Home care businesses are feeling the pressure of an ongoing struggle for top talent. In a tight labor market, there’s a lot you can do to win over the best candidates, like offering good benefits, paying competitive compensation, and building your employer brand.
But those things will only get you so far. You also need to focus on reducing your time to hire.
Moving slowly in a hiring process means that you won’t get the opportunity to engage your best candidates and get them excited about working for you. They’ll move on to other opportunities with companies that contacted them first, got them into interviews sooner, and made them an offer.
Are you hiring fast enough to secure the best talent for your home care business?
In this article, we’re looking at how quickly other businesses are hiring so that you can see how you compare. We’ll also share some of our best tips for reducing your time to hire.
How Fast Should You Be Hiring?
We define “time to hire” as the amount of time it takes you to fully complete a hiring process – from initial job posting to accepted offer.
When thinking about hiring faster, you might be wondering how quickly other companies are hiring. In our Recruiting Metrics Report, we’ve found that healthcare employers are shaving down their time to hire a little each year.
In 2020, the average time to hire for the healthcare industry was 29.8 days, and in 2021, that number dropped to 19.5 days. This means that employers were hiring 10.3 days (two business weeks!) faster than they were the previous year. And in 2022? Employers took just 17.8 days.
Employers in the home care industry have made great progress speeding up their time to hire over the years. But is it enough in today’s labor market? Or should you be trying to hire even faster to lock down the best candidates?
The 24-48-5 Rule
We’d like to challenge you to speed up your process even more.
We recommend following the 24-48-5 Rule: Contact applicants within 24 hours. Schedule an interview within 48 hours, and hire within 5 days. You can put your business at a significant advantage if you contact them fast, before the competition scoops them up.
CareerPlug President, Jenny Leman advises that “taking more than 5 days to hire causes a dramatic drop off in an employer’s ability to close the hire with the right applicant.”
Taking longer than 5 days limits your options for great employees. It could also be costing you money in lost revenue. It’s estimated that a job vacancy costs companies an average of $95 per day!
How To Reduce Your Time To Hire
Hiring in 5 days? Depending on your current hiring process, that might sound like a bit of a stretch. But unprecedented competition for talent means you might have to do things differently than you’ve done before. Here are some ways you can try to hit those goals of contacting and hiring candidates.
Speed Up Candidate Communication
Contacting candidates within 24 hours is a great goal for employers, and candidates appreciate it, too! In a recent survey of job seekers, we found that applicants consider prompt and frequent communication to be a major factor in a great candidate experience.
So how do you reach out to candidates within 24 hours without being glued to your phone or computer all day?
An applicant tracking system can help. With an ATS, you can set certain parameters around your application, and get notified when someone that checks all your boxes applies. Once you’re notified, you can reach out to that candidate right away. With some applicant tracking systems, you can even automate sending polite rejection emails to candidates that don’t meet your minimum qualifications, saving you more time.
Use Text Recruiting
Another way to streamline candidate communication is with text recruiting. Even if you are reaching out to candidates within 24 hours, if you’re using email, they may not see it.
Sending candidates a text is a faster way to get a response and engage them early. The proof is in the data:
- Email has only a 20% open rate – compared to text messages, which have a 98% open rate.
- The average email gets a response about 6% of the time. The average text message has a 45% response rate.
- 68% of recent job seekers told us that they’ve been contacted by an employer via text message during the hiring process. 84% of those job seekers said their experience with text recruiting was positive.
Automate Interview Scheduling
If you’ve ever experienced the countless back and forth emails with candidates trying to figure out a time that works for both of you to meet, or played endless games of phone tag, then scheduling an interview within 48 hours may sound like an impossible task.
That’s why automated interview scheduling (available in some applicant tracking systems) is a game changer for home care businesses, and the best way to hit the goal of getting interviews scheduled quickly after someone applies.
Automated interview scheduling eliminates the back and forth with candidates, by simply sending them a link so that they can self-schedule an interview. You sync your calendar, candidates see your open time slots, and choose a time to interview that works for them. The interview automatically shows up on your calendar.
Automated interview scheduling can cut interview scheduling time by up to 91%. Less time scheduling interviews means a quicker time to hire, and better chance of making those right hires for your team.
Conclusion
Being a great place to work will help you attract job seekers to your open roles, but in order to turn them into hires, you have to move quickly.
For the past three years, home care businesses have hired a little faster than the year before, shaving their time to hire down to around 18 days in 2022. This is great, but to really beat the competition, we recommend aiming to try and turn an applicant into a hire within 5 days.
You can do this more easily by improving your communication with automations and text recruiting and letting candidates self-schedule their interviews.