What Is Time to Hire, and How Does Time to Submit Impact Your Hiring Speed?

It refers to the complete timeframe from when a candidate first enters your recruitment pipeline to the moment they accept your job offer. It’s basically how long it takes to close the deal with a new hire. This is slightly different from “time to fill,” which spans from job requisition to a candidate’s start date – but both metrics gauge recruiting speed.

It focuses specifically on the initial yet crucial stage—from the first recruiter interaction until the candidate is formally presented to hiring managers. Essentially, it measures how swiftly recruiters can identify, qualify, and forward suitable candidates after initiating contact.

The early stages of candidate engagement set the tone for your entire recruitment process. Delays at this point risk losing top talent to faster competitors, prolonging vacancies, and ultimately raising operational costs. By streamlining the candidate submission phase, you dramatically enhance your recruitment effectiveness, reduce financial losses, and boost your competitive advantage in acquiring top talent quickly.

One of the simplest ways to accelerate hiring is to start with a plan. Too often, recruiters and hiring managers kick off a search without aligning on timelines or process. The result? Decision delays, scheduling conflicts, and “let’s wait and see” indecision. Instead, treat hiring like a project with a deadline.

How it works : Before you post a job or source a single candidate, huddle with the hiring team and set a target time to hire. For example, commit to making an offer within 30 days, or even faster for urgent roles. Break down the steps: 

• How many interview rounds? 
• Who needs to give input?
• How quickly will we screen resumes? 

By setting a cadence (e.g., “Initial screenings in 1 week, onsite interviews in week 2, decision by week 3”), everyone knows the race they’re running. This prevents the process from dragging due to avoidable internal delays.

Why it helps : Clear expectations create urgency. If a hiring manager knows at the outset that they’re expected to give feedback on candidates within 48 hours of each interview, they’re less likely to let resumes languish in their inbox. When candidates know the timeline, they stay more engaged and patient. It’s all about accountability and momentum.

Tools for effective timeline management :

• Greenhouse , Lever , Workable : Offer advanced features like Service-Level Agreements (SLAs), automatically prompting teams for timely feedback.
• Asana , Trello : Project management platforms that visually outline tasks and timelines, enhancing transparency across teams.
• Paññã Recruit : Provides an advanced Manager Dashboard with real-time metrics on recruiter activity, ensuring constant oversight and proactive management of delays or bottlenecks.

Communication delays are the silent killer of hiring speed. How many times have you lost a week just trying to schedule an interview, or waited endlessly for feedback on a candidate? To reduce time-to-hire, you must streamline communication at every step – both with candidates and within your team.

How it works : Establishstructured communication protocols mandating quick interview feedback and consistent candidate updates.Start by tightening the feedback loop internally. Establish a policy that interview feedback is due same-day or next-day. Use structured scorecards to make it quick and easy for interviewers to jot down their evaluation right after the meeting . For hiring manager decisions, consider a brief daily or bi-weekly huddle to make hiring decisions in real-time rather than long email threads. Essentially, treat candidates like the priority they are – no file should sit idle waiting for someone’s comments.

Why it helps : When communication is swift and transparent, candidates feel respected and engaged – and thus are more willing to stick with your process. On the flip side, companies with poor communication suffer dearly: 50% of job seekers have turned down offers due to a poor candidate experience, citing lack of communication as a major factor.

Tools enhancing communication :

• Slack , Microsoft Teams : Offer real-time internal communication integrated with Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) to promptly update teams.
• GoodTime , Engage , Avature , Paradox Olivia : Automate personalized candidate communication, ensuring candidates remain engaged through consistent, timely updates.
• Paññã Recruit : Integrates VoIP, SMS, and call logs into one cohesive system, automates call transcription and recording, and ensures immediate follow-up capabilities, enhancing recruiter responsiveness and candidate engagement.

One of the biggest time sinks in hiring is coordinating live interviews across busy schedules. Asynchronous interviews is a technique where candidates record answers to your interview questions on their own time (often via video or audio), and your team reviews them when convenient. No scheduling, no timezone gymnastics. It’s like turning interviews into a flexible, on-demand process.

How it works : Instead of a 30-minute phone screen for every candidate, you use an asynchronous interview platform to send a set of pre-recorded questions. Candidates receive a link and can record their responses (video or voice) by a certain deadline. Recruiters and hiring managers can then watch or listen to these responses at their leisure, and usually much faster than real-time, since you can skip or speed up playback.

Why it helps : Speed and volume. Without needing to line up schedules, you can screen far more candidates in a day. If it normally takes a week to schedule 10 phone screens, an async platform could get 10 recorded interviews back within 48 hours. This shaves days, even weeks, off your initial screening stage.

Tools for asynchronous interviewing :

• HireVue, Spark Hire, VidCruiter, Willo, Hireflix : Allow efficient handling of pre-recorded candidate responses, facilitating rapid candidate evaluation and feedback.
• Paññã Recruit and Paññã OneWay : Together, they provide high-quality video interview recordings complemented by automated reminders and personalized follow-ups, maximizing candidate responsiveness and ensuring consistent engagement.

Have you ever gone through four rounds of interviews only to discover the candidate lacks a core skill? It’s a common scenario that wastes everyone’s time. The solution is to validate key skills early in the process through practical assessments. By doing so, you ensure only truly qualified candidates move forward, reducing the number of interviews and time spent on long-shot candidates.

How it works :  Depending on the role, a skills assessment could be a coding test, a writing assignment, a sales pitch simulation, or even a role-specific quiz. The idea is to design a sample task or test that reflects important aspects of the job. Administer this early – often right after an initial screen or even alongside the application.

Why it helps : 
(1) Fewer interview rounds. Strong assessment results can replace or condense certain interviews. For example, instead of 3 separate interviews to grill a software engineer on algorithms, you might use one coding test that filters out those who can’t cut it. You’ll then spend live interview time only on those who demonstrated ability, perhaps focusing interviews more on culture fit and deep technical discussion rather than basics.

(2) No more  guesswork. Hiring teams reach consensus faster when there’s objective data. If the assessment clearly shows Candidate A is stronger than Candidate B, you avoid protracted debates and second-round “just to be sure” interviews. It brings clarity early on.

Tools for skill assessments :

• Codility, HackerRank, TestGorilla, Vervoe, SHL : Offer comprehensive assessments ranging from coding skills to cognitive abilities, enabling recruiters to make informed decisions swiftly.
• Paññã Recruit : Automates AI-powered technical assessments, instantly benchmarking candidate skills and providing detailed, objective evaluations to accelerate qualification decisions.

Ask any recruiter or HR coordinator, and they'll tell you that coordinating interviews can be surprisingly complex and time-consuming. The back-and-forth emails can take days. It’s a deceptively simple task that often injects major delays into hiring. That’s why automating interview scheduling is one of the quickest wins to reduce your time to hire.

How it works : Modern scheduling tools integrate with calendars to cut out the email tag. You can either give candidates self-service access to book a time or use automation to propose slots to all parties. For instance, you can send a candidate a scheduling link (through Calendly or ATS’s scheduling module) that shows all available time slots for an interview panel. 

Why it helps : Speed and candidate convenience. 67% of recruiters say they can spend up to 2 hours just scheduling a single interview for senior roles – and those delays add up to weeks added to time to hire. By automating this, you reclaim those hours and calendar days. Candidates also love the flexibility of picking times that suit them without the awkward “sorry, I’m not free then” emails. It positions your company as tech-savvy and respectful of their time.

Scheduling tools :

• Calendly, GoodTime, Paradox Olivia, Google Calendar, Outlook 365 : Provide intuitive scheduling interfaces, seamlessly integrating with calendars and simplifying coordination for candidates and recruiters alike.
• Paññã Recruit : Automatically prioritizes missed calls in a smart follow-up queue, ensuring prompt interview rescheduling and minimizing candidate progression delays.

To truly speed up hiring without sacrificing quality, forward-thinking teams are leaning on AI-powered recruitment tools to automate the most time-consuming tasks. From sourcing to screening to candidate outreach, smart automation acts like a trusty sidekick, handling the grunt work at lightning speed while your human recruiters focus on high-value decisions.

How it works : AI technologies handle tasks like candidate outreach, technical evaluation, automated follow-ups, and predictive analytics, freeing recruiters to focus strategically.

Why it helps : AI solutions drastically reduce manual errors, accelerate routine tasks, enhance candidate engagement, and improve the overall efficiency of the recruitment process.

Key AI tools :

• Paññã Recruit, HireVue, Paradox Olivia, Paññã OneWay : Automate candidate outreach, screenings, technical evaluations, and continuous engagement, optimizing recruitment outcomes.