Slow Hiring Process has negative impact

Let’s not circle the issue: if you have a slow hiring process, you’re missing out on top talent. Period.

Other companies are eager to hire the same people you want to hire – the ones with the skills, experience, and personality you need to help your business any exceed its goals. And, just like you, companies want to hire them now. Having a slow hiring process leads to problems for your business down the road.

Signs of a Slow Hiring Process

You may not know that you’re working in a culture that takes too long to hire because it’s often difficult to see your business’ way of doing things from an objective viewpoint.

There are clues, including:

It takes three or four weeks to respond to your applicants only to find that they have made another offer. In fact, HR thought leader John Sullivan believes that the top 10 percent of candidates have accepted an offer within just 10 days.

Your vacant positions stay open for weeks, if not months. (Companies were finding in 2015 that the average time it took to fill an open position was 52 days.)

You make your top candidates go through more than two interviews. If you have three or more meetings, that takes a good amount of time. The best candidates may be gone before you get to that third interview.

You are experiencing higher turnover than usual. This issue is present because you’re not able to hire the top-tier candidates and are settling for the second- or even third-tier prospects. Down the line, this results in hires with poor skills, the background or even the cultural fit that the top talent has, making these hires a poor fit. The Harvard Business Review reported that as much as 80 percent of employee turnover is due to bad hiring decisions.

How Slow Hiring Negatively Affects Your Business

You may think that the recruitment process has sped up in recent years due to technological advancements in recruiting tools. While it’s true technology allows you to use keywords to find candidates that match your exact skills and needs, and social media connect with prospects online, it still takes an average of almost 27 days to fill an open position (and longer if the position is one for your C-suite).

So how does a slow hiring process negatively affect a company’s bottom line?

Your firm can lose productivity and revenue.

Recruiting has the highest impact on income and profit of all of a company’s talent functions. If, for example, you keep a sales position empty for weeks or months, consider how much sales revenue your firm isn’t receiving.

If a position performs critical tasks, how much work – productivity – is lost while the position remains vacant? Who is performing the job now? What else could they be working on if the position was filled?

Keep the slow hiring process, and your reputation can suffer.

The recruiting process often is the very first interaction a candidate will have with your company, and candidates often look at it as what it would be like to work with you. Go slow when hiring and candidates may make the assumption that you’re uncertain or fighting bureaucratic red tape to make a decision.

A candidate often wants a manager who is accurate and makes decisions with certainty and speed. He could assume that a slow-moving hiring manager will be slow moving as a supervisor.

Thanks to sites like Glassdoor and LinkedIn, candidates who decide to go elsewhere due to a slow hiring process will often share their experiences, thus potentially hurting a company’s employer brand and making them less attractive to future candidates.

The customer experience may suffer.

If customer service positions remain empty too long, how long will it be until your service has degraded enough that the clients notice?

What’s more, employee morale could suffer resulting in more turnover and lower retention rates.

Hiring costs could increase.

Hiring takes time – for everyone involved. Candidates must find some way to leave work (if currently employed), travel to the interview site, and several hours meeting with hiring managers and recruiters. Hiring managers and interviewers must spend time away from the positions for which they work on a daily basis, thus accruing a productivity cost. Interview a single candidate several times, and the price climbs.

Research shows that eliminating the unnecessary parts of a drawn-out recruiting and hiring process saves money and increases the quality of the hire because you have a better chance of gaining a high-quality candidate rather than your second, third or even fourth choice.

JDP Search can shorten the time it takes to fill open positions in the supply chain, engineering, manufacturing, or sales sectors because we’ve already vetted and interviewed exceptional professionals in these industries.  We want to help you keep costs down while speeding up your slow hiring process.

Tell us about your recruiting challenges; we’ll work with you to solve them!