01 Apr How Long Does It Take To Hire Someone?
How Long Does It Take To Hire?
We now see lots of businesses using social media to recruit directly, I get it potentially saves money, but does it? If your business doesn’t have an HR function, is it the best use of a line manager’s time if their job isn’t actually recruitment?
Key example ‘CEO asks his Marketing Manager to advertise directly for a role in their team, the Marketing Manager says I have had over 100 applicants what do I do now?’
To shortlist 100 CVs takes time, pre-screening, arranging interviews, organise diaries & respond to each application interview or not – this is a really important element of recruitment to keep your Brand in a positive light.
The question is does it save your business money given that the Marketing Manager is spending time recruiting, rather than doing the job that they are paid to do, bringing in leads for the business?
The article below gives you an idea of how many person-hours it takes to hire, and this is a best-case scenario.
Written by J Kaplan-Moss
How many hours does it take to hire someone, from approval of the open position to their first day? It takes about 100 person-hours, and that’s a best-case scenario.
It’s widely known that making a good hire is expensive. Most of that cost is time investment: recruiting, screening, interviewing, and negotiating all take a large amount of time. When actively hiring, ideally you need to set aside 65% of your time to devote to hiring, but that is just a rough guide, other factors like counteroffers can extend the recruitment process; Jacob wanted to know more specifically how long himself (and his team) spent on a recruitment campaign.
So, he tracked a recent hiring round to see. This is just one example, not scientific data or anything. It was a typical hiring round that went fairly smoothly, so these numbers probably represent something close to a best-case scenario.
They spent 100 hours over 4 weeks to get to an offer. The round by the numbers:
- 60 applicants
- 15 got initial hiring manager screens
- 10 full interviews (4 interviews per candidate)
- 1 offer
It’s a small applicant pool, but the per-applicant numbers are pretty solid and should scale to larger rounds.
Here’s how those 100 hours broke down:
Activity & Time Spent – Total hours
- Writing JD – 4 hours
- Posting to job boards – 1 hr
- CV review 10 minutes per application – 10 hrs
- Hiring manager screen – 45 minutes/screen – 11.25 hrs
- Interview scheduling – 1 hour/applicant – 10 hrs
- Interviews 3 × 1 hour/applicant – 30 hours
- Interview – hiring manager – 1.5 hours/applicant – 15 hrs
- Interview debriefs -15 minutes/applicant – 2.5 hrs
- Offer, negotiation, and paperwork – 4 hours – 4 hrs
- Pre-onboarding work – 8 hours – 8 hrs
Total 95.75
Of those hours:
- 32.5 hours were other interviews’ time, split among three people – so about 10 hours per non-hiring-manager interviewer.
- The remainder, 63.25 hours, was Jacobs’s time – hiring manager time.
Again, this is just one example, but a decent representative and forecast of how long it can take to hire!