I agree that the time between a position being open and a new hire starting has a tremendous impact on hiring manager satisfaction with staffing, perhaps second only to the actual performance of newly hired employees. It would be interesting to collect information from hiring managers to determine their tolerance for having open positions. I suspect that the ‘patience threshold’ for waiting for positions to be filled varies considerably depending on the job and the hiring manager. Some hiring managers may be content to wait 3 months to find just the right person, while others are screaming on the phone if they have to wait for more than 3 days. We haven’t actually done this sort of study, but perhaps someone else has done it?

A related challenge is exploring how to get hiring managers to recognize the tradeoff between time to start and quality of hire. More research is needed to look at financial data demonstrating the value of searching for candidates before positions actually become vacant. In other words, how much funding should be allocated toward building pre-qualified candidate pools, or in some cases even hiring employee before an actual opening comes available (i.e., building an internal talent bench)? Ultimately it is up to staffing departments to figure out cost-benefit ratios associated with ‘hiring in advance’ of actual needs in order to determine when it makes sense to do this and how for in advance this hiring should be done.

In my experience, this more analytical approach to staffing strategy is still relatively new for most companies. However as staffing technology provides greater access to data we are starting to make serious progress in this area. The cultural challenge within staffing is to move from an ‘anecdotal’ approach to building strategies to one that is more firmly rooted in empirical analysis (admittedly, I’m probably pretty biased on this latter point given my penchant for numbers).

Steve

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