Time to Hire is a key recruitment metric – it helps to highlight where things are going right for you, as well keep a keen eye on any recruitment bottlenecks or flaws in your process. Using Eploy Dashboards, you can now take control of your time to hire analysis and begin to explore the data with greater depth than ever before.

With the ability to create average time to hire, as well as time to authorise, time to fill and time to onboard, you can easily access all the data you need. Add to that the ability to cut the data across key business areas, locations, positions or departments - the options for widgets highlighting team performance is almost endless.

The first thing you need to do is help Eploy identify the key points in time that you wish to measure against – when does your approval process start? When do the recruitment team start ‘working’ a vacancy? Do you measure until the offer is made, accepted or both? Once you have the answer to these questions, you can set this up within Admin > Drop Down Lists.

Eploy uses statuses against your vacancies to track the progression throughout your process. Vacancy approval is tracked through the vacancy status and indicate when the vacancy goes live and is advertised.

To set this up, start with your Vacancy Statuses, by clicking into Admin > Drop Down Lists and choosing the list called Vacancy Status. This will show you all of the vacancy statuses in your process, including those used for authorisation, advertising and no longer required.

Click into the first status in your process – this may be First Authorisation Required or whichever status a vacancy is set to when it is created on the system. This will be the start of your time to fill calculation, as it is the point that a requisition is recognised as being required.

Within the status, you will see a tick box for Time to Fill and Time to Hire.

It’s important to be consistent in how you measure your time-based metrics so your first task will be to standardise your start and end points for Time to Fill / Time to Hire and then stick to it.

Within the first status in your process, you need to flag this as Time to Fill. This means that the calculation we use in our metrics will begin as soon as the vacancy reaches this status. However, as there may be cases where the full process has not been followed (ever fast tracked a vacancy through approval?) it is just as important that you tick all of the following statuses for Time to Fill. This is to ensure that, if in the event the vacancy goes outside of process and skips a stage or two, the data doesn’t get skewed by outliers.

Tick the Time to Fill box in every status, up until the point the recruitment team begin working the role. Depending on your business, this may be Resourcing Team Authorisation Required (where they pick up the vacancy and prep for advertising) or Live Requirement, where the role is advertised, and you are accepting applications.

Once you reach the recruitment team involvement status (the start of the Time to Hire calculation if you will), you still need to ensure that Time to Fill is ticked, but also begin ticking Time to Hire. This status, plus every status that the vacancy can progress too from this point, now need to be ticked for both Time to Hire AND Time to Fill. Again, doing this will help protect the integrity of your calculations, just in case this vacancy goes outside of your normal process.
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Repeat this process and tick each status accordingly:

Based on some generic vacancy statuses, we would expect it to be set up as below to ensure accuracy:

Milestones are assigned to Application Statuses, Action Outcomes and Hire Statuses and serve as a way of tracking Candidate progression through the workflow at a much higher level than Stage and Status reporting gives you.

Milestones also serve as the end points for the majority of Time To calculations, giving you the ability to measure not only Time to Hire and Time to Fill but also, for example, Time to Application Received, Application to Interviewed, Interviewed to Offered and Offered to Started.

There are seven milestones available: New Application, Reviewed, Interviewed, Rejected, Offered, Hired and Withdrawn.

To assign a Milestone to a Status or Outcome navigate to Admin > Drop Down Lists from the menu bar and select either Application Status, Action Outcomes or Hire Status from the list.

Click through each option available and look for the Recruitment Milestone option, selecting the milestone applicable to that status or outcome.

Now that you have set up all of your statuses and Milestones, we can create the time based metrics which will allow us to measure between these points. We do this within Reports > Configure Metrics.

This will give you access to a full list of existing metrics, where you can use the search function or the filters to see all of the different metrics available.

The process for creating a time-based metric is the same as any other metric, which you can learn more about in this guide.

When creating a time-based metric, you need to ensure you select a suitable Record Type:

When you reach the Aggregate Type, set this to Average. This will display the Numeric Field and it is this field that we will use to tell Eploy what time calculation we'd like to make.

There are many options available, but they fall into the following categories:

The final thing to do when creating a Metric is to create a suitable Filter.

The Filter allows you to focus specifically on the types of Vacancies, Applications and Hires that you wish to report on and there are far too many options to go into detail on within this article, but there is one key filter item you need to pay close attention to.

When reporting on Milestones, ensure you have created a filter to only include Applications which have reached those specific Milestones.

For example, if you're measuring the time from Application Date to Interviewed, you'll want to exclude those Applications which haven't yet reached the Interviewed Milestone. Similarly, if measuring the time between Offered and Hired, you'll want to exclude any Applications which haven't reached those milestones.

Given we're calculating the Average time-to, in both these examples, failing to filter out any Applications which haven't reached those milestones can result in erroneous results as these Applications would be included when calculating the average.

Now that the metrics have been created, you can use them in any widgets on your dashboard – snapstats are great for headline information, bar charts for comparing between positions / departments and line charts for progression or improvement over time.

Try using the same metric in different widgets, but changing the Group by options selected – as the calculation is based on the trigger points outlined above and how the information is then split, the group by will allow you to see time to hire based on departments, positions, vacancies or even candidates!