Time to hire now averages 43 days and is increasing

At AMS we're proud to be partnering with the Josh Bersin Company to produce a new series of quarterly reports on the Talent Climate.  These reports will explore today's challenging and turbulent world of talent, providing up-to-date and in-depth market insights, trends, and solutions for how to tackle the changing global talent conditions. 

The first report, published earlier this month and available to download here, focusses exclusively on time to hire.  Time to hire may not feel like the most strategic metric with which to assess the talent climate but it's the metric that is most commonly measured by talent acquisition professionals and the metric for which I'm most often asked to provide benchmarks.  The report leverages half a million global data points from AMS, in addition to The Josh Bersin Company database of hundreds of HR practices.  For the report, the Josh Bersin Company analyzed hiring data from eight industries and over 25 countries. The insights offered are broken down by Industry, Region, Roles, and Country. It's an incredibly detailed report which I know all talent acquisition specialists will find invaluable.

The findings of the report couldn't be clearer.  Despite continual innovation in talent acquisition, despite the deployment of automation and AI, virtual working, mobile applications, video interviewing, despite all the progress that recruitment leaders have made, it's taking progressively longer to hire talent.

As of 2022, time to hire took an average of 43 days globally (measured from the approval of a hiring requirement to the point that a candidate verbally accepted an offer).  That metric differs by sector (Defense, Energy and Engineering have a mean time to hire of 48 days whilst Retail & Consumer Goods have a mean of 38 days).  The metric also differs by region but not dramatically, North America hiring takes a mean of 40 days compared to 43 days for the EMEA region.  

In the report, the Josh Bersin Company explain three reasons as to why time to hire is increasing.  They point to low unemployment rates, the exit of baby-boomers from the workforce and decreasing birth rates which are together stagnating or shrinking the working age populations in many countries.  They point to changing behaviors of job-seekers and the demand for better benefits and flexibility.  And they point to the changing demand from employers for new skills - skills for which demand outstrips supply.  

So what can Talent Acquisition leaders do to slow or reverse the increasing time to hire?  My companion article here shares six strategies for reducing time to hire:

• Leveraging talent intelligence
• Tailoring recruitment brand messaging
• Deploying an expert candidate sourcing capability
• Putting candidate experience first
• Innovating and automating
• Delivering on candidate care

Please do read the article for my thoughts on each of the above areas. 

We're excited to bring you the next of our Talent Climate reports later this year which will include updated time to hire trends as well as a focus on other key talent trends and metrics.  

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