Recruitment management system

A recruitment management system is bought to make hiring faster, and the first thing worth knowing is where the time currently goes. This sheet takes four numbers you can get from your own last few hires: the days from application to first screen, screen to first interview, interview to offer, and offer to acceptance, plus the reqs you have open. It returns time to hire end to end, the same in weeks, the days that pass before an offer exists at all, the share of the wait that is upstream of the offer, how many hires one pipeline can turn over in a year at that pace, and how many weeks of pipeline your open reqs represent if they ran one at a time. On the worked example, 6 plus 9 plus 11 plus 5 is 31 days, and 26 of them, 84%, happen before anyone makes an offer. Desks that feel slow usually blame the offer stage, and the arithmetic almost always disagrees.

The offer is rarely the problem

Five of the 31 days on the worked example are between offer and acceptance. Shaving that stage to nothing saves 16% of the wait; halving the screening delay saves more, and costs nothing but a calendar habit.

Days, not averages of averages

Work the stages from your own recent hires rather than from a remembered figure. The point of splitting the wait four ways is that one stage is usually much worse than the others, and a single average hides exactly that.

What your open reqs actually represent

Eight reqs at 31 days each is 35 weeks of pipeline if they ran one at a time. They do not, of course, but the figure is the honest answer to whether one person can carry that list.