Time-to-hire vs Hiring Velocity

Time-to-hire is one of the most foundational metrics that in-house recruitment teams track. It’s all about efficiency, the quicker you hire a candidate then there’s less time a vacancy is unfilled, and more money saved for your organisation.

It can also be crucial to your candidate experience strategy. Top talent doesn’t always remain on the market for long, and the more seamless your process is, the better your candidate’s impression of your company will be. But if you’re really looking to get a big picture view of this area of your recruitment process, hiring velocity is also a key metric.

What is time to hire?

Time to hire measures the number of days between an individual submitting their application for a role and accepting a job offer.

What is hiring velocity?

Hiring velocity is your average time to hire – it doesn’t just measure the speed to fill one vacancy but rather every vacancy across your entire organisation over the last quarter or year.

How do you calculate hiring velocity?

The formula for hiring velocity is to divide the number of hires with your chosen time period. For example, if we wanted the hiring velocity per week for a year:

Number of hires: 55

Number of weeks in the period: 52

Hiring velocity: 55/52 = 1.05

This makes the hiring velocity 1 hire per week.

Which is better?

Time-to-hire and hiring velocity are both hugely useful metrics. Time-to-hire allows you to get granular and should absolutely be measured and compared against your organisations hiring velocity. If you have a couple of extremely high or low time-to-hires, they could significantly throw off the average, which would be good to have visibility of.

You may also choose to measure hiring velocity for different departments to see if there are any that are thriving or significantly lagging behind when it comes to getting new talent onboard in a timely fashion. This can then help your team look for any issues, such as hiring managers in need of interview training or uncompetitive salaries.

What other hiring metrics should you track?

As we’ve just outlined, a single stand-alone metric can only provide so much insight. Recruitment data will do the most work for your team and business when analysed together instead of in isolation, so you can spot patterns and address issues early on.

We would also recommend tracking:

Source of Hire

Source of hire is about breaking down which channels your candidates have come through. This shouldn’t just be a numbers game though. For example, you may get the highest volume of applications through job ads on social media, but the greatest quality of hire may originate from the few candidates you get from referral schemes.

Application Drop Off Rate

Application drop off rate is the percentage of people who begun but did not complete an application process with your company. This can be an incredibly insightful metric when it comes to growing your talent pool, as if you are able to identify areas of applications that can be streamlined this will create a simpler application process for candidates. If this results in more candidates completing the initial application process, this not only means you have a greater selection of talent to choose from when progressing to the interview process, but also more candidates to add to your talent pool for future vacancies.

Offer Acceptance Rate

Measuring offer acceptance rate can operate as a crucial candidate experience metric. Candidates who get through to a job offer may turn it down due to finding your organisation’s recruitment process cumbersome or unnecessarily stressful. You may also notice that you have a higher offer acceptance rate in certain areas of your business, but a lower offer acceptance rate in others.

For example, it may be very high for senior and management positions, but very low for entry level positions. This should be a cue for your recruitment team to examine every aspect of the recruitment process for entry level – how competitive is the package? Are the responsibilities of the role realistic? Does the interview process reflect the level of the role? Most importantly you’ll want to ask your candidate who have turned down offers for feedback, which brings us to our next metric.

Candidate Net Promoter Score

This brings us to Candidate Net Promoter Score. Candidate Net Promoter Score refers to how likely candidates say they would be to recommend your organisation to other candidates. You’ll gather the data to calculate your Candidate Net Promoter Score through surveys. Discuss internally the best questions to ask, bench mark your results against industry standards, and set realistic goals for improvement.

You calculate Candidate Net Promoter Score with the answers from the candidates on a 0-10 scale divided into three groups:

• Scores of 0–6 are Detractors – Not likely to recommend the organisation as a place to apply for a job
• Scores of 7–8 are Passives – Not actively recommending your organisation as a place to apply, but are also unlikely to dissuade their network from applying to a vacancy with you
• Scores of 9–10 are Promoters – Would actively recommend your organisation as a place to apply for a job

Next, you take the number of candidates in each group and what their share of the total is.

The formula for calculating candidate Net Promoter Score is:

cNPS = % of Promoters – % of Detractors

A cNPS of above 0 is good, with anything between 30 and 70 being brilliant, and scoring above 70 suggesting little room for improvement.