How long the hiring process takes depends on the hiring team’s requirements, the position level, salary negotiations, and more. A good hiring team will keep you updated, but that doesn’t always happen. So look out for yourself by asking for regular updates and considering other job opportunities.
By Lora Korpar
The hiring process is unpredictable. One candidate’s hiring could be simple, while another candidate’s involves weeks of back-and-forth.
Companies hire candidates on the spot for certain positions. But others can require jumping through multiple hoops. And even if you complete this process, no one guarantees you a job until an offer is on the table.
Once the recruiter or hiring manager contacts you, prepare for interviews, screenings, and negotiations to draw out the process.
“The position is published, people apply to the position and you have the recruiter or HR professionals conduct initial conversations and then present a list of candidates to the hiring manager who then personally will go on to schedule interviews, etc.,” said Ed Han, a senior recruiter for Cenlar FSB. “On average — and that really needs to be there with an asterisk — the hiring process can often take a month to six weeks. But this assumes that everything proceeds exactly as expected and that the hiring process is not drawn out unnecessarily.”
What Determines How Long the Hiring Process Takes?
“How long does it take to get hired?” is not a simple question to answer because the hiring process length depends on many factors.
“The answer to this is based upon several factors: Is it a new position? Is it replacing someone? How experienced is the hiring manager… at hiring?” Bernadette Pawlik, a recruiting insider and career strategist at Coffee & Consult, said in an email.
Larger companies with more applicants have longer hiring processes. Also, hiring managers with less experience tend to take longer to hire a candidate.
“[This is] not because the hiring manager isn’t great at his/her job, but because they are learning how the recruiting process works, and learning how to hire,” Pawlik said. “They don’t have a successful history of hires, so they tend to be more cautious about hiring without seeing a larger number of candidates.
“Similarly, if the job is a brand-spanking-new one, there is more uncertainty about the role. The hiring team may be solidifying the expectations for the role by conducting a fairly [lengthy] search and determining based upon the available candidates what the reasonable expectations might be for this role.”
The role’s seniority level can also impact how long it takes to hire someone.
“It's not uncommon for there to be more rounds [of interviews] when you talk about more senior people,” Han said. “When you're hiring a marketing manager, you might want to get the director or VP involved, maybe one or two stakeholder interviews, but you're probably not going to do much more than that. But you start talking about bringing in an EVP or someone in the C-suite, there are going to be a lot more stakeholders, and that becomes a case where there may be many conversations going on.”
Some manager or stakeholder schedules might not align, requiring more interviews so everyone can meet the candidate. Having more interviews draws out the process.
Also, the hiring process does not finish when the manager extends a job offer. Salary negotiations can extend the process depending on the flexibility of candidates and managers.
Some jobs also require drug screenings, in-depth background checks, and polygraph tests, especially in government positions. These processes can delay your start date by several weeks, depending on how many people need to be screened before you.
Which Factors Go Into the Hiring Process?
Recruiters and hiring managers have a lot to consider when choosing a candidate. They evaluate who is the best fit for the position using resumes, references, and interview answers.
Connect with people at the company and tailor your resume to the job description to stand out to hiring managers.
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“The trick that I think may not be clear to a lot of job seekers is that whatever your accomplishments may have been, what's going to matter the most to any reader who's evaluating the resume is how relevant those things are to this particular position,” Han said. “Make sure that the bullets on the resume speak directly to the things that seem most important to that job in that job description.”
“Go through the job posting and list the responsibilities and the qualifications and make a list of at least two examples of your outstanding achievements in each area,” Pawlik added. “Generalities are common in the interview process, but specific examples are what make you memorable and reinforce your qualifications in the interview team’s collective mind.”
Pawlik said to keep these two “critical” questions in mind going into the interview:
Also, connecting with recruiters will give you an advantage in the hiring process.
“As you develop your Linkedin network, set a goal of 30% of that network being active recruiters,” Pawlik said. “Those are the people who can tell you if your resume is recruiter-impressive, if your Linkedin profile attracts recruiters. People without substantive recruiting experience cannot give you that perspective.”
How Long Should You Wait to Hear Back?
The waiting game begins once the interviews are complete. Recruiters and hiring managers should update you on the decision-making process. But it is possible to not hear from the team for a few days, especially if they are still interviewing other candidates.
However, ghosting can happen, so it is important to keep regular contact with the hiring team and consider other opportunities while waiting for a response.
“Ideally, whoever the employer's representative is should be able to articulate what the timetable should look like and set some kind of reasonable expectation about when they should expect to hear back,” Han said. “If for some reason it is unclear or not stated, or the timetable has been exceeded, then that's the time when the job seeker really ought to reach out and find out what the story is. Sometimes it might be as simple as the point-of-contact person has been ill.
“Unfortunately, what we've been seeing over the course of this year has been a lot of high-profile employers are conducting layoffs. A number have instituted hiring freezes before they started doing that. And of course, if you're in the process and then a hiring freeze goes into place, hopefully they'll reach out to the job seeker proactively, but they don't always. So, I think that a good guideline is after a week to follow up [with the employer].”
If you took the time to establish a connection with a recruiter during the interview process, don’t be afraid to contact them to ask about the timeline.
“At some point, you will interface with a junior person in the process. This might be an internal or external recruiter. Build that relationship,” Pawlik said. “Determine how much access to information this person has and ask: How far along in the interview process is the hiring manager? What should I know about the hiring team that may not be in the job posting? Can you tell me how I can make sure that I am successful in the interview process? Now this junior may or may not know the answers, but you would be surprised by how often they do know!”
Make your follow-up message constructive if you do not want to come off as pestering the recruiter.
“One of the things I think is really helpful in terms of being effective and doing some kind of follow-up is to share a link to an article or a blog entry that touches on something that you discussed with the hiring manager and send that along with the message,” Han said. “Because then that's a bit of a value-add. And it [encourages] that hiring manager to say ‘This person has really been thinking about this and there's a higher level of investment there.’”
But no matter how well you do in the interview, ghosting is always possible. So do not expect to receive a job offer until it is in your hands.
“You can assume you are not the hire until you actually are sitting at your desk at the company,” Pawlik said. “Whether you are being considered or being ghosted has no bearing on how much effort you should put into your search. I’ve seen unexpected things happen (a billionaire acquires your company, e.g.) and a search be put on hold. Ghosting is awful, hurtful, and unprofessional. But your search needs to continue at full throttle [until] you are securely employed.”
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Timing of the Hiring Process
