Time-to-Fill vs. Time-to-Hire in Healthcare: FAQ and Tips

For healthcare facilities, time-to-fill and time-to-hire are both helpful metrics to track and analyze for the purpose of optimizing the hiring process. The differences between time-to-fill vs. time-to-hire determine how these metrics can be used to guide decisions. While time-to-fill involves a timeline that's initiated by the employer, time-to-hire reflects the pace with which individual candidates move through the pipeline.

We'll answer frequently asked questions about the differences between these two informative hiring metrics, and look at how they can be used to guide decisions that optimize hiring for your facility. We'll also discuss the potential consequences of an elongated hiring process and provide five helpful tips for getting qualified healthcare workers onto your team faster.

Time-to-Fill vs. Time-to-Hire: What's the Difference?

Although these phrases are often used interchangeably, they're different. Acknowledging the distinction and tracking them as separate metrics will help inform your hiring program's evolution and continued refinement.

• Time-to-fill: The day the candidate accepts a hire offer minus the date of the job posting. This metric focuses on the hiring party, because it begins with an employer-initiated action.
• Time-to-hire: The day the candidate accepts a hire offer minus the date of entry into the hiring process (applying, for example). This metric focuses on the candidate, because it begins with a candidate-initiated action.

What Factors Impact Both of These Healthcare Hiring Metrics?

There's overlap in the internal and external factors influencing these metrics, such as the:

• Size of your healthcare organization.
• Location of your facility.
• Resources available.
• Payscale of the open position.
• Industry-wide clinician workforce shortages.
• Clinician workforce shortages by specialty.

For example, a large hospital in an urban area may have short time-to-fill and time-to-hire averages, due to being a prominent employer in an area that provides a large candidate pool. Or, consider an open nursing position with a payscale well above the market-average which quickly attracts qualified nurses who are motivated to move through the process and begin working.

What Insights Can Be Gained From Time-to-Fill vs Time-to-Hire?

Despite the fact that there's overlap in what these metrics reflect, they do offer insights into distinct elements of the hiring process. Time-to-fill can help you answer important questions about the employer-driven initial phase of the hiring process, such as:

• Is our recruitment ad spend sufficient?
• Is this clinician job post getting enough visibility?
• Is the reputation of our healthcare organization positive or negative?
• Is the job post attractive to healthcare workers?

In contrast, time-to-hire reveals unique insights related to the candidate experience. It can help you answer questions about the speed of applicant processing, such as:

• Are we communicating with applicants effectively?
• Are our applicants engaged with the process?
• Does the communication we send encourage prompt replies?
• Is our interview process streamlined?

What Does it Mean to Use Time-to-Hire and Time-to-Fill Benchmarks by Stage?

Looking at total timelines for these metrics can be helpful, but the real insights come when a hiring team analyzes data for specific stages of the clinician recruiting and hiring process, such as the:

• Candidate sourcing stage
• Interviewing stage
• Credentialing stage

This lens enables hiring teams to uncover specific bottlenecks that may be unnecessarily extending the overall timeline. In the healthcare industry, credentialing is a time-intensive process that can be evaluated through analysis of the average time-to-hire by stage. Recruitment process benchmarks for other industries are typically much shorter than those in healthcare, due to provider credentialing requirements specific to the industry.

What Contributes to an Extended Hiring Timeline?

Prolonged time-to-fill and time-to-hire timelines can happen for a variety of reasons. For example, the time-to-hire average in healthcare is around 49 days, but hiring a new nurse in hospital settings may take as long as 250 days. Some of the reasons behind these numbers may include:

• Scheduling conflicts between hiring team members due to clinical demands.
• Miscommunication or delayed communication from stakeholders.
• Outdated hiring processes that don't leverage new technology or evidence-based guidance.
• Data silos that lead to fragmented and disorganized information flows — like a nurse manager relying on emails from a candidate while HR utilizes an applicant database.
• Slow or delayed credential verification, which is necessary for ensuring a candidate has been fully vetted and is qualified for the high-stakes job.

What Are the Healthcare Costs of Lengthy Hiring Processes?

The healthcare industry is known for having some of the longest hiring timelines. This doesn't just bog down the hiring team's productivity, it also influences patient outcomes. Let's investigate some of the key issues of an elongated hiring process.

• Inflated healthcare costs: Nursing turnover can cost an institution an estimated $56,300 per registered nurse (closer to $100,000 for nurse practitioners). These expenses pile up as the vacancy persists due to expensive temporary contracts and overtime pay for maintaining staffing quotas.
• Suboptimal candidate pool: Quality hires know their worth and will have multiple job offers in an industry facing critical shortages. If your hiring process is on the long side, it may cost you the ideal candidate.
• Increased staff shortages: The longer it takes to onboard a new team member, the longer a department goes without adequate staffing. This can affect more than cost, jeopardizing regulatory compliance with mandatory patient-to-staff ratios.
• Decreased staff satisfaction: Dysfunctional teamwork and restrictive, inflexible scheduling are major contributors to nurse burnout. Pervasive staffing issues and being forced to ignore hiring red flags when candidate pools dwindle can contribute to increased turnover rates.
• Less favorable patient outcomes: Patient satisfaction is integrally tied to their relationships with clinicians. Not only does better staffing increase the availability for that crucial rapport, it also improves safety because outcomes are linked to better retention.
• Diminished organizational reputation: If patients and staff aren’t happy, it’s often reflected in facility reviews. And when 90% of internet users say those reviews affect choices around healthcare, ignoring reputation is a gamble.

How to Reduce Time-to-Fill and Time-to-Hire Averages in Healthcare: 5 Tips

If you're worried about some of the organizational risks associated with extended hiring times, we've got you covered. Combat cyclic short staffing and improve patient outcomes by shortening your hiring windows with some of these recommendations.

1. Revisit Protocols Around Nurse Hiring

If it's been a while since you last reviewed your hiring process, it's time to revisit your protocols and standards. Research is constantly updating the best evidence-based strategies around hiring. Utilizing that evidence can help refine and streamline your process while ensuring quality isn't sacrificed for efficiency.

As you revisit your protocol, assess whether recent advances in technology could be leveraged to optimize your process. Integrating AI-assisted software into hiring workflows is one of the top solutions for reducing time-to-hire in mass recruitment.

Tips:

• Implement timelines along with each step of your hiring campaign to standardize the process and ensure efficiency.
• Consider working with a job site that can offload hiring tasks from clinicians, allowing them to focus on their healthcare-related work while guaranteeing that the hiring team is focused on the job at hand.

2. Create Routine, Seasonal Hiring Windows

Running a medical organization or department is busy work. When juggling healthcare leadership demands (many of which are time-sensitive and critical in nature) it's no wonder that hiring can get relegated to the back burner. Creating routine, structured, and seasonal windows for hiring is one way to prioritize the process..

Tips:

• Analyze calendar data and credentialing timelines to identify periods of the year where leadership can dedicate focused time to quality recruitment strategies and selecting the top candidates.
• Host cyclical hiring events like community career fairs that truly reflect how exciting it is to work for your organization and underscore your organization's reputation for dependability.

3. Make Hiring an Interdisciplinary Effort

Whether it's collaborating with the public relations department to create a stellar career fair or working alongside human resources to ensure that your emphasis on just culture is maintained throughout hiring, interdisciplinary work isn't limited to the bedside in healthcare.

Make hiring an interdisciplinary effort by strategically allocating tasks among departments. For example, HR and IT departments may need to work closely to implement automated workflows. To develop your strategy, it may be helpful to look at your facility's data compared to healthcare-specific averages for time-to-hire by stage.

Recruitment process benchmarks for each stage can be found in various reports, including the American Society for Healthcare Human Resources Administration (ASHHRA) annual Healthcare Talent Acquisition Report. If certain stages of your recruiting and onboarding processes are taking much longer than healthcare-industry averages, you may need to reallocate tasks to optimize the process.

Tips:

• Highlight the interprofessional collaboration necessary for maximizing outcomes — clinical and otherwise. For example, utilize IT's expertise to implement digital tracking and pattern recognition while reflecting on current hiring timelines and issues.
• Harness nurse committees to assist with candidate selection and consider employing a shared-governance approach to reform current policies that elongate the hiring window.

4. Partner With Local Nursing Schools

Streamline your candidate pipeline by going directly to the source of new nurses who are eager to work and have a long, fulfilling career ahead of them. By forming relationships through clinical training opportunities within your facility, you can bypass some of the introductory, get-to-know-each-other hiring aspects that often inflate timeframes.

If your data supports it, compare time-to-fill vs time-to-hire timelines related to your nursing school candidate pool. For example, a hospital that offers nursing externships through a local school could discover a long time-to-fill timeframe, paired with a short time-to-fill timeframe, indicating that communication with externs about job openings is perhaps lacking.

Tips:

• Incentivize nursing staff to identify quality, passive candidates among the nursing students during clinical rotations.
• Offer professional development credit via clinical instructor training opportunities and teaching incentives. This can also improve the alignment of the partnered program's educational goals with your standards.

5. Focus Your Nursing Candidate Pool

Weeding through a candidate pool that may have applicants who are unqualified or aren't truly invested in the career opportunity is time you can't get back. The average time recruiters spend on resumes is two to three minutes per resume, which adds up quickly when processing hundreds of resumes — and that's merely a fraction of the process. It's crucial that you invest in technology and systems for narrowing your pool to only those candidates who are motivated and qualified.

Comparing time-to-fill vs. time-to-hire timelines can be helpful for judging whether your job postings are attracting a high-quality candidate pool. A large gap between the two metrics could indicate that your job posts sit stagnant on communication channels for long periods of time before attracting candidates. In the case of online recruitment channels this can be related to search algorithms that cause the post to get buried. Adding details about the position (such as salary or benefits) or simply refreshing the wording could shorten time-to-fill.

Tips:

• Optimize job descriptions to entice quality potential hires while adhering to your culture of inclusivity and keeping language broad enough to include candidates who may be a great match but don't fit inflated (often workable) requirements.
• Utilize the best job boards to guarantee access to the top candidates.

Want to Speed Up Your Hiring Process by Reaching Quality Candidates Sooner?

Performing analysis on your time-to-fill vs. time-to-hire metrics is an exciting step toward building better, faster hiring workflows. Keep your process efficient without jeopardizing excellence by using our premier healthcare hiring board and connecting with hire-ready clinicians today.