Alexander Florio, Co-Founder of Swob Inc., advancing AI-powered solutions for the future of hourly work.
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For years, hiring has been treated like a numbers game. Post a job, collect applications, review resumes, schedule interviews and hope the best candidate is still available when you’re ready to make a decision.
Today’s hiring market doesn’t always work that way.
Increasingly, one of the biggest competitive advantages in hiring is speed. Great candidates have options, and the company that reaches them first often has the best opportunity to hire them. And it isn’t necessarily because they’re offering the highest salary or the biggest signing bonus.
Great Candidates Don’t Stay On The Market
Job seekers have more ways than ever to discover and apply for opportunities. A candidate can find multiple positions and submit applications to several employers from their phone in a relatively short period of time.
That changes the hiring dynamic.
The first employer to acknowledge an application, begin a conversation and move a qualified candidate toward an interview immediately stands out. By the time another company begins reviewing applications days later, that same candidate may already be several steps into another hiring process.
This is particularly important when hiring for positions where candidates have multiple similar opportunities available to them. Hiring delays don’t just cost time. They can cost talent.
The Gap Between Application And Conversation Matters
Think about two companies hiring for the same position.
The first reviews applications every few days. A manager identifies promising candidates, manually reaches out, waits for responses and then goes back and forth trying to find an interview time.
The second has built a process designed around responsiveness. Qualified candidates hear back quickly, scheduling is simple and interviews can happen while candidate interest is still high.
Both companies might offer similar compensation, benefits, culture and career opportunities. The difference is that one created momentum before the other.
Too often, companies spend significant time and money trying to attract candidates and then introduce unnecessary delays once those candidates actually apply. If someone has already expressed interest in working for your company, the next priority should be starting the conversation.
The Cost Of Waiting Goes Beyond Recruiting
An unfilled position affects far more than a company’s recruiting metrics. Existing employees may take on additional responsibilities, managers can become stretched thinner and important work can be delayed.
Over time, those pressures can create a larger problem. When teams consistently operate short staffed, burnout can increase and employee experience can suffer. A single vacancy can eventually contribute to additional turnover, creating an expensive cycle for the organization.
This is why time to hire shouldn’t only be viewed as an HR metric. In many organizations, it’s an operational metric.
Reducing the time between application, conversation and interview can have an impact well beyond the recruiting department.
Technology Should Remove Friction, Not People
Technology has an important role to play in making hiring faster, but I don’t believe the goal should be removing people from the process. It should be removing the administrative work preventing people from connecting sooner.
Hiring managers have other responsibilities. They’re leading teams, managing customers, solving problems and running businesses. Reviewing applications and reaching out to candidates can easily get pushed down the priority list.
The right technology can reduce some of that friction. Candidate communication can happen faster, interview scheduling can become simpler and hiring managers can spend more of their time doing what actually matters: meeting and evaluating people.
The best hiring technology shouldn’t make recruiting feel less human. It should create more opportunities for human interaction by eliminating the tasks that slow those interactions down.
Speed Is Part Of The Candidate Experience
The hiring process is often someone’s first meaningful interaction with a company.
A quick response communicates that the organization is attentive and values the candidate’s time. Long periods of silence can communicate something very different.
That means candidate experience doesn’t begin with the interview. It begins the moment someone applies.
Companies spend enormous amounts of time thinking about employer branding, job descriptions and how they present themselves to prospective employees. But the experience candidates have after clicking “apply” may say more about the organization than any careers page ever could.
Companies can’t control how many other opportunities a great candidate is considering. They can’t control who else that candidate is interviewing with. But they can control what happens when that candidate expresses interest in their organization.
When great candidates have options, the company that starts the conversation first is often the one that gets the opportunity to finish it.
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