How to Reduce Time-to-Hire Without Reducing Hiring Standards

What You Will Learn in This Post

• Where unnecessary delays can creep into a MedTech recruitment process
• How to make hiring faster without cutting useful interview or assessment stages
• Why agreeing the brief, process and decision-makers in advance can save time later
• What employers can do to keep good candidates engaged while making the right hiring decision

A three-stage interview process doesn't necessarily take longer than a two-stage one.

What often makes recruitment slow is everything that happens between those stages.

Five days to arrange the first interview. Another four waiting for feedback. A week before diaries align for stage two. Then somebody decides another stakeholder needs to meet the candidate.

None of that necessarily makes the hiring decision better.

It just makes it later.

If you want to reduce time-to-hire without reducing your hiring standards, the answer isn't simply to interview fewer people, ask fewer questions or make quicker decisions.

It's to remove the unnecessary waiting and duplication from the process.

Find Out Where You're Actually Losing Time

Before changing your recruitment process, look at where the time is currently going.

Take a few recent vacancies and map the journey from the initial brief to the accepted offer.

For example:

Brief agreed → search begins → candidates submitted → CV feedback → first interview → feedback → second stage → decision → offer.

Where were the longest gaps?

You may discover that finding candidates wasn't the biggest problem.

Perhaps suitable CVs were submitted within a week, but feedback took another six days.

Perhaps the first interview happened quickly, but the next available slot for a second stage was ten days later.

Maybe the preferred candidate was identified promptly, but internal approval delayed the offer.

“It took us eight weeks to recruit” doesn't tell you very much.

Knowing where those eight weeks went does.

Get the Recruitment Brief Agreed Before You Start

Speed starts with knowing who you're actually trying to recruit.

If the hiring manager, Sales Director and HR team have different ideas about what the successful candidate needs to look like, those differences tend to emerge later.

Requirements change. Previously rejected candidates are reconsidered. Extra interviews are added. The search may even need to start again.

Before going to market, agree:

• Why you're recruiting
• What the person needs to achieve
• Which experience genuinely is essential
• Where you're willing to be flexible
• The salary and package
• Who will be involved in the decision

You may still learn something during the search that makes you reconsider part of the brief.

But that's very different from discovering halfway through that the people involved never agreed in the first place.

Plan the Interview Process Before Candidates Enter It

Don't design the next stage after each interview.

Decide in advance:

• How many interview stages you expect to have
• Who needs to attend each one
• What each stage is intended to assess
• Whether there will be a presentation, assessment or field visit
• Who makes the final hiring decision

If the Managing Director genuinely needs to approve the appointment, build that into the process from the beginning.

Don't get somebody through two interviews and then suddenly add an “informal chat” with another director that turns into a third interview.

Candidates should have a reasonable idea of the process they're entering too.

Make Every Interview Stage Earn Its Place

Reducing time-to-hire doesn't mean automatically reducing the number of interviews.

A second or third stage may be entirely appropriate for a senior, technical or commercially important appointment.

The question is:

What are we learning at this stage that we haven't already established?

If two interviews cover essentially the same ground with different people, there may be unnecessary duplication.

If one stage explores experience and motivation while another uses a relevant presentation or scenario to assess how somebody approaches the job, both may add value.

The objective isn't to have the fewest interview stages possible.

It's to make sure every stage has a purpose.

Reserve Interview Time Before You Need It

Diary availability can add days or even weeks to an otherwise straightforward recruitment process.

If you know you'll be interviewing candidates next week, consider reserving some space in the relevant diaries before you have the final shortlist.

If the Sales Director needs to attend final interviews, identify some potential slots in advance.

You can always release the time if it isn't needed.

It's much harder to find a suitable candidate and then discover the next time everybody can meet is two weeks away.

Don't Wait for a Pile of CVs Before Meeting a Good Candidate

Sometimes an employer receives a candidate who appears to meet the agreed brief but decides to wait until there are several more CVs to compare them with.

That can feel sensible.

But if you would genuinely be interested in meeting somebody, there is little benefit in delaying purely to create a bigger shortlist.

Interviewing somebody doesn't commit you to hiring them.

And if the role requires a relatively specific combination of product, customer, geography or commercial experience, there may not be five comparable candidates waiting to appear at exactly the same time.

Meet good people when you find them.

You can continue searching at the same time.

Keep Sourcing While Interviews Are Happening

Recruitment doesn't always need to happen in a strict sequence.

You don't necessarily need to finish sourcing before interviews begin.

If Candidate A is progressing to first interview, the search for other relevant people can continue.

If Candidate A reaches final stage, you can decide whether it still makes sense to keep approaching new people based on how the process is developing.

Running appropriate parts of the process in parallel can remove days or weeks without changing the standard against which anybody is assessed.

Agree How Feedback Will Work

Interview feedback is another common source of delay.

You don't need an arbitrary rule that every decision must be made within a particular number of hours.

But everybody involved should know:

• Who is responsible for providing feedback
• Who needs to contribute to the decision
• How quickly feedback can realistically be given
• Who will update the candidate or recruiter

If several interviewers are involved, don't leave it until afterwards to work out how their views will be brought together.

A clear process makes it easier to make a considered decision without allowing days to disappear between stages.

Keep Candidates Informed When There Is a Delay

Sometimes delays are unavoidable.

A decision-maker is travelling. Interviews have had to be moved. Somebody is unexpectedly absent. An internal meeting needs to happen before the next stage can be confirmed.

Tell the candidate.

“Karen is travelling until Thursday, but we're expecting to come back to you on Friday” feels very different from several days of silence.

This is particularly important with candidates who have been approached directly rather than applying for the vacancy themselves.

If you've persuaded somebody who wasn't actively looking for a new job to explore your opportunity, don't assume they'll remain engaged indefinitely while nothing appears to be happening.

They may also be involved in other recruitment processes that are continuing to move.

Don't Confuse Speed With Pressure

There is another extreme to avoid.

A fast recruitment process shouldn't mean rushing candidates into decisions.

Interviewing somebody on Monday, offering them the job on Tuesday and demanding an answer by Wednesday afternoon isn't necessarily good recruitment.

A candidate needs enough information to make a properly considered decision, particularly if accepting means resigning from an existing position.

The aim is to remove avoidable delay.

It isn't to manufacture urgency.

Know How You'll Make the Offer Before You Need to Make It

A recruitment process can move efficiently all the way to the final decision and then grind to a halt because nobody has established how the offer will work.

Before you reach that point, understand:

• The approved salary range
• Who can approve movement within or beyond that range
• How the bonus or commission works
• Whether the role includes a company car or allowance
• The significant benefits
• Any likely start-date considerations
• Who will communicate the offer
• Who is responsible for issuing the paperwork

You don't need to know the exact offer you'll make before you've met the candidate.

You do need to know how you'll make one when you've decided you want them.

Building a Pipeline Can Give You a Head Start

If every recruitment process starts from zero, finding the right people will naturally take time.

For roles you recruit regularly, maintaining relationships with relevant people before a vacancy arises can give you a useful head start.

That doesn't mean keeping a list of people you assume will still be available six months later.

It means understanding your market, knowing where relevant talent sits and maintaining appropriate relationships so that you're not beginning completely cold every time somebody resigns.

Use Your Recruitment Partner to Keep the Process Moving

A good recruitment partner can do more than find candidates.

They can help agree realistic timescales at the beginning, arrange interviews, keep candidates informed, gather feedback, clarify questions and flag when a delay could create a problem.

They can also tell you when something you're seeing during the search may require another look at the brief.

For example, if every relevant candidate is outside the agreed salary range, or a supposedly essential combination of experience is proving extremely difficult to find, that's useful information.

The employer still makes the hiring decision.

The recruiter's role is partly to make sure the information needed to make that decision keeps moving between the people involved.

Faster Recruitment Should Still Be Good Recruitment

There will always be some vacancies that take longer than others.

A difficult geography, unusual combination of experience, senior appointment or particularly selective brief may require patience.

That's different from allowing a recruitment process to become slow because of avoidable gaps between each step.

You don't need to lower your standards to hire more efficiently.

You need to know what you're assessing, plan how you're going to assess it and remove the unnecessary waiting around it.

The fastest recruitment process isn't necessarily the one with the fewest steps. It's the one with the least unnecessary waiting between them.