How to Tackle Recruitment Bottlenecks and Improve

In recruitment, time really does kill deals, and in a fiercely competitive market, you can’t afford to hang around. The longer your hiring process takes, the more likely it is that top candidates drop out or accept offers elsewhere. With the average time-to-hire in the UK now sitting at 40 days (higher than the global average), agencies of all sizes are under pressure to speed things up, without compromising on quality.

Fortunately, there are simple, effective ways to reduce time-to-hire. Most of them come down to identifying and tackling the common bottlenecks that are slowing your processes down.

Why Time-to-Hire Matters

Time-to-hire isn’t just a metric. It’s a reflection of how well your recruitment process works.

A longer hiring process can damage your reputation with candidates, making your agency seem slow or unorganised. Candidates can then feel undervalued or lose interest entirely. In fast-moving sectors, a few days can make all the difference between securing top talent and starting from scratch.

It’s also worth noting that time-to-hire varies across industries. For example, roles in energy may take 67 days to fill, while hiring in tech or media can be much quicker, at around 20 days. Regardless of the sector, reducing time-to-hire should always be a priority.

You can calculate time-to-hire by subtracting the date of first candidate engagement from the date an offer is accepted. This helps you focus on the phase you have the most control over, which is, coincidentally, the internal recruitment process.

7 Ways to Improve Time-to-Hire

1. Map Out Your Hiring Process

Start by breaking down your current process from first contact to offer accepted. Every step should have a purpose. Mapping this out visually helps you spot unnecessary delays or repeated tasks that can be streamlined.

Useful questions to ask yourself:

•          Where are candidates most likely to drop out?

•          Which steps take the longest?

•          Where does communication slow down?

2. Screen Candidates More Efficiently

Screening eats up a lot of time. Streamlining this step doesn’t mean rushing it though. It means making it more consistent. Use clear criteria to assess applications quickly and fairly. Set benchmarks for must-have skills so that you’re not reinventing the wheel for every role.

Where possible, standardise your screening questions and evaluation methods to save time and ensure fairness. You can even use AI and Automation to do this for you!

3. Streamline Interview Processes

Interviews are the second biggest time drain for recruiters. Often, delays come from unclear scheduling or inconsistent interview formats.

To help speed things up, consider the following:

•          Use templated interview structures across teams

•          Keep interview rounds to a minimum where appropriate

•          Communicate scheduling expectations early

You can also prep question sets in advance, based on the role type, so you’re not starting from scratch each time. AI can also help to generate interview questions here that will populate based on the job role and interview type.

4. Keep Candidates in the Loop

Clear, timely communication is a huge trust-builder. It shows candidates that you value their time and interest. When candidates feel informed, they’re more likely to stay engaged, even if the process takes longer than expected.

Set clear expectations on when they’ll hear from you next, and make sure you follow through. Even a quick check-in can make a difference. Where possible, automate the administrative parts of communication so that your team can focus on personal, high-value touchpoints.

5. Clarify Your Job Requirements

Unclear job descriptions can waste everyone’s time. Vague or overly generic ads may attract the wrong people, or not enough of the right ones. It also helps to avoid sifting through hundreds of irrelevant CVs.

Make sure every job post includes:

•          Essential skills and qualifications

•          Clear responsibilities

•          Realistic expectations for the role

Standardising this across your team helps improve quality and consistency. Some ATS tools can even generate job ads for you that will follow the same structure.

6. Reduce Drop-Offs Mid-Process

Candidate drop-offs can sometimes be avoided with the right process. For candidates, frustration builds when job seekers face long delays, lack of updates or needlessly long application processes.

Here are a few ways to prevent this:

•          Ensure applications are mobile-friendly

•          Make communication two-way (respond to questions, not just send updates)

•          Review your process from the candidate’s perspective. What would you find frustrating?

The smoother your process, the more likely candidates are to stay the course. You can embed automation within this process, to ensure that every candidate is regularly updated, even if there is no progress. You could even consider sending NPS scores at specific points throughout the process, to gain valuable insights on where you can improve.

7. Use Data to Optimise Over Time

Optimising workflows and reducing time-to-hire is a continuous process. It requires a lot of tweaking, and should be regularly informed by your data. The key to what’s working (and what isn’t) is in your data, and how you use it.

Make sure you’re tracking:

•          Where the longest delays occur

•          How different hiring managers perform

•          Where drop-offs are most common

•          Which interview questions consistently lead to strong hires

Use this insight to refine your approach regularly, keeping what works and adjusting what doesn’t.

At the end of the day, speed matters, but so does experience. If your hiring process feels like a black hole to candidates, they’ll simply walk away. By tackling bottlenecks and refining your workflows, you keep the candidate experience front and centre, which helps to reduce time-to-hire without sacrificing quality.

At RE:STACK, we help recruitment teams build efficient workflows that scale. Whether you're overhauling your hiring process or just looking to improve your key metrics, the key is knowing what to tweak and when to do it.