Jeremy Shapiro

Senior Vice President

Hodes iQ

Reinventing Time to Fill

Jeremy Shapiro• About Jeremy

– Co-Author, Ultimate Performance, Wiley, 2007– Frequent speaker on BI and human capital at SHRM, state

events, SAPHR2008– SVP, Hodes iQ Talent Management System

• About Hodes iQ, www.hodesiq.com– Leading Talent Acquisition & Management System– Thousands of recruiters, covering 1.5M employees– Gartner rated “Visionary”

Session Goals

• Identify where Time to Fill is failing us• Build a working definition of Time to Fill• Create a new working definition of TTF• Consider new uses of TTF with alternate goals

Agenda

• Time to Fill, a brief history• A working definition of Time to Fill• What’s wrong with TTF?• Three improved TTF metrics and goals

– A Fixed “Plain Old” Time to Fill– Segmented Time to Fill– Categorized Time to Fill

• Making TTF actionable• Q & A and resources

Time to Fill: A Brief History 1,000 BC Meeting Notes

First recorded time to fill. Avg

45 days.

The first documented “closed eyelid” of an

executive ignoring the report.

The Scarab, meaning “Faster, or I will bonk you

with my staff.”

We’ve Come a Long Way

Our time to fill avg is 45 days. Sleeping Executive

“Faster, or I will bonk you with my

laptop.”

Working Definition of Time to Fill

• Begins when HR owns the requisition.• Ends when an offer is accepted.• There are certainly acceptable variations of these end

points.

Definition of Time to Fill: Company Wide

Time to Fill =

The Sum of Each Hire’s Time to Fill in the Time Period

Total # of Hires in the Time Period

So, in other words, it’s an average…

What’s Wrong with Time to Fill?

• Hiring usually doesn’t happen on a bell curve• Hiring Managers assume that Time to Fill is solely a

measure of a recruiter’s productivity, not theirs• The real value of reducing (or extending) TTF is murky• There is rarely an actionable outcome

– It’s used as a bludgeon vs. a tool– Often confused with Time to Start

What’s Wrong with Time to Fill?

• Without context or direction, Time to Fill is completely subjective and embedded in the past.

Our Time to Fill is 45 days

An Example of Non-bell Curve Data

Not Your Father's Pay: Why Wages Today Are Weaker(WSJ: 5/25/07)

“In 2004, the median income for a man in his 30s, a good predictor of his lifetime earnings, was $35,010, the study says, 12% less than for men in their 30s in 1974 -- their fathers' generation -- adjusted for inflation. A decade ago, median income for men in their 30s was $32,901, 5% higher than 30 years earlier.”

Median: Fixing Non-bell Curve Data

2 10 10 12 18 26 31 32 32 41 54 55 60 240 366 366 543

Let’s go back to 7th grade math class and your time to fill data

Average Time to Fill (Mean) = 125 days

Average Time to Fill (Median) = 32 days

How to Deal with Skewed Data

• Some of your are thinking: “That’s cheating!”– It’s only cheating if you switch back and forth between

median and mean. – Be consistent.– Document which statistic that you’re going to use.

How to Calculate a Median Using Excel

Another Problem: On Hold

• All of us struggle with requisitions that go on hold– Recruiters hate it; makes their individual performance

look bad.– HR Managers hate it: Keeps extra requisitions open,

and increases sourcing costs.

• Shouldn’t we deduct the hold time from time to fill?– If it happens across many reqs, you won’t need to.

Everything is skewed up.– If it happens in pockets, you may want to, but note it

in the report!

Segmented Time to Fill

• Of course, not all of time to fill is about recruiter performance. It’s a team effort.– Track the avg. time to submit resumes to HM.– Track the avg. time for HM feedback.– Track each interval that is important to you, and look

for process improvements.• What’s taking so long to produce an offer?• Do four interviews result in better hires than two?

Using Excel to Leverage Data

Categorized Time to Fill

Sure, I’ll read those resumes you sent me right away. And by

“right away” I mean after you remind me 4 times.

Categorized Time to Fill

Categorized Time to FIll

Right mouse click

Categorized Time to Fill, Graphically

Company Time to Fill Goal: 34 days (median)

Making Time to Fill Actionable

Managing UpExecutivesTime to Start

Time to Productivity

Managing OutHiring ManagersSegmented Time to Fill

Departmental Time to FillContracted Time to Fill

Managing DownHR Staff

Time to FillSegmented Time to Fill

Making Time to Fill Actionable

• Service Level Agreement. – “We’ve committed to a service level of no less than 45 days TTF for

engineers and 30 days for accounting.”

• Business Process Improvement.– “I noticed that have a consistent lag the final interview and

background check results, can we move up that step to shorten our process?”

• Analysis On Top.– “Yes, time to fill went up this quarter. Look at the level of hires we

put into place. Last quarter they were all entry level. This quarter, 50% Senior Executives.”

Making Time to Fill ActionableMetric Name Goal Recr

uiters

CXO Hiring Mgrs

Fixed Time to Fill

Segmented Time to

Fill

Measure HM feedback on

resumes sent.

Process Improvement.

Categorized Time to

Fill

Understand types of hires and

TTF.

Process Improvement.

Takeaways

• When calculating Time to Fill, use median, not mean.• Cutting Time to fill data by interview stage or by category

or department gives you greater insight into what’s actually occurring.

• Shared understanding of the metric with hiring managers can create change.

• Goals-driven use of TTF will result in change.

Resources

Resources

• Ultimate Performance, Wiley• The Black Swan, Random House• Competing on Analytics, HBR• The Workforce Scorecard, HBR• The HR Scorecard, HBR• Utterly Confused Guide to Statistics, McGraw-Hill• More whitepapers posted at: www.hodesiq.com