Recruiters are consistently pushed to shorten the time it takes to find and recruit new talent. In spite of such pressures, current average time-to-hire is the highest it’s been since 2009, and time-to-hire is only getting longer. The job market is better than it was 5 years ago. Even with more job openings, it still takes too long to bring on a new hire. What is the current time it takes to actually bring a new hire on board? 23.5 days… over three weeks of time and over three weeks of resources trying to compensate for the open position. Although there are over 4.7 million job openings according to the U.S Department of Labor, there are still problems in shortening time-to-hire rates. 

It all STEMs from a skill shortage

Technology is forever going to be one of the staples in the workplace. Training programs, daily projects, and onboarding are all affected by advances in technology. Even the hiring process requires enough technical knowledge to operate a computer browser. The real issue, however, is that there aren’t enough candidates who have the necessary training. This training revolves around Science, Technology, Engineering, or Math (STEM) education needed for organizations’ needs.

On the other hand, many students that receive their degree in a STEM field, don’t continue that work into their careers. They abandon STEM for other career fields. The Census Bureau surveyed 3.5 million homes and found that out of those who received bachelor’s degrees in a STEM science, 75% of them did not hold a STEM occupation. They have what the training companies want – and really need – but they are not willing to fill the positions. One reasoning, according to the director of the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce, Anthony Carnevale, is that these degrees are becoming “universal” because STEM students are using their degrees for STEM unrelated careers.

Never-ending cycle

Effective recruitment is the secret; the password is efficiency. The first step in lowering your time-to-hire rate is to create a recruitment cycle. When you’re recruiting one candidate, you should be sending others through the process.

Candidates in the sourcing, interviewing, follow up, rejection, offering, and onboarding stages must all be processed concurrently. This is where an application like an Applicant Tracking System would come in handy. An ATS removes 70% of the resumes so recruiters don’t see irrelevant resumes, making the time spent evaluating candidates much shorter. Not only that, a well-rounded ATS will help to keep candidates informed on the status of their application.

Who is the one?

In order to find the right candidate, you have to take part in good marketing practices first… after all, as a recruiter, you are trying to sell the position. Leslie Cope, Monster Senior Product Director, says: 

“If you have a brand message that needs to carry across multiple channels, you want to be consistent and portray all of your company brand’s features consistently across all media.”

Candidates who show the most promise have resumes that exhibit potential for high adaptability and teamwork. These skills can’t be taught even though they are necessary for the workplace. The candidates who are interactive during the interview, using it as a time for answering your questions and asking their own, are the ones who actively process their cultural and functional fit within the company. 

Aside from finding the right candidate for the job, recruiters are ultimately concerned with how long it takes to attract candidates to a position. The shortage of STEM skills leave recruiters scrambling for the next class of tech graduates. Despite the overwhelming desire for STEM candidates, recruiters can decrease their time-to-hire by maintaining steady rounds of recruitment. For example, while one candidate is in the application process, another is in the interview, and another is onboarded.

The efficiency of your recruitment, as well as the effectiveness of your recruitment, directly impact the results of the talent acquisition plan. It can all be traced to the effectiveness of the job advertisement. A poor job description won’t attract as many candidates as the one that incites excitement and intrigue in the job seeker.

Bio: Raj Sheth, CEO/Partner

Raj Sheth is the co-founder of Recruiterbox, an online recruitment software and applicant tracking system designed especially for growing companies. Prior to Recruiterbox, he founded two other web startups -- a classifieds portal and an ecommerce site. He is a graduate of Babson College and spent the first three years of his career as a financial analyst with EMC Corporation in Boston. Learn more about Recruiterbox right now.

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