How to cut your time-to-hire down with SAP SuccessFactors Recruiting

In a competitive world as ours, top talent is hard to find. Besides, in a post-pandemic world, quiet quitting has hit us hard and organizations find themselves challenged in retaining employees and hiring new ones as replacements. As an organization, therefore, if you are not able to move fast, you’ll miss the bus in getting the best talent. 

When you find the right talent you’re seeking for, it is important you act fast in order to avoid losing candidates to other organizations they may be interviewing with. Taking longer to hire would mean your shortlisted candidates have the opportunity to accept offers at organizations who’ve moved faster than your recruiting team. Cutting down time-to-hire therefore becomes a critical factor in the hiring process. 

For many organizations, Time to Hire (T2H) is the most important KPI in recruiting after those measuring new hire quality. Some use Time to Fill or both or even use the two expressions interchangeably. Terminology notwithstanding, it’s about getting the right people into the open positions quickly. So how can you accelerate and quicken the hiring process? As an organization you need a modern solution that can streamline the interview process and cut down hiring time.  

Achieving Time-to-Hire goals with SuccessFactors Recruiting:

Time to Hire is high on the agenda for most recruiting system implementation projects. There are a number of ways that SAP SuccessFactors Recruiting can help to achieve this, including, but not limited to: 

• Adding pre-qualification questions to job adverts to auto-disqualify clearly unsuitable candidates, thus allowing recruiters to get to the right candidates faster.
• Building a Talent Pool that can be auto-notified or approached by recruiters directly as soon as an opening comes up.
• Making it easier for candidates to apply, most notably via mobile, so they may apply during their daily commute or lunch break rather than waiting for the next weekend.  

My focus today is on the time that gets lost finding appropriate interview slots. A delay at this stage is particularly obstructive, as we are dealing with the top 5% or so of candidates – those who made it to the interview stage. 

Streamlining Interview Scheduling

You probably know that getting hiring managers and candidates to agree to an interview timeslot can be tedious. Video interviews add some flexibility, but then most managers find it difficult to manage with their ever-busy schedules, wiping out any benefit video technology may bring. 

There are basically two approaches to speed up interview scheduling. Both rely on providing the recruiter or coordinator with a number of slots to draw from. 

• All parties involved are asked to mark out the time periods during which they are available. The system then supports the coordinator to identify those time slots everybody agrees with and allows the candidate to pick one from that selection. Every organization using SAP SuccessFactors Recruiting Management (RCM) can make use of this. 
• The availability of line managers and other interviewers is drawn directly from their calendar. A prerequisite for this is that the organization must be using Microsoft Outlook, which needs to be connected to the SuccessFactors instance. Once this is set up, you are ready to go. Needless to say, it requires some discipline from Line Managers to keep their calendars up-to-date, but it is an effort every bit worthwhile. 

If you are looking for a solution to speed up your hiring or you need help to set up SuccessFactors Recruiting solution and derive optimum value from it, get in touch with us.

Vishwas GK

SAP SuccessFactors Consultant