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.

Getting Started

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.

Vacancy & Placement Status

Eploy uses statuses against your vacancies and placements to track the progression throughout your process. Vacancy approval is tracked through the vacancy status, whilst the offer & onboarding process is managed via placement statuses, so being able to measure between these points will help you to calculate all of your Time to Metrics.

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 & 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.

Time to Fill & Time to Hire

• Time to Fill – We define Time to Fill as the length of time between the first recognition of a vacancy requirement, all the way through to completion of the recruitment and onboarding process. In simple terms, time to fill is the bums on seats measurement, how long does it take to fill a position including all of the red tape parts of the journey, such as approval, recruitment and onboarding.
  
  
• Time to Hire – This calculation allows you to measure how long the recruitment team ‘works’ a role, once it has been approved. This will include all pre-screening & screening activity, as well as the interview and offer process. This is the metric the recruitment team will care about, where as time to fill will be more relevant to the wider business.

Within the first status in your process then, 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 Auth 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.

Repeat this process and tick each status accordingly:

• If the status can be reached following the initial Time to Fill status, then you need to tick Time to Fill.
• If the status can be reached following the first Time to Hire status, then you need to tick Time to Hire & Time to Fill.

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

Once you have set up your vacancy statuses, you need to repeat the process for your Placement Statuses, identifying those which indicate the offer has been made and the offer has been accepted.

To do this, change the drop down list selection to Placement Status and click into the first status to indicate that the offer has been made to the candidate and tick the appropriate option. Then, every status that follows that one, you need to tick for Offer Made.

Once you the reach the status to indicate the offer has been accepted by the candidate, you then need to tick both options. See the example set up below:

Time-Based Metrics

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

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. You can also create new metrics by clicking New on the grey tool bar. 

Hint – Always check to see if the metric you need already exists – creating duplicate metrics can cause issues with inconsistent reporting, as well as leading to confusion when attempting to manage your dashboards.

In the search bar, check to see if your Time To metrics already exist, by searching for Time To – this should filter the page and show you any metrics that have that phrase in the title.

If the metrics haven’t already been created, click New to start the process of configuring your metric. 

Creating Time-Based Metrics

There are eight standard time to metrics that we recommend, to help give you a full & well rounded overview of your time based recruitment KPIs:

• Time to Authorise – This is a vacancy metric and allows you to measure how long it takes for a vacancy to be raised and approved on Eploy, measuring from the first Time to Fill date through to the first Time to Hire Date – i.e. from First Authorisation Required through to Live Requirement.
  
  
• Time to Offer Made from Time to Fill Date – This is an application metric, which looks at the date the job was first sent for approval, through to when the offer has been made to the candidate, based on both your vacancy status and placement status.
  
  
• Time to Offer Made from Time to Hire Date – This is an application metric, which looks at the date the job was first put live, through to when the offer has been made to the candidate, based on both your vacancy status and placement status.
  
  
• Time to Offer Made from Application Date – This is an application metric, which looks at the date the application was made by the candidate, through to when the offer has been made, based on the application date and the placement status.
  
  
• Time to Offer Accepted from Time to Fill Date – This is an application metric, which looks at the date the job was first sent for approval, through to when the candidate has completed onboarding and the offer has been accepted.
  
  
• Time to Offer Accepted from Time to Hire Date – This is an application metric, which looks at the date the job was first put live, through to when the candidate has completed onboarding and the offer has been accepted.
  
  
• Time to Offer Accepted from Application Date – This is an application metric, which looks at the date the application was made by the candidate, through to when the candidate has completed onboarding and the offer has been accepted.
  
  
• Time to Onboard – This is an application metric and allows you to measure between when the offer was made to the candidate and when they have then accepted the offer, by completing onboarding.

From the list above, decide which are relevant for you and your business then click New to create a new metric.

Configuring Metrics

The first thing to do when creating a metric is to give it a Title. This field will be visible when adding widgets to your dashboards and you may end up with lots of different metrics – for this reason, ensure that the title given is clear and concise, so that you know what to look for when setting up widgets. We also recommend adding a Description of the metric, where you can outline in plain terms what you are measuring, so that it's clear when adding widgets exactly what the results will show!

Once you have populated your Title & Description, you can complete the following fields:

• Record Type – This is the area of the system that you are reporting on and for Time to Metrics, should be either Vacancies (for Time to Authorise) or Applications (for all others listed above).
  
  
• Date Field – Once you have picked your record type, you will have access to a host of date fields to filter based on. This is not the dates which will be used for your Time to Fill/Hire reporting, but will allow you to filter for subsets of data. i.e. if you chose advertising start date, within your widgets, you will be able to filter based on vacancies that were advertised within a specific time frame.
  
  
• Aggregate Type – This field sets the calculation that your metric will do, so for time based metrics, you need to select Average. When doing this, you will then be able to choose the Numeric Field.
  
  
• Numeric Field – After selecting average, you can then set the time based calculation you are interested in.

• User Field – This field allows you to choose the user association on the metric, which impacts how you would filter for users when creating metrics. If unsure, select Vacancy – User as this will allow you to filter the data based on the users assigned to the role.
  
  
• Permission – Every metric needs to have a permission associated, to ensure that only those with the right permissions are able to report on this activity. In this instance, choose either the Vacancy Summary or Application permission, so that users with access to that data can then use this permission on their dashboards.
  
  
• Editors – You can now lock down who can edit this metric, to protect the integrity of the measurement. If you leave this blank, any user with the permission to manage metrics will be able to make any amendments if required.
  
  
• Filters – This is where you can restrict the data to only include certain records. These are our recommended filters for each time based metric type:
  
  
• Time to Authorise – Filter the vacancy statuses for any vacancies currently at live requirement or any status that is used following this status. This is to help identify only the records that have been approved, regardless of the current status. By adding this filter you will remove any records that have not yet been approved and therefore return no data.
  
  
• All other Time to Metrics – For all the other examples, we would recommend filtering for only those applications that have reached the offers & onboarding stage of the recruitment workflow. This will help to eliminate all applications that have not yet been placed and therefor skew the data.

Once you have completed the form and added your required filter, Save your metric – this will make it available to use on your dashboards as required.

Repeat this process for each measurement that you wish to use, in order to start reporting on time based metrics.

Widget Inspiration

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 option 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!