The costs of an inefficient hiring process

From the largest Fortune 100 Company to the smallest local government, an organization derives its value from the foundation of its employees. Quality employees can drive growth and lead organizations to a brighter future. However, these employees can only add such benefits if they make it through the hiring process. An inefficient hiring process can impede an organization’s ability to attract top-performing candidates.

The average length of a hiring process has almost doubled in the past five years. A slow and inefficient process directly contributes to a loss of revenue and productivity as vacant positions take longer to fill. Furthermore, a lengthy hiring process can result in the loss of applicants, especially for high-demand prospects. Top-performing candidates generally have many opportunities and will assuredly receive alternative offers. When given the choice between a quick application process with an immediate, guaranteed, and often expiring offer and a process involving a months-long wait for a potential offer, it isn’t surprising that a candidate will likely go with the former. Even if your job posting and salary is more attractive, potentially great employees may be lost by delays in the hiring process. This potential loss of the most competitive candidates lowers the quality of the entire candidate pool, leaving only average to weak applicants to select from by the end of the process. Choosing from sub-par candidates can lead to a bad hire, costing the company valuable time and resources.

Lengthy hiring processes have substantial effects on how employees perceive companies. A Robert Half survey revealed how rapidly candidates can lose interest in a company with a lengthy hiring process: 69% of applicants agreed that a process longer than one to two weeks would cause loss of interest in the role. Furthermore, 32% reported that they question the company’s ability to make other decisions if they can’t seem to make a timely hiring decision.

As governments face tight budgets, it is of utmost importance to understand the substantial costs of making a poor hiring decision. A bad hire is estimated, on average, to cost a company 30% of the individual’s first-year potential earnings. Aside from the loss of productivity, the costs to an organization include training, interviewing and testing, HR, and recruiting costs, to name a few. Hiring an employee requires a significant amount of staff resources and time; replacing a bad hire means that the entire process must be repeated. The costs of an inefficient hiring process rapidly accumulate to sap already limited government budgets.

In addition to the monetary costs of a poor hiring decision, the workplace environment can be impacted as well. Company culture often suffers from a bad hire, eroding the morale of existing employees. When a new hire is uninterested, negative, or otherwise problematic, previously engaged employees may become disheartened or frustrated.

Whether too lengthy or too rushed, inefficient hiring processes can result in a loss of productivity, time, and revenue for an organization. On one hand, an overly drawn out process can result in the loss of competitive applicants while damaging the external company image. On the other hand, a hasty or thoughtless hiring process can lead to bad hiring decisions resulting in wasted resources and a decrease in employee morale. It is clear that an inefficient hiring process is also an ineffective one.

However, there is a superior solution to improve your hiring process. While saving you valuable time and resources by streamlining and expediting the entire process, Ricoh’s ECM system ensures that you thoroughly vet each candidate and make the right hire the first time. We provide a comprehensive platform through which governments gain greater control over each step of the hiring process – from crafting the job description to accepting the optimal candidate. Our system is applicant-focused and notification-based, benefiting both the hiring committee and prospective candidates throughout the hiring process.

Ricoh can implement an automated business process through which the hiring team will be able to review candidates, make notes, and easily mark applicants as rejected or accepted to the next round. As the next round begins, applicants will automatically receive an email of their status. Those in charge of the next stage of the hiring process will also be automatically notified of which applicants were approved and will be able to review those profiles. Ricoh’s system is mobile-friendly, enabling the hiring committee to remotely contribute to decisions. Reliable and secure, data collection at every step of the process allows for continuous optimization. Ricoh’s automated system significantly increases the speed at which hiring decisions can be made without sacrificing the quality of those decisions.