“If you’re lucky enough to live in an Instacart zip code, you’ve already experienced the sheer joy of ordering Costco via your phone and having it delivered to your door two hours later,” states Leah McKelvey, Sr. Director, Sales & Partnerships at ClearEdge Marketing. “Have services like Instacart shifted expectations on the professional side too? Yes”

In a recent Q&A, Leah and I discussed how the growth of the on-demand economy is impacting how hiring is done. Read on about this growing trend and how you can prepare.

Leah: What do you see as the biggest trend that will impact the talent industry in the next 5-10 years?

Scott: The next 10 years will focus on instantaneous hiring.

Time-to-fill should be zero. However, it reached an all-time high this year – over 26 days.

It’s no surprise that jobs will open through resignations, terminations, transfers and business expansion. What is surprising is how few companies have created a system to immediately deliver talent exactly when and where it is needed. Quick and decisive hiring (filling roles with greater speed, more accuracy, and less effort) is becoming the new standard to combat this issue.

Leah: What evidence are you seeing of this trend making an impact already?

Scott: More and more buyers are demanding faster results. Why? They find waiting for talent unacceptable.

In an organization, an empty seat is like an open wound. It’s a painful distraction that interferes with the business’s core mission.

When there’s an empty seat, the work must either be redistributed or left undone, resulting in stress, costs, delays, and lost opportunity, as well as lower revenue.

We live in an on-demand world. Every day, we access more and more products and services at the click of a mouse, touch of a button or by dialing our phones. In order for staffing and recruitment firms to remain relevant and competitive, this same convenient access must be applied to acquiring talent.

Leah: How can organizations prepare for this trend?

Scott: First, they need to understand what slows down fast hiring. Especially if they hope to change this in their staffing firm. And, to get their customers to make faster decisions.

At least four problems get in the way. When trying to select a candidate for a job or assignment, people are:

• Hampered by their beliefs (a common one is “slow to hire and quick to fire”)
• Tapping into a pool of top-talent that is too small
• Employing interview methods that are labor intensive and inaccurate
• Allowing their open seats to interfere with sound decision-making

To combat these problems, staffing companies and recruitment firms need to stop using methods that are reactive and, instead, follow a process that allows them to fill jobs and assignments the instant they open.

This process should include:

• Creating a continuous flow of candidates by improving the company’s pull on top-talent, calledCandidate Gravity
• Sizing up talent more rapidly, ensuring the right fit, right away
• Building a pool of people ready to hire, while factoring in the reality that good candidates come and go

Leah: With this approach, what type of results should firms expect?

Scott: The ability to fill jobs and assignments in an instant, which I call On-Demand Hiring(SM), makes the competition, who can’t do this, irrelevant. Just like Netflix turned video stores, like Blockbuster, into unsustainable enterprises.

Firms who can deliver instantaneous hiring end up with larger market share and higher margins, both resulting from happier customers.

Leah: Can you share any examples or lessons learned as you’ve helped firms provide instant hiring?

Scott: Being able to deliver people on-demand becomes a healthy addiction. People who make this their way of doing business, keep doing it this way.

A good example is Beth Casey-Bellone. Over a decade ago, I showed her and her team at a staffing and outsourcing firm in New York how to move away from reactively filling jobs. Like many companies in the people business, they always needed good candidates and never seemed able to find enough. As a result, filling openings often took days and, in some cases, weeks to fill.

I helped them improve their Candidate Gravity, their ability to pull in quality people much more quickly. Also, how to employ Talent Manufacturing to build prospective employees before they are needed. They filled jobs and assignments, using their Talent Inventory, in minutes.