Many companies fixate on sourcing and interviewing when looking to improve a lagging hiring process. The truth is, the issue is rarely there. Usually, the real obstacle is further along the chain, in the screening and compliance stages. Manual processes and slow vendors bleed days, if not weeks, into the hiring timeline, unseen by most. If you want to accelerate your time-to-hire, you have to take a closer look at the entire process with an eye towards what happens between “we want to hire this candidate” and “this candidate will be here next Monday.”
Below are eight steps to audit the process and streamline what you find.
Map the current workflow before making changes
Before making any changes, take a close look at what happens today. What really happens, not what your process document says happens. Get out your ATS and walk through a few recent hires, step-by-step. Where were the candidates lingering? You might be surprised to learn it doesn’t happen during sourcing or interview setup. The two biggest bottlenecks tend to be between the final interview and offer, and again between the acceptance of the offer and the beginning of background checks. The latter is particularly insidious because it can occur in that gray space between the recruiter, hiring manager, and whomever is responsible for initiating the screening.
Draw a visual map of the process if needed, with timestamps for each leg of the journey. It’ll teach you more in an hour than half a year’s worth of hiring meetings.
Calculate baseline stats with hard numbers
You can’t fix what you haven’t measured, and assumptions about the source of delay tend to be incorrect at best.
Pull the time-to-fill and time-to-hire numbers for your last two quarters. According to the Society for Human Resource Management’s Talent Acquisition Benchmarking Report , the average time-to-fill for most organizations is 36 days, with roles requiring background checks and other pre-employment screenings taking much longer. If your average time-to-hire for screened roles is 45, 50, or 60 days, you have a serious issue in the screening process itself that’s likely limiting your ability to accelerate the rest of your cycle.
More importantly, drill down into the numbers at each step to understand the attrition rate at each stage. A high drop-off between offer acceptance and the start date tends to indicate lengthy background checks and candidates taking other jobs in the meantime. If your offer acceptance rate is dropping at any point, a slow and unpredictable screening timeline is often an overlooked culprit. Candidates who accepted your offer are expecting to get to work, and if they don’t hear from you for two or three weeks, they’ll assume something has gone wrong and move on.
Know screening criteria for each role ahead of time, before requisition opens
The most common reason for delay in the screening process isn’t a slow vendor or a compliance hold – it’s sheer indecisiveness. A candidate accepts an offer, and someone has to go back to the drawing board to understand what checks need to happen – criminal check, employment verifications, drug tests – or if any are even required. This should never happen after an offer has been made.
Establish what screening checks are required for each type of role, before any requisition is opened for that role. Depending on the role, a warehouse worker, finance manager, and remote software developer will require dramatically different checks. Make sure your legal and HR teams agree on these screening minimums at the job-family level, rather than on an individual-hire basis, so that there aren’t any surprises when a candidate reaches the offer stage.
For companies that operate in multiple states or have remote employees, consistency in screening is also critical, particularly with national criminal background checks. County-level criminal checks only reflect a person’s record in that particular county – so if someone with a theft charge from another state moves to Texas, their record will show up in Texas, but not the other way around. For roles that operate in multiple states, standard criminal background checks at the national level are preferable as a default, so that a person’s entire record is visible from fingerprinting, rather than a patchwork of county checks from each state. By standardizing, you also remove decision-making from the process – if everyone gets a national criminal background check, the “do we need one?” question is moot.
Build FCRA compliance into the process, not around it
Unfair processes are the root cause of many hiring delays. Worse, they can expose your company to potential legal issues. Under the Fair Credit Reporting Act, candidates must sign the disclosure and authorization forms before a background check can be run. If a recruiter has to ask permission to perform a background check before paperwork has been completed, your process is legally non-compliant with the FCRA, or you’re wasting days of time waiting for paperwork to clear.
Put the disclosure and authorization workflow in your ATS, and make it a mandatory step before “submit background checks” becomes available. It serves to streamline your process by removing manual paperwork (did we get this signed yet?) and making sure no checks are run before permission has been granted, which is a legal necessity. This same principle applies to adverse action notifications. If a report comes back with information that would prevent a candidate from being hired, two notifications are required: a pre-adverse action notice, and a final adverse action notice. Again, make it automatic – the last thing anyone wants is a human error causing a discriminatory adverse action lawsuit. Unless your adverse action practices are blanket rejections that make no consideration of the candidate’s criminal record and its applicability to the job, you should always send both notifications to the candidate in question. If your city or state has a ban-the-box law that prevents asking about a candidate’s criminal history at any point during the hiring process, adverse action policies should still be in place to control how candidates are notified if their records do apply.
Automate the handoff between offer acceptance and screening initiation
This is the easiest fix of all. In most companies, as soon as a candidate accepts an offer, another person has to manually initiate the background check. In most cases, that ‘someone’ is a recruiter who already has several other direct hires to keep track of, and the manual process is a huge source of delay. If your ATS can be programmed to automatically submit background checks as soon as an offer is accepted, do it. It’ll shave days off your process, and reduce human error in the procedure.
Streamline your screening vendor, not your internal process
You could optimize every step of your internal process, but if your screening vendor is slow, it all matters little. This is one of the most overlooked aspects of the time-to-hire equation, because the vendor is negotiated based on cost and scope, not speed. It’s crucial to understand the average turnaround time of your vendor for the last six months, broken down by check type. Criminal checks, employment verifications, and education checks can have wildly different timelines, and if one is significantly slower than the others, that’s your bottleneck.
A slow vendor is a bottleneck that no amount of internal process optimization can fix. Likewise, if your vendor’s turn time is inconsistent or steadily rising, it may be an issue you need to address before your next contract renewal.
Set a communication schedule so candidates aren’t falling off the map
The lack of communication throughout the screening process is often a major factor in why candidates take other job offers over yours. It’s an easy fix – establish a baseline communication schedule with candidates right when they accept your offer. Let them know what to expect – “our background check usually takes 3-5 business days, and we’ll be in touch with you when it’s complete.” Then follow up with the “still in progress” message when appropriate, so that candidates don’t think you’ve ghosted them. It’ll reduce the number of “where are we with my application” inquiries dramatically. The same courtesy should be extended to hiring managers, who will also get frustrated if they don’t hear from you. If your hiring managers need four business days to review a candidate or approve an offer, it’s important to let them know that upfront.
Document everything and re-audit this periodically
A documented process is the only reliable process. If you can’t explain it, write it down, and if you can’t write it down, get someone who can. Ideally, you want to have someone who knows the process well enough that they can fill in for the person who created it, should the need arise. If your recruitment process is the lifeblood of your organization, it shouldn’t be at the mercy of one person’s ability to keep track of everything.
Once everything is documented, schedule another audit for some time in the future. Things move, vendors change, laws change – maybe most importantly, people change, and forget. A quarterly re-audit using the same steps above will keep your process as efficient as it needs to be.
Structured interviews can help move things faster earlier in the process, reducing the back and forth between recruiter and hiring manager, but you should fix the issue you see first. It’s entirely possible that your process is as optimized as it can be, and it’s time to move on to the next bottleneck. Many organizations with accelerated recruitment processes have no secrets – they simply went through this process, fixed the most glaring issues with their process, and made sure nothing slipped through the cracks that could unnecessarily slow things down.
