One of the most important metrics in recruitment is your brokerage’s time to hire. Ideally, you should be able to fill a role within 30 days or less. If it takes any longer, there may be some hiccups in your process that you need to address ASAP.
Indeed, it’s important to figure out how you can speed up your time to hire. This is because if you take too long, you’re not only driving up the cost per hire but also risk losing high-quality candidates. Remember: you’re not the only one looking to hire the cream of the crop. If you want the best real estate agents to join your brokerage, you have to be both smart and quick about recruitment.
If you’re looking for ways to improve your recruitment process overall, you can visit this website for some valuable advice. Meanwhile, below are some helpful tips to effectively reduce time to hire:
Look at Your Data
The first step you need to take to improve the time to hire is to collect the right data. This way, you can figure out exactly where you’re going wrong and not waste time trying to fix something that isn’t broken in the first place.
Some of the data you need to take a look at include but are not limited to the following:
- Your current time to hire vis-a-vis the industry standard
- The time it takes for one candidate to complete the stages of recruitment, whether or not they’re successfully hired
- The number of good applications versus poor ones
- The time it takes for you to make an offer after deciding on the best candidate
- The time it takes for your recruiters or hiring personnel to respond to candidate concerns
Afterwards, analyze which problems you want to prioritize. Don’t fall into the trap of addressing everything all at once (unless you find certain overlaps). Tackle one issue at a time for better efficiency.
Don’t Pass Up on Internal Candidates
Sometimes, you spend too much time and money to hire external applicants when the most suitable candidate is already part of your team. Promotions, whether vertical or lateral, can drastically cut down the time you need to hire qualified employees. For one, you no longer have to conduct such a stringent screening process. You also don’t have to worry too much about whether the person will be able to work well with others in your brokerage.
Of course, this doesn’t mean that you should promote your own people instead of hiring someone from the outside. It will still depend on the individual’s qualifications and what they can bring to the role. Nevertheless, you can still benefit a lot from conducting regular appraisals of your current employees to see if they’re going to fit current vacancies and future roles.
Automate Repetitive Tasks
There are plenty of repetitive tasks involved in real estate recruitment. These include things like scheduling interviews, sending emails, as well as screening CVs and test results. While they’re not particularly difficult, they can still take up a lot of time.
Fortunately, there are software solutions that can help automate these processes. As a result, you can free up your recruiting team’s time so that they can do more crucial tasks such as conducting the actual interviews and assessing a candidate more thoroughly.
Establish a Hiring Process
If you don’t have a hiring process yet, it’s about time you develop one. Not having a structure to follow can lead to a lot of guesswork, which can add days or even weeks to your time to hire. With a structured process, your recruitment team basically has a road map that can guide them from start to finish.
If you already have an established hiring process, it would be good to review it periodically. This will give you a clearer picture of the candidate journey and an opportunity to refine certain steps when needed.
Hyper-Target Your Job Placements
There are times when your time to hire is slowed down not because of your actual process but because you’re receiving too many unqualified candidates. If this is the case, consider hyper-targeting your job placements. This usually requires spending more on ads, but this can ultimately be beneficial since you’ll get more visibility. As a result, you’ll receive more qualified applications sooner.
Improve Your Sourcing
Sourcing isn’t strictly a part of the recruitment process, but it can definitely have an impact on your time to hire. This is especially true if you’re getting a poor ratio of high-quality and low-quality applications. You may also be having difficulties finding good candidates in the first place, which further prolongs your time to hire.
A good way to improve or speed up your sourcing phase is to know where and how to advertise your vacancies. Social media is a good place to advertise, particularly if you’re looking for younger applicants. Programmatic advertising, meanwhile, can help with the above-mentioned hyper-targeting so you can really hone in on your target audience. Employee referrals and internal hiring are also good ways to create a robust candidate sourcing pool.
Do note that it takes a bit of time to feel the results of the changes you implement. Just be patient and you’ll definitely cut down your time to hire.
Good luck!
