CHICAGO — One of the most popular metrics in the world of recruitment is time to hire. But Tim Sackett, CEO of HRUTech.com, has strong feelings about that KPI — he “hates it.”
“I hate time to fill as a statistic,” he told the crowd at SHRM24 in Chicago this week. “It is not to judge anybody, because it’s the most used recruiting statistic on the planet.”
The reason behind his loathing is simple: “Just because you’re faster at something doesn’t make you better.”
“I can easily argue that you’re filling positions too fast, you’re actually missing out on better talent,” said Sackett. “It’s the same thing where you go, ‘Hey, shark attacks increase in the summer when ice cream sales increase. If we just stopped serving ice cream, the sharks would stop attacking people.’ No. Just because you correlate something doesn’t make it right. And that’s time to fill.”
The metric is popular because it’s easy, and the data around it is clean, he said. All you need to do is look at the date the job became available and the date it was filled and, voila, it is measured.
Go candidate first
One of the biggest mistakes Sackett sees is going HR first in the recruitment process.
“There’s too many of us that are still designing the process for us and not for them,” he said. And in an era of chronic labour shortages, with even worse predictions on the horizon thanks to an aging population and declining birth rate, any advantage an employer can get in recruitment is needed.
“It’s going to be really hard to find really talented people because of all those things,” said Sackett.
His advice for HR is to step back and really look at the process with an outside lens. For example, when was the last time you applied for a job at your company to test out the process?
“Put yourself in the seat of the candidate,” he said. “So, especially if you’re hiring hourly workers, when’s the last time you applied to one of your jobs on a mobile device while stealing WiFi from a McDonald’s parking lot? Because that’s really the experience.”
The hiring technology and process is often designed on desktop and tested in corporate environments. “And we’re like, ‘Tim, it only takes seven minutes. It’s fine.’ And then you ask somebody who doesn’t work for you to sit in the car seat next to you on a mobile device and time them and go, ‘Oh god, this is painful. This is really bad.'”
Avoid customization
Sackett doesn’t like to see organizations heavily customizing recruitment software. Vendors will happily make any changes that a customer requests because they want the business — but that doesn’t make it right.
“If we go to the software vendor and we go, ‘Hey, can we have this field?’… they’ll be like sure, we could do that for you because you’re paying an invoice,” he said. “But what you’re asking them is, ‘Hey, will you break our software.'”
That can lead to problems and headaches down the road, he said.
The ‘screen of death’
He talked about the significant dropout rate observed in the application processes when candidates are immediately presented with a login screen, which is a common step in the process for many major HR tech systems.
The cumbersome “screen of death,” as he called it, requires people to enter a username and password to access their profile — or create a new one — to start the job application process as soon as they click on the posting. That login screen, and the unnecessary hurdle it poses, scares off 68 per cent of job candidates, he said.
“They will actually leave, and we can measure this in career sites, so we know where people drop off in the process,” said Sackett.
HR should take a page from marketing and embrace a more candidate-friendly approach that involves gradual information gathering rather than overwhelming candidates with invasive questions up front, he said. A lot of the arguments for forcing people into those systems don’t hold water, he argued.
For example, companies are trying to avoid having duplicate candidate profiles. “If they don’t fill out a profile, we’re going to get dupes,” he said. “So, what if I have five email addresses like everybody in the world? Can I just do another profile?”
The “screen of death” won’t stop that behaviour, but it will scare off the majority of candidates.
Don’t overwhelm candidates
Candidates that are new to an organization are often kicking the tires at first, he said.
“They kind of want to feel us out. They kind of want to date us a little bit,” said Sackett. “They want to ask us questions, and we immediately go, ‘What’s your social insurance number? Have you ever been to prison? What’s your blood type? Are you on drugs?'”
It’s like asking someone to marry you on the first date, he argued. “People get scared with that.”
The days of too many candidates and not enough jobs are over, so employers can’t afford to frighten any prospects off. All of the information needed can be gathered over time. “We don’t have to do that the first time they meet us.”
Technology can play a big part in that low-key data collection. Sackett walked through some AI-powered chatbots that can communicate with candidates and gather information by answering their questions — asking what type of job they’re looking for and the types of benefits they require.
While many companies are scared of AI, and fear of it saying the wrong thing or being biased, vendors are getting really good at ensuring that doesn’t happen, he said.
“I always tell people I’m less afraid of AI being biased as I am Todd, right? I can control my AI, I can’t control Todd,” he said.
Programmatic is another marketing tool that can work in the HR space. That’s the technology that serves up ads for the shoe you Googled one time and follows you around the web as you visit different websites. It can help target specific occupations, for example.
“The programmatic engines know, based on your traffic history, that you’re more than likely a registered nurse,” he said.
Convert applicants to candidates
A metric Sackett likes is measuring how many people come to the company’s careers page versus how many turn into a candidate.
“You should know what that is,” he said. “When I ask companies if they know that is, most will go no — but it’s probably like 50 or 60 or 70 per cent.”
The real number is closer to five per cent, he said. Most companies don’t need more applicants for jobs. Instead, they need more candidates.
“What we do with the… ‘screen of death’ and all these things is we kick all these applicants off and tell them to go apply somewhere else,” said Sackett.
