Author, Shriram Viswanathan
A candidate from a well-known benchmark firm dropped out of the search for a senior level position because the hiring manager took a week to respond to his interest. He said “It’s not like I need their job. If it takes them a week to respond to a resume like mine for a job of this importance, they’re not the kind of company I want to work for. I move fast, and I can already see that my style wouldn’t fit their culture”
One of the primary contributors to effective hiring is having a great external employer brand image and slow hiring does affect that, which in turn reduces the number and quality of applications that you receive. A long, drawn-out hiring process will also negatively impact your candidate experience, which is another topic that gets a lot of attention on social media and in job-seeker-related blogs. The lesson to be learnt from these two instances is: in a world full of social media, that you can’t expect to keep “being painfully slow” hiring a secret from potential applicants.
Your customers and employees will also feel the negative impacts of slow hiring – you can’t be myopic when it comes to the impact of slow hiring. Recruiting leaders must understand that when a position is vacant for a long period of time, many will suffer. Customers will certainly be able to notice that extended vacancies in customer service positions will result in degraded and slower service because there is literally no one in the chair to do a great job. Your employees will also notice because they will be asked to do double duty and/or overtime, which will negatively impact their morale and retention rates.
The lesson to be learnt is: that recruiting leaders must fully understand and then calculate in dollars the broad negative business impacts that outstanding position vacancies can have on both the customers and the employees.
Obviously, fast decision-making could inadvertently lead to bad decisions, so in recruiting it’s important to have the right strategies and tools for “speed hiring.”
