Hiring Readiness Index
Hiring Readiness Index measures how efficiently you open a role, calibrate, attract the right talent, and align your offer with your target candidate.
Time to [X] is a topic that comes up often in recruiting.
How fast are we hiring? How long does it take us to make an offer?
This isn't an article meant to get into the specific time to [X] definitions and how to educate the business on what they are and why they matter. I'm going to focus on a way to measure the efficiency and effectiveness of your entire hiring processes by introducing a simple ratio. I'm naming it the Hiring Readiness Index.
TTF / TTH
What is the Hiring Readiness Index(HRI)?
The Hiring Readiness Index is a recruiting efficiency metric calculated as:
Time to fill looks at the entire hiring process from a company perspective. Time to hire focuses on the hired candidate's journey. I have usually evaluated these metrics in isolation. By looking at TTF and TTH together you can identify the time it takes to fill a position and how much of that time is spent identifying the hired candidate.
If you divide the total number of days of TTF by the total number of days of TTH you get an entirely different insight instantly. Here are a few examples.
HRI measures how efficiently you open a role, calibrate, attract the right talent, and align your offer with your target candidate. HRI will be an indicator that you have the necessary bandwidth within your recruiting team to identify the best candidates quickly.
The HRI ratio measures the time a job requisition remains open and the speed at which the eventual hired candidate moves through the hiring process. A lower ratio indicates a more synchronized and responsive hiring process, whereas a higher ratio may highlight inefficiencies in:
- role setup and job description creation
- role calibration between the hiring manager and recruiter
- candidate attraction and sourcing
- referral generation
- candidate engagement
Interpreting the Hiring Readiness Index
There are many factors that will change how you should interpret the HRI. There will be major differences between evergreen roles and ad-hoc openings. Similarly, talent supply and demand gaps and the seniority of the position will influence your HRI.
The scale below is based on a mid-level ad-hoc role where there are no major imbalances in the available talent pool.
- HRI < 1 ⚠️ → An anomaly (or potential data issue), as a hire shouldn’t happen faster than the job is officially open. If a team is exceptional at pipelining talent ahead of the role being opened, this is possible, and should be highlighted as excellent. 🎉
- HRI≈ 1 ⚙️ → The hiring process is hyper-efficient. Jobs are approved and filled efficiently with zero lag time. Similar to the above on warning flags and potentially low quality candidate assessment. One is not the ideal outcome, especially when your hiring team intentionally creates a stage for the application acceptance window. ⚙️
- HRI ≤ 1.5 🏆 → Efficient process that includes time for candidate attraction, calibration, and a selection process that doesn't focus on hiring 'first available'.
- HRI > 2 😩 → Indicates low effectiveness. The recruiting team is likely over-capacity and not calibrated with the hiring team.
Use Cases for Hiring Readiness Index
- Hiring Kick-off Optimization: Helps identify bottlenecks in job setup and calibration. You might need to drill down into the number of days between the requisition opening and the first day the job is posted on your careers site.
- Candidate Attraction: A considerable day difference between TTF and TTH indicates your value proposition(and everything that goes with this) might not be resonating with the market.
- Recruiter Performance Benchmarking and Bandwidth: Evaluate the effectiveness of recruiters filling roles quickly.
- Workforce Planning: Ensures the business is prioritizing well and job openings aren’t sitting too long before meaningful pipeline activity begins.
By understanding what you are targeting for your HRI score, you can have more impactful conversations on what you are optimizing for and where to invest additional energy to improve.
Are you already measuring this? Do you think this is a useful metric? Do you have a better name than Hiring Readiness Index? 😆 Please comment below, you'll be the first one. 🤩