How Hiring Slowly Is Damaging Your Business

It doesn't matter if you're a small business or a large corporation. The consequences of slow hiring are the same. In short, slow hiring decisions result in top candidates losing interest and accepting an offer from one of your talent competitors who got there first. Slow hiring decisions are often due to indecisiveness, poor organisation, a drawn-out interview process, and fear of making a bad hire. Bad hires can be costly, but slow hiring often results in bad hiring. Slow hiring means you'll have to select from the leftovers, mediocre candidates who aren't snapped up like the top performers. Everyone knows you need to get to a car boot sale (garage sale for those across the pond) early to get the best deals.

According to Workable's benchmarking data [1], the industry average time to fill for a Data Scientist is 60 days and 70.5 days for a Senior Data Scientist, which is too long and way above other industries.

If you wish to increase productivity and get executive buy-in on the need for speed when it comes to hiring, feel free to use this list as a reference to show the damage it's doing to the business when competitors are beating you to top talent.

Slow Hiring Affects Your Bottom Line

Economic costs are a factor that's hard to ignore. Losing top candidates due to slow hiring comes with enormous costs. Here are some examples of such costs:

Revenue loss — A direct cost related to slow hiring is the loss of revenue that an employee would generate directly or indirectly. This is more obvious for sales jobs, but there can be a significant loss from missed opportunity when projects are delayed or lost altogether due to not having the talent to deliver. Not only could you be losing talent to your competitors, but you may also be losing customers to them.

Low quality hires — Top candidates are on and off the market in no time, so if you miss them, the quality of hire will go down. It's not just that the candidates you are hiring may be less qualified, but they also might have a shorter tenure with your company and ultimately cost more to replace in terms of time spent recruiting them as well as their salary costs during this period. If the low-quality hires stay for a longer tenure, you should also consider the years of lower performance to your hiring cost.

Talent loss to a competitor — If you are not hiring quickly enough, top talent may take your competitor's offers. You have to include the costs of losing that candidate because it helps your competitor's bottom line and hurts yours in a big way if they end up delivering for them instead! Keep an eye on where your lost talent ends up to see who is gaining from your loss.

Lost competitive advantage — Getting more than your fair share of talent can massively boost revenue, and speed hiring is one way to achieve this. While the average time to fill is 60 days for a Data Scientist and 70.5 days for a Senior Data Scientist, some very successful companies manage virtually zero days time-to-fill. How? Workforce planning and talent pipelining. If you have a pipeline of candidates available before a role's release, this can save much time. This works exceptionally well for recurring hiring needs, typically challenging hires or for the type of candidate you'd hire if a superstar came along.

Low productivity — When a position is vacant for even one day, you lose the opportunity to get work done. Having many vacancies open due to slow hiring can impact the productivity of others in the team, especially if they're taking on the extra responsibilities of the open jobs.

Bad PR — An unnecessarily long interview and hiring process will hurt your candidate experience, which leaves rejected candidates with a bad taste in their mouth. Candidates talk, and they will speak to their peers and possibly your customers about the experience. It's often a topic of conversation in the data community. A company takes a candidate through a lengthy process of multiple interviews and tests over many weeks to be told they don't have enough experience in a particular area that could have been identified at the first interview.

Permanent talent shortage — as there are so many companies competing for high-demand talent, such as machine learning professionals, data professionals and the like, these candidates are quickly snapped up. If you constantly get pipped to the post, you could experience permanent skills shortages. Unless you change, you speed up your hiring process and make some quick wins.

Increased salary costs — the longer candidates are in the process, the more competitive it becomes and often ends up in a bidding war. Even mediocre candidates have multiple offers, which can be a great ego boost for them, but not so good for the company they join who overpaid for an average performer. Unfortunately, this can result in short tenure, which isn't ideal for either party.

Low team morale and stress — this can very quickly snowball and create a host of other problems. When employees are required to fill the role of two or more, it can be arduous work and lead to stress. This can result in mistakes made on the job, poor productivity where they're stretched too thin, negativity spreading among the team and staff turnover. Unless you're going to pay these employees double while you hire someone to take the workload, you better hire quickly or risk having another vacancy to fill.

Candidate Problems Caused By Slow Hiring

Slow hiring drives candidate behaviour, and can top performers want quick decisions.

Higher dropout rate — Sought after candidates are more likely to drop out the longer the process drags on. They have more time to rethink your opportunity, and as they are now active in their job search, they're getting more and more options to consider other possibilities. This dilutes the appeal of your opportunity significantly. Some candidates in certain situations require immediate income. They will usually accept the first opportunity that's offered and start straight away. Offering your top candidate a job on the day of their final interview can significantly increase acceptance rates and minimise dropout rates.

Candidates will proceed with other interviews and applications — Every day that goes by, your top candidate is open and available to other opportunities. As Beyoncé would say, if you like it, then you better put a contract in front of them. Or something like that. Managing their expectations is essential. If you inform them you're looking to make a decision quickly, which will be made in a certain number of days (provide the number), this may buy you some time, so they hold off on making other applications. But stringing them along can cause candidate frustration. Not only will they lose interest and likely accept another offer, but they'll also be left with a bad taste in their mouth and a poor candidate experience to talk about.

Abismal acceptance rates — Candidates judge companies and leaders by their interview process, efficiency, and ability to make decisions. Rightly so. If there's lots of dither and delay in the recruitment process, what does it say about how other decisions are made internally. This alone puts many candidates off, and if their expectations aren't managed effectively, drop out rates will be high and acceptance rates low.

No interest to reapply in the future — Candidate frustration leaves a negative view of your brand and will put candidates off applying again in the future, even if the role sounds fantastic.

Harm Your Employer Brand And Deter Applicants

Everything in your recruitment process should be designed to enhance your employer brand and attract candidates. A slow process can cause the exact opposite.

Candidates talk about their negative experiences — Upset candidates share their experience stories, which could harm your brand further. One of the first things learnt in customer service is a happy customer might tell one person about their great experience, but an unhappy customer will more likely tell ten.

Candidates write reviews — Nowadays, information is freely available, and reviews play a massive part in branding. Reviews can help or harm your brand. If a candidate writes a negative review on Glassdoor or Google, this can put other candidates off applying to your company. This is especially common if a candidate feels they have been strung along when the ultimate feedback suggests a decision not to hire could have been made a lot earlier.

Poor Decision Making Caused By A Slow Process

Candidates aren't the only ones frustrated by a slow hiring process. It affects hiring managers and recruiters too, which lead to low-quality outcomes.

Comparisons become tricky — It's easy to make candidate comparisons when the interviews are close together, but when you're assessing several candidates over a long period, fair comparisons become problematic and can result in expensive bad hires.

Impulsive decision making from hiring managers — It's not just candidates who get fed up with long, drawn-out hiring processes. Hiring managers do too, which can lead to quick decisions to get the whole ordeal over with. This often happens shortly after their top candidate drops out. They end up settling on a candidate they likely wouldn't have chosen if they were quick enough to hire their first choice. Again, this kind of decision making can lead to bad hires.

Recruiters get frustrated and demotivated — Recruiters get excited when they bring a superstar candidate, whom they consider a unicorn, into the process. When one of these candidates drops out due to the slow process, this can be very disheartening. This can affect energy, enthusiasm, effectiveness and be very demotivating, especially if it repeatedly happens due to a complex and slow hiring process. External contingency recruiters will very quickly drop the search and move onto something more fruitful. Internal recruiters could end up looking for a new job themselves. Retained executive recruiters will consult the client on the problem, show them the data and hopefully collaborate to improve the process so the position gets filled.

Diversity hiring suffers — There's much competition for well-qualified candidates from diverse backgrounds. A slow hiring process can greatly hinder a company's ability to hire in-demand candidates.

Hiring Manager Issues

It's incredibly frustrating for hiring managers who have productivity goals to meet, and their resources are being wasted on a slow hiring process. A hiring manager who is held back from making key hires feels held back in their career.

Hiring reluctance — When a hiring manager has a need, they envision the progress they'll make by having the new starter onboard. Long processes and all the problems that come with it cause that vision to cloud, and it becomes tiresome and frustrating. While having the right person on board would be great and solve many problems, those problems build up every moment the person is not hired. Hiring managers often find themselves taking on jobs the recruit would be responsible for. While this should put the hiring at a higher priority, it can often have the opposite effect. Once the hire is successfully made, the hiring manager can be reluctant to go through the same process again next time, which ultimately hinders growth.

Lost time and money — many interviews can be very time-consuming for hiring managers, which takes away from their other work. If the dreaded happens and you lose your top candidate to a competing offer, or they drop out of the process, the whole search may need to start again. This will not only drive recruiting costs up but also take up the valuable time of anyone involved in the process, together with the missed opportunity cost,

In Conclusion

In conclusion, hiring slowly is damaging to your business. If you want a company that can grow and adapt quickly, then it's important for the process of finding new employees to be fast, efficient and effective. Not slow or cumbersome in any way - especially if there are other companies out there vying with yours over talent!

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[1] https://resources.workable.com/tutorial/recruiting-kpis