Time to Calibration

Last year, John Vlastelica proposed a Time to Alignment metric for driving faster hiring outcomes. It is extremely important to align exactly on what the hiring manager is requesting. John's TtA metric is focused on pre-sourcing alignment with the hiring manager on the target profile.*

I'm proposing another important hiring metric, Time to Calibration. Time to Calibration(TtC) is measuring how quickly a hiring team can move from opening a new role to first successful hiring manager interview. This is a unifying metric that is nearly impossible to game. A recruiter can't make a hiring manger say yes and pass a candidate forward. A hiring manager has no incentive to say yes to a non-qualified candidate if they or their team will be required to invest more time with the candidate. TtC confirms the recruiter and hiring manager are calibrated on the target profile.

To measure your TtC, count the number of days between the Opening(Requisition) opening and the day the first candidate had a successful Round 1(post recruiter interview) interview.

If recruiters have the goal of the fewest number of days in Time to Calibration, they will likely make better decisions on who to spend their time with and focus on driving alignment with the hiring manager.

There are a number of ways to decrease your TtC. Once alignment is achieved, the recruiter should do everything possible to generate interest from the target profile and qualify those candidates quickly.

On the application side, objective application review helps to drive efficiency the most. There are application review platforms (and natively built in ATS solutions) that leverage AI** based on the requirements of the role. Within the platform you can quickly determine based on the prompts you have who is the best candidate, objectively. This empowers recruiters to move away from gut feel and have evidence to support their decisions on who to spend time with. These platforms also minimize recruiter fatigue in application review and allow for consistency in how candidates are being evaluated.

How this process works:

1. The recruiter creates and adjusts the screening criteria based on the role requirements
2. The tool runs the prompts against all applications for the role
3. The recruiter reviews and filters to identify the best of the applications

You will need to determine a threshold for your role that qualifies for an automatic scheduling. One example would be if a candidate meets 6/6 requirements including the nice to haves, schedule them asap. If they are 5/6 or less then spend that time engaging alternative candidates into the interview process. Go source. Make a referral post within the company. You may decide to wait for a specific period of time and then evaluate if you need to move that grading threshold. If you receive 20 applications that meet 6/6, then you may regret moving quickly to schedule the first candidates that came in.

A wonderful feature of AI application review is the ability to add in prompts for your "nice to haves" and sort based on the best of the candidates that have them. If you have time after you've talked with five candidates who met 6/6 requirements, then make the decision if you want to consider some of the job applicants that met less and learn more about their fit for the role.

For those hiring managers requesting the impossible candidate, it can be useful for recruiters to show hiring managers that no candidates are matching up to ALL of their must have requirements and to really help prioritize between a must have and a nice to have. Objective rankings will drive time to alignment and time to calibration much faster.

I really agree with Jim Miller's article about how to effectively handle your application review process. One of the highlights is being transparent about how long you'll keep the application submissions open. This will remove urgency on the candidate side and create space for them to submit a great application. Leverage open text application questions. This will enable better AI grading and give motivated applicants a chance to showcase their skills against the role.

What is a good benchmark for TtC?

A possible TtC, could be:

1. Role approval and setup - Day 1
2. Application received - Day 2
3. Recruiter Interview - Day 3
4. Hiring Manager Interview - Day 4
5. Next step - Day 5

This is a four(+/-) day time to calibration.

I understand this may not be ideal for a variety of reasons. I am suggesting that if you can do this and you do have a great candidate on day one, you should strive to make this happen.

If candidates are passing the Recruiter Interview and failing the Round 1 interview (Hiring Manager), implement an immediate retrospective to align. It is even better if the recruiter can listen to the interview and learn why a candidate might not have been successful. This allows the recruiter to revisit the criteria of the role and application parameters to iterate and update. The recruiter can then do another sprint to engage with the adjusted candidate profile persona types and try again.

Recruiters also need to be aware that anything less than a 4/4 interview rating in the Round 1 may be an opportunity to understand calibration challenges and iterate.

One of the best ways to decrease the Time to Calibration is to show the most important segments from the recruiter interview. If the hiring manager only has two hours to interview in a given week and you move forward with the worst of the best, you've eliminated an opportunity for the hiring manager to meet the best candidate sooner.

Ways to decrease your Time to Calibration:

• Empower hiring managers to craft compelling job descriptions. Use technology and prompts that generate details and create clarity for the hiring manager on what needs to be accomplished in the role and what skills and experiences are needed.
• Create a structured interview process with clear thresholds for each interview.
• Align on what questions will be asked in each interview.
• Develop open text interview application questions that allow people to highlight their experience related to the most critical role objectives.
• Leverage objective application review technology that alerts the recruiter when a certain threshold of requirements are met (or likely to be met).
• Embed interview recording technology to verify every candidate is objectively evaluated.
• Ensure recruiters and hiring managers have immediate interview time available for the best candidates.
• Market mapping. The recruiter and hiring manager should understand the available skills and talent in the market. Does the desired candidate even exist? How in demand is the skillset? Are there any flexible requirements to increase the candidate pool.
  • Spend time sharpening the axe and drive down your time to alignment.
• Source.
• Seek out referrals from the best people in your team with similar skillsets.

What did I miss? Have you implemented a similar metric before? Is it named something else?

* One possible way to track this metric in your ATS is counting the number of days from Opening(Requisition) open date to the date the first candidate entered the Talent Screen stage. The recruiter and hiring manager can leverage a Pre-screening stage to align on candidate profiles before moving them into Talent Screen.

** AI is not perfect and there will be flaws in your system. Human review and auditing is critical.