How to reduce your time to hire by over 60% and hire the best candidates in record time.
Content Marketing Manager
Take a minute to imagine a recruitment workflow where every stage is optimized for efficiency, quality control is built-in from the start, and top-tier candidates are identified and advanced quickly using objective data.
This will mean a streamlined, efficient, and scalable hiring process featuring shorter time to hire, and consistently high quality of hires.
Sounds like a hiring professional’s paradise, doesn’t it?
It’s the level of stability and efficiency that we all aim to have, and fortunately, it is possible when the proper systems have been put in place and the right strategy is applied.
This has already been said a lot of times, but the emphasis is still needed, so I’ll say it again: The traditional approach to recruitment is fundamentally broken! It is slow, expensive, inconsistent, unreliable, and very unproductive.
Consider this: The average time to hire for a single role in the United States is 42 days, but the best candidates are already off the market in just about 10 days.
So by the time you finally complete your 6-week hiring process, the most qualified person for the job has already been picked up by your competitors or smarter companies.
Data source: Candidate Expectations Report, Cronofy, 2024
A long time to hire is the textbook definition of hiring disadvantage!
The solution is simple: build a seamless process that flows from one logical step to the next, powered by intelligent automation, and then apply the right strategy.
In this article, I’ll take you through an advanced strategy and set up that can slash your time-to-hire by at least 70%, all while dramatically improving the quality of your candidates.
Let’s get into it!
Before we build the new workflow, let’s be crystal clear about the challenge. A long time-to-hire is not just an inconvenience, but a significant drain on your organization's resources, productivity, and reputation.
1. You Lose Top Talent to Competitors: This is the most immediate and painful consequence. While you’re painstakingly reviewing every resume manually, your more agile competitors are already making offers. A lengthy process signals indecisiveness and can make candidates feel undervalued, prompting them to accept competing offers that arrive sooner.
2. Skyrocketing Recruitment Costs: Every day a position remains open, the hiring costs incurred increases. Think about both the direct costs (continued ad spend, agency fees, etc) and the indirect costs (the hours your recruiters and hiring managers spend on screening, interviewing, and deliberating). Simply put, a longer process inflates your cost-per-hire significantly.
3. Decreased Team Productivity and Morale: An open role, especially a critical one, leaves a noticeable gap. Existing team members have to shoulder the extra workload, which leads to burnout, decreased morale, and potential delays on key projects. The longer the vacancy, the greater the strain on your team.
4. A Damaged Employer Brand: In the age of social media and online reviews, candidate experience is paramount and cannot be overlooked. A slow, unresponsive, and drawn-out hiring process creates a terrible impression, which may lead candidates to share their negative experiences, and tarnish your company’s reputation. Needless to say, it will be much harder to attract top talent in the future once this happens.
Data source: Global Candidate Experience (CandE) Benchmark Research Report. 2023
By successfully reducing your time to hire, you don’t just carry out damage control but also build a powerful competitive advantage. There are immense benefits your organization starts to enjoy when you can identify, engage, and hire top talent quickly:
- Secure In-Demand Talent: You get to the best candidates first, making compelling offers before they are overwhelmed with options.
- Enhance Candidate Experience: A swift, decisive, and communicative process makes candidates feel valued and respected, which is a big boost for your employer brand.
- Lower Cost-Per-Hire: By condensing the timeline, you reduce the cumulative costs associated with a long, drawn-out search.
- Accelerate Time-to-Productivity: You fill critical roles faster, meaning your new hire starts contributing to team and company goals sooner, closing the productivity gap.
The age long fear has always been that speed compromises hire quality. But modern, automated workflows prove just the opposite: by systematizing quality checks early on, you achieve both speed and higher quality.
The key to transforming your hiring process and ultimately optimize it for speed and quality is to move away from disconnected manual tasks and toward a single, seamless, and automated flow.
Each step should validate the candidate’s capability, and automatically trigger the next, ensuring momentum is never lost.
Here is a sample blueprint for this high-speed, high-quality workflow that you can implement for your own process:
It may be easy to view the job description as a small, inconsequential part of the hiring process, but in reality, this is where everything begins.
A vague job description attracts a vague pool of candidates, but a clear, concise one acts as your first filter. Be specific and focus on the expected outcomes for the role, not just a long list of responsibilities. Clearly define the core skills and competencies required to succeed in the role.
This level of clarity not only attracts more relevant applicants but also provides the precise criteria needed for the automated steps that follow.
This is where you save many days of hiring time. Instead of a human manually reading or reviewing 200+ resumes, an automated system screens them in minutes. It instantly parses every application based on pre-set criteria you set or defined in your job description (e.g., specific skills, years of experience, certifications).
It also creates a shortlist of the most qualified candidates and can even flag AI-optimized resumes that may be keyword-stuffed, ensuring your initial pool is both relevant and authentic.
This is the most important part of the modern, skill-based hiring workflow. Once the automated screening system creates a shortlist and you give the green light, the system automatically sends an invitation to each candidate to complete a pre-created assessment to test the core skills needed for the role, as well as behavioural and personality traits to help define cultural fit.
The magic of this workflow is in how streamlined it is, and how each stage connects seamlessly to the next. As candidates complete their MTestHub assessments, the platform automatically scores the results based on your pre-set benchmarks.
Top-performing candidates can automatically receive a calendar link to schedule their own interview, eliminating the frustrating back-and-forth of manual scheduling.
By the time you speak to a candidate in the interview stage, you already know they are qualified. They've been vetted by the resume screen and have proven their skills in the assessment.
This allows you to conduct much richer, structured interviews. Instead of asking "Can you do X?", you can ask "I saw from your assessment you excelled at X; tell me about a time you applied that skill in a complex situation."
The hiring decision is no longer based on a few subjective interviews. It’s a holistic decision made using a complete file of objective data points gathered across the entire process - the initial resume screen, the assessment results, and scores from the structured interview. This data-driven approach dramatically reduces bias and increases the likelihood of a successful hire.
The final step is to extend an offer to the most qualified candidate, confident that they have been thoroughly and fairly evaluated at every stage of a swift, professional, and engaging process.
Like you may have noticed by now, this highly efficient workflow is only possible with a powerful assessment and automation tool at its centre.
MTestHub is the engine that drives the most critical, time-saving stages of this process. It bridges the gaps between screening, assessment, and interviewing, to create a single, fluid motion.
Here’s how MTestHub brings this modern, automated workflow to life:
1. It helps you attract the right candidates
The entire process begins with clarity. MTestHub’s AI-powered job description creator helps you craft clear, concise, and compelling job posts that attract the right talent from the very start. By analyzing top-performing job descriptions for similar roles, it ensures you use the right language to highlight the core competencies and outcomes, acting as a magnet for qualified applicants and a filter for those who aren't a good fit.
2. It handles initial candidate vetting & shortlisting in a fraction of the time
MTestHub automates the most time-consuming part of recruitment. By integrating with your existing systems, our platform can perform an automated screening of incoming applications based on the key criteria established in your job description.
This process, which takes minutes instead of days, instantly creates a high-quality shortlist of candidates who meet your non-negotiable requirements, allowing your team to focus their energy exclusively on top-tier talent.
3. It tests candidates' actual skills through smart assessments
MTestHub allows you to verify a candidate's abilities with unparalleled precision through its skill-based, role-specific, and highly customizable assessments.
The AI-powered assessment generator helps you quickly build scientifically valid tests even if you're not an expert.
The assessments are fully customizable, relevant, and role-specific, covering any industry or niche. Whatever the role you’re hiring for is or your level of knowledge/experience about it, you can always build the perfect assessment.
Advanced anti-cheat features, such as screen proctoring and plagiarism checks, are in place to ensure the integrity of the assessments and give you complete confidence in the results.
4. It automates assessment evaluation
As soon as candidates complete their tests, MTestHub’s platform scores them instantly against your predefined benchmarks. This eliminates hours of manual grading and removes unconscious bias from the evaluation process.
You receive a clear, ranked leaderboard and detailed performance reports, allowing you to identify your top performers at a single glance.
5. It helps you create a seamless, streamlined hiring workflow
By automating each step and ensuring a smooth handoff to the next, MTestHub is the connective element for your entire hiring process. This seamless flow is the key to slashing your time-to-hire.
For candidates, this means a fast, modern, and engaging experience that reflects positively on your employer brand, keeping them invested and excited about the opportunity.
6. It helps you make data-backed hiring decisions
Gut feelings and intuition are prone to error and bias. So MTestHub provides a rich, objective data profile for every shortlisted candidate, including skill proficiencies, cognitive abilities, and behavioral insights.
When you combine this hard data with the qualitative notes from your structured interviews, you create a holistic view that empowers you to make confident, defensible hiring decisions that lead to a demonstrably better quality of hire.
7. It helps you build a scalable hiring workflow ready for growth and the future
A manual process breaks under pressure. An automated workflow thrives. Because the MTestHub system is repeatable and efficient, it is inherently scalable. Whether you need to hire for one critical role or onboard fifty new team members during a period of rapid expansion, the process remains just as fast and effective.
This makes MTestHub a strategic partner that ensures your talent acquisition function is a powerful engine for growth.
At this point you may be thinking; ‘How does this all help me cut down my average time to hire?’ You’re also probably wondering if an almost 70% reduction is possible or even practical.
Let's break it down for you based on real results we’ve recorded.
The companies winning the war for top talent are not the ones that work the hardest or who have the highest HR teams. They are the ones that work the smartest.
That comfortable 42-day hiring time average is a liability that costs you top candidates, inflates your expenses, and burns out your team.
By implementing a streamlined, skill-based hiring workflow powered by MTestHub, you can build a formidable competitive advantage. You can identify, vet, and engage the best talent with incredible speed and precision, all while creating a candidate experience that elevates your employer brand.
Don’t let another star candidate slip through your fingers. Book a demo now to see how MTestHub can help you build a faster, smarter, and more effective recruitment process today.
Streamlining Recruitment, Assessments, and Exams with AI-driven automation.
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