies, there are a variety of recruitment software that allow you to track what’s working and what isn’t so you are better informed of next steps to take.

How CareerArc reduces time to fill

At CareerArc, saving time is at the core of what we do. We save our clients an average of 949 hours a year of manual work—about 6 months of work. How do we do that? Simple: we strategically automate your social media recruiting and employee advocacy, so you’re growing reaping the maximum benefits out of your social media recruiting and employee advocacy strategies–including building your brand awareness with every post–without any of the time costs.

Through strategic automation, we help you reduce hundreds of hours of work while also reducing the time it takes for your open jobs and employer brand content to publish across social media, enabling you to reach and attract candidates on social media sooner and faster than ever before.

As Jennifer Spry, Manager of Talent Acquisition at Von said, “Before CareerArc, we had relied on job boards that simply weren’t delivering enough qualified candidates for hard-to-fill positions. Our quality of hire, time to hire, and cost per hire all improved thanks to CareerArc’s solution and service.”

Or, in the words of Shawn Scott, Talent Acquisition Manager at Vi Living: “Over the course of a year, hundreds of hours of my time are saved. I can’t imagine not using CareerArc to effectively execute our social media strategy.”

Or like Nihal Soloman Talent Acquisition Manager at Magnite put it: ““By automating social postings on our LinkedIn and Twitter, CareerArc has broadened our reach and driven candidates to apply without my having to hire someone to manually market the jobs. Perhaps the most surprising aspect to me is how little effort is required to produce these results.”

So if you’d like to see how CareerArc drastically cut down your time to fill, simply click here to try out a demo today.

6 strategies to reduce time to fill