Hiring the right talent is key to your business, but it often takes time.
Sorting through hundreds, if not thousands, of resumes and applications can bog down your team and slow your progress. We should know – some of our roles receive more than 6,000 applications between candidates who apply and candidates who we reach out to. And contrary to popular belief – we DO review each resume.
But resume review is just the beginning. We’re walking through each stage of the recruiting process and sharing how much time it really takes to make an effective hire.
For every open role, your company may receive hundreds or thousands of applications. Even if you allocate just 30 seconds to review each resume and application – the time adds up quickly.
On average, our team reviews 1,000+ applications for any given role.
If you assume you spend just 30 seconds reviewing each application or for a single role – that’s at least 8 hours – and that’s just for reviewing submitted resumes, from ONE posting.
Keep in mind, if you don’t find suitable candidates from your first posting (which is common) you’ll have to repost your role again and start the process again. Many candidates won’t apply to postings that are months or weeks old.
We spend a lot of time sourcing the right candidates too.
Posting a job description and hoping the right talent finds you isn’t a strategy to rely on. Top-tier talent often have a lot of options – and they aren’t thinking about switching jobs constantly.
We find that we need to send a couple hundred LinkedIn messages to identify the right candidates to find the right number of candidates who are a good fit for our clients.
Our team spends hours customizing our outreach, doing things like:
1. Using extremely specific filters for skills and background on LinkedIn, which takes time to set up and sort through
2. Researching a candidate’s background and sharing aspects of the role that would be interesting to that individual
3. A/B testing how to best describe an early-stage product or startup that doesn’t have brand recognition yet
Initial phone screens start after reviewing applications and resumes. On average, we share applications from about 5% or less of candidates who apply or are sourced for roles.
So just tens of applications at the most for any given role make it to our clients’ desks.
If we assume a minimum of 20 minutes spent on each candidate who makes it past the resume review stage (time spent scheduling a phone screen, speaking on the phone, and then compiling notes for our clients), this can easily be hours and hours spent on the initial recruiting stage for just one role.
And for many of these candidates, we often spend more time than 20 minutes working with them. Our conversations go long, we have follow-up questions, or we put together even more details into notes for our clients. So, time may vary here!
Plus, this process also doesn’t account for the time we spend internally asking questions of our other team members or getting second opinions on candidates – which we often do.
We’re already at least 20+ hours spent between resume reviews, sourcing and screening just for one role.
But let’s say at a minimum of the candidates who make it through the initial phone screen – our clients speak with 10-15 candidates past that initial phone screen.
It’s worth noting that the number of candidates who make it past the phone screen can vary a lot. Sometimes we find someone almost immediately who meets our criteria. But a lot of the time, our clients need to interview a decent number of candidates for that first round call to get a sense of the talent pool that’s out there.
If we assume an average of even just 45 minutes for a first-round interview – between scheduling, communication, and the actual interview itself – this too can add up to hours and hours with candidates.
You’ll spend more time on the scheduling part than you may think, too. Between vacations, sick days, and the need to fit interviews between your other meetings – the administrative work adds up.
If you want candidates to meet with multiple members of your team or do things like present case studies or take-home projects, this time will add up too – even if you narrow down your late-stage candidates to three or four people.
In an ideal world, all top candidates would accept their offers and would start immediately.
But this is often not the case. Your top candidate may decline their offer, waver, ask for a higher salary than you were prepared to give, quit AFTER accepting the offer – we’ve seen all these happen.
Remember – if your top offer declines and you aren’t 100% sure about your backups, this whole process may start again.
When you add it all up, hiring for a single role may require 50+ hours, conservatively. That’s more than a full workweek spent reviewing resumes, sourcing candidates, conducting screens, coordinating interviews, and handling late-stage logistics.
And that’s just for one role. For companies with multiple openings, this process can consume weeks of time for your internal team.
That’s why it’s crucial to have a clear strategy - and the right resources - to streamline the process. If you’re working 48 or 49 weeks a year, very few of us can dedicate multiple weeks of our time to hiring alone.
Partnering with a recruitment expert or agency can help you save time, maintain focus on your business, and ensure you secure the best talent for your team. After all, every hour you spend hiring is an hour you’re not building your business.
You may ask though – but isn’t knowing how to spot great talent an incredibly important skill for a founder?
For founders, knowing how to hire is one of the most crucial skillsets they can develop. Building a successful business depends on assembling a team that shares the founder’s vision, values, and drive to achieve long-term goals. Without the ability to identify and secure top talent, even the best ideas can struggle to come to life.
But an agency partner can be an asset here, not a distraction to a CEO or founder developing this skill.
We find that many of our clients gain insights into the hiring process itself by partnering with us. An RPO solution allows founders to observe best practices in talent acquisition, learn how to assess candidates effectively, and build a scalable hiring strategy for the future.
In this way, RPO recruiting acts as a collaborative partner, helping founders sharpen their own hiring acumen while growing their teams more efficiently.
Let our team help you get where you need to be.
