Why recruiting sucks (part I)
A data perspective.
Do you know the average time for your company to shortlist a candidate? Average number of days it takes to complete the interview process? Time to offer?
And do these numbers matter?
Yes, they do. The speed and intent that you show in your recruitment process, defines whether you will be able to hire or not.
Unfortunately this is glossed over because we have a convenient scape goat — Not.Enough.Good.Candidates! So the problem is always out there and not within. Even we thought the same, till we started up.
We’re Geektrust, a tech recruitment platform and we track everything. We know exactly how much time it takes for companies to shortlist, how much time it takes for a company to complete their interview process, how long does it take to make an offer, or to reject. And this data is important. I can guarantee that if you look at your own data, and fix it, you will be able to improve your hiring.
In this ‘Why recruitment sucks’ series of blogs, I will try to draw attention to things that matter but are usually ignored, because we can always point our finger at lack of quality candidates.
Data point #1 — time taken to shortlist candidates
Shortlisting is the first step and this is an important indicator of how serious you are about hiring.
A few companies at Geektrust take more than 3 weeks to shortlist candidates. 3 weeks! And these companies have come to us because their regular hiring failed and they desperately need people. I don’t think it matters at all what the source is. If it takes 3 weeks to shortlist candidates, you’re not going to hire easily.
Days-to-shortlist vs Offers
We plotted some data to show the correlation between offers and days-to-shortlist. The y-axis on the chart above is the number of offers and x-axis is the days-to-shortlist. The size of the bubble indicates the number of companies.
What this shows is, companies that move forward with a candidate within 10 days of receiving the profile, give double the offers than companies that take more than 10 days.
This data is across the last few quarters. 60 offers have been given out when the candidate was shortlisted in less than 10 days. Whereas, take 15–30 days to shortlist, and the offer count reduces to 26.
Logically, this makes sense, right? Go slow with candidates and other companies will grab them. But it’s not just about that. Time to shortlist is a great indicator of whether intent (to hire) meets actual action on the ground from the recruitment and tech teams. Sure, this is but one indicator but as the data shows, you double your offers if you shortlist fast.
So do you know your company’s time to shortlist?
I’m Krishnan, co-founder of Geektrust. I got into the domain of recruitment 4 years ago after spending 10 years in a software delivery role at ThoughtWorks. At that time I thought recruitment would be fairly straightforward — build a platform that is developer-first, entice developers to register, get them to showcase their code on Geektrust, connect them with companies who will happily interview them and hire.
Oh, how naive I was! Every step described above has proved painful. However, today we have about 30,000 developers registered with us. And we’ve received good feedback on their experience with Geektrust, and superlative feedback on the hand-crafted feedback we provide every developer who writes code on our platform.
87% of companies that use us regularly, say Geektrust is better than other recruitment partners they have. Most of these companies come to us because their regular channels don’t work. And all of them have high hiring standards — many of them Series A/B raised companies looking to hire at mid to super senior level.
In the next set of blogs, I will talk about more data points and how they impact your hiring capability. What is the average number of interviews that companies that hire successfully do? What is the average time it takes to complete interviews? And more.
Want to connect? Have questions? Mail us at hello@geektrust.in
