Employers

Reducing Hiring Time

Almost none of a long hiring process is spent doing work. It is spent waiting, and waiting is much easier to remove than work is.

The short answer

  • Measure the gaps between stages, not the stages. The work is hours; the waiting is weeks.
  • The four usual sinks are review backlog, scheduling, sequential approvals and the gap between final interview and offer.
  • Speed does not require lowering the bar. Most of it comes from removing repetition and parallelising approvals, neither of which changes the standard.
  • Being slow costs you the strongest candidates specifically, because they are the ones with other offers.

Measure the gaps

Take your last three hires and write down the date of each event: posted, first application, first review, first interview, final interview, decision, offer, acceptance.

Then look at the gaps rather than the events. Almost every long process has two or three multi-day gaps where nothing happened and nobody was blocked on anything except attention. Those are your target, and they are far cheaper to fix than anything involving the actual assessment.

The four usual sinks

Review backlog. Applications arrive and sit while someone finds a clear hour to read them all. A ranked list removes this: the top of the list can be reviewed in ten minutes without waiting for a block of time to read the whole stack.

Scheduling. Frequently the largest single sink, and almost entirely administrative. Offering fixed slots rather than negotiating times, and removing the requirement for a physical room, both cut days out. In-platform video meetings help because there is nothing for the candidate to install or configure.

Sequential approvals. Three approvals in series is three waits. Most of them can be in parallel, and some do not need to exist. Ask what an approver would actually stop, and if the answer is nothing, they are a notification rather than a gate.

The final gap. Between last interview and offer. The assessment is finished and the delay is purely internal, which makes it both the most avoidable and the most expensive: the candidate is at their most engaged and most likely to have another offer landing.

Speeding up without lowering the bar

The objection to moving faster is that rigour will suffer. It only does if you speed up by removing assessment. Most of the available time is not assessment.

Three changes that cost nothing in rigour: cut stages that duplicate another stage's question, which raises signal per hour rather than lowering it; decide the criteria before the process starts, so the decision does not need a week of deliberation at the end; and name a single decision maker, since consensus by exhaustion is the slowest possible way to reach a mediocre answer.

What slowness costs

It does not cost you candidates uniformly. It costs you the strongest ones, because they are the most likely to be in other processes and the most likely to have an offer arrive while you deliberate.

So a slow process quietly selects for candidates with fewer options. That is the real reason to fix it, and it is a quality problem rather than an efficiency one.

FAQ

Frequently Asked Questions

Measure the gaps between stages rather than the stages themselves. The work is hours and the waiting is weeks. The four usual sinks are applications sitting in a review backlog, interview scheduling, approvals running in series that could run in parallel, and the gap between the final interview and the offer.
Not if the speed comes from removing waiting rather than removing assessment, and most of the available time is waiting. Cutting stages that duplicate another stage's question actually raises signal per hour. Deciding criteria up front and naming a single decision maker both remove delay without touching the bar.
The gap between the final interview and the offer. The assessment is already finished, so the delay is purely internal, and it lands at the moment the candidate is most engaged and most likely to have another offer arriving.
Because it does not lose candidates uniformly. The strongest candidates are the most likely to be in several processes and to receive another offer while you deliberate, so delay filters your shortlist toward people with fewer options. Slowness is a quality problem, not just an efficiency one.

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Comparisons

By industry

  • Retail
  • Hospitality
  • Healthcare

Cut the two biggest delays

A ranked applicant list removes the review backlog, and in-platform video meetings and interviews remove most of the scheduling overhead.

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