Reducing Time-to-Fill Without Compromising Candidate Quality

A common misconception in talent acquisition is that thorough hiring processes must be slow. In practice, the opposite is true: the organisations with the shortest time-to-fill metrics often have the most structured processes. Speed comes from eliminating waste, not from skipping steps.

Where Time Gets Lost

When we analyse time-to-fill data across organisations, the delays rarely occur during candidate evaluation. They accumulate in the spaces between stages:

• Requisition approval: Without defined approval workflows, requisitions sit in email inboxes waiting for sign-off. Average delay: 5-15 business days.
• Interview scheduling: Coordinating panel availability through email chains and phone calls. Average delay: 3-10 business days per interview round.
• Feedback collection: Waiting for interviewers to submit their evaluations. Average delay: 2-7 business days after each interview.
• Decision-making: Unclear decision rights and insufficient information lead to delayed or deferred decisions. Average delay: 5-10 business days.

In a typical four-stage hiring process, these inter-stage delays can add 30 to 60 business days — six to twelve weeks of dead time where no value is being created.

Acceleration Without Compromise

Automate Approval Workflows

Define approval chains in advance. When a hiring manager submits a requisition, it should automatically route to the appropriate approvers with all necessary information. Set SLA targets and escalation rules for approvals that exceed their time limits.

Structured Scheduling

Move interview scheduling from email chains to coordinated systems. When a candidate advances to the next stage, scheduling should begin automatically based on panel member availability.

Real-Time Feedback

Require evaluations to be submitted before the next stage begins. Structured scorecards reduce the time needed to complete evaluations — interviewers are not writing free-form essays, they are completing a focused assessment against predefined criteria.

Clear Decision Rights

Define who makes the hiring decision, what information they need, and what the escalation path is if consensus is not reached. Remove ambiguity from the process.

Measuring What Matters

Time-to-fill is a useful operational metric, but it should not be optimised in isolation. Track it alongside quality-of-hire indicators, candidate experience scores, and offer acceptance rates. The goal is not the fastest possible hire — it is the most efficient process that produces consistently good outcomes.

The most effective approach is to break time-to-fill into stage-level metrics. Knowing that your overall time-to-fill is 45 days is less useful than knowing that requisition approval takes 12 days, sourcing takes 8 days, and interview scheduling takes 10 days. Stage-level data tells you where to focus improvement efforts.

The Platform Advantage

Manual process improvement has limits. When approval routing, scheduling, feedback collection, and reporting are all manual, each improvement requires changing human behaviour. Platform-based improvements change the system, producing consistent results regardless of individual behaviour.

ShumelaHire automates the administrative overhead that inflates time-to-fill metrics while preserving the human judgement that produces quality hiring decisions. The result is a faster process that is also more thorough, more consistent, and more auditable.