Seventy-one percent of the
US labor force is currently on the job market. So says a new survey of today’s
job seekers1. Even more important, thirty-five percent of the labor
force will change jobs at least every five years. In other words, workers are
more willing to ‘wander’, even if they’re currently employed.
What does this mean for the
staffing industry? HR professionals must keep pace with the job market’s
massive cultural changes. Buzz words like turnaround time are quickly changing
into Time to Hire. Recruiting is highly competitive and your talent acquisition
workflow needs to map closely with today’s dynamic business needs.
The background screening
industry makes reference to the term “Turnaround Time” (TAT) every day. It uses this parlance to describe how long a
background check takes. The truth is that these times vary significantly, based
on what searches are bundled together in a package, the particular courthouse
where records are being searched, and other factors. Some searches take minutes
or hours, while others take many days and even weeks.
Vendors often use this term
to their advantage in advertising, and commonly quote approximately 24-72 hours
for the return of the average criminal record result. Some third party
providers refer to the 24-72 hours and make the clarification that they mean business
hours, thereby expanding the timeframe from 3 days to 9 days. A vendor may tell
you there is a delay at the courthouse, resulting in postponed report delivery;
and then you receive a cleared result.
Time to Hire is a fairly new
metric in the talent acquisition field, and is a measure of how much time
passes to the time you advertise for a position and the time you actually on
board a successful candidate. Companies with highly defined HR processes have
faster hiring times than those without. Of course, this applies to recruiting
conditions when there are hundreds of suitable candidates. Appropriate
candidates lower both the Turnaround Time and the Time to Hire.
It’s great to be in a
position to make an offer to a rock star candidate. Unfortunately, if you then
run a background screen, employment or education verification, or drug test,
and find a hit or flaw, you are back to square one. This process costs time and
money, as well as morale, as other employees manage with limited resources.
This is why Time to Hire is such an important measure, and the staffing
industry is moving away from Turnaround Time.
It is the predictability of
your background screening results that drives your Time to Hire. You should be
able to depend on your background screening vendor to return a 360° profile of
your candidate within your hiring window. The confidence you feel when a
candidate’s bio is reported should be an accurate reflection of their
background and employment performance. This is only possible when laser focused
processing, with research methodologies like the Aurico Audit™, are used. This
type of pre-processing will yield hit ratios of 18% or higher (rather than the
industry standard of 6-8%), reveal the closest match between your candidate and
their records because at least two key identifiers (DOB, address, first name,
middle name or initial, last name, SSN) are required, and name match only
records become the exception.
“You will find this data
critical in measuring the productivity of your recruiting staff, as well as
determining which employee recruiting sources are working best,” said Ben
Goldberg, President of Aurico. “Ask yourself whether your recruiting efforts
are delivering hires in a reasonable time in a predictable manner.” Your
Turnaround Time gives you data but it’s not the data you need to calculate the
best return on your background screening investment.
1 (http://recruiting.jobvite.com/)
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