The Cost of the Empty Chair: Calculating the Real ROI of Speed-to-Hire

What would happen if a seat stays open for 90+ days? How do the consequences ripple out across your organization, your projects, and your revenue? Did you know that every passing day that you see that empty desk, your project velocity drops by 15%?

Speed-to-hire ROI can be measured by cost of vacancy, increased productivity and revenue produced by the new hire, and the quality of the hire. As you can see, the quality of the hire is just as important, meaning it’s not all about speed—you’ll want to make sure you also get the most qualified candidates too.

But what if you don’t have the internal HR resources to hire fast enough?

With Provato Staffing, you can save time with a whole team working to find, vet and screen, and provide you with a list of qualified technical candidates faster.

Our staffers with backgrounds in IT and engineering will ensure you’re matched only with the candidates that meet your requirements and culture fit. We do the hard work, and all you have to do is choose from our list of finalist candidates.

Join us and learn what kind of ROI that speed-to-hire provides, the cost of slow recruitment, and how to get your most qualified hires sooner, you’ll see how hiring fast and proper will save you from the costs of the empty chair.

What is Speed-to-Hire and Why Does It Matter?

Speed-to-hire is the time it takes between a job requisition being approved and when a qualified candidate has accepted an offer made by your team. In the world of IT and technical engineering hiring, speed can make a competitive difference, especially since the most qualified of candidates tend to land a position in as soon as 10-15 days.

Time is of the essence not just for the qualified candidate you’re seeking, but also for your existing team, your business, and your projects. Each day with an open seat can lead to an increase in employee burnout as extra work is given to them, disruption to business, and project delays because of the missing expertise.

By understanding why speed-to-hire is important for filling technical roles in your organization, you’ll be able to see clearly how recruitment speed and business performance are connected.

What is the ROI of Fast Hiring?

Imagine if it took 90 days for that new hire to join your team, that translates into:

• 90 days that a competitor may swoop up a valuable client that could’ve been yours
• 90 days of customers looking at companies ready to help them and not seeing yours
• 90 days when a potential candidate could’ve been yours but instead joined another organization.

By hiring your IT or engineering candidate faster, such as 30 days sooner than you might, you’re not just saving money on HR—it also leads to business opportunities, faster time-to-market, retaining your best team members, and accelerating sales and revenue gain.

Faster Time-to-Market

Forevery day sooner that your new hire joins your team,you’ll have an extra day for faster time-to-market, getting more work done, shipping features out, releasing products, and launching client deliverables. Getting your releases out even a day sooner can improve your company’s market position and enhance customer retention.

Retaining Your Best Team Members

Hiring a qualified candidate sooner also means retaining your best. Your team and productivity would suffer even more if you had a lead developer leave because of excessive workload and burnout, and every lost team member will compound that stress on the rest of your team.

Getting your team the help it needs sooner will help keep your star team players happy and your projects moving steadily.

Accelerate Sales and Revenue Gain

Revenue opportunities can be missed and snapped up by competitors while a seat remains empty. Filling your technical role faster leads to sales cycle acceleration, keeping your product launches on track, and quickening your actual revenue gains.

Hiring faster isn’t just about filling open roles—it’s about protecting the momentum of your business and enabling better performance of your team. Neglecting the open positions you have will lead to hidden costs that’ll come from multiple angles.

The Hidden Cost of Leaving Technical Roles Open

Having a technical role open for 90 days or more can cost your organization thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars in missed productivity, and delayed projects and deliverables. An open seat can also create unnecessary stress during sprints as the rest of your team must pick up the slack, meanwhile your backlog will increase and team velocity will only slow down as burnout sets in.

These hidden costs affect more than just your team of developers, the rest of your organization will feel the direct and indirect impacts of this vacancy. From your project managers and QA teams to your leadership and stakeholders, they all will feel the burden that an open seat creates.

Now you understand how time is a critical factor in filling your open technical roles. But it’s not just about hiring as fast as you can—you need to make sure your candidate is also of high quality to ensure you get a proper return on investment.

Speed-to-Hire vs Quality-of-Hire: Striking the Balance

Speed-to-hire is crucial as we’ve discussed, but there shouldn’t be a sacrifice of quality. Fortunately, it is possible to hire both faster and smarter, but you’ll need the proper framework to help ensure this:

• Refined Intake Calls
• Structured Interviews
• Pre-Assessments

Refined Intake Calls

Refined intake calls will help keep staffing recruiters and your hiring managers aligned on what they really need from a qualified candidate, what factors may be deal-breakers, and what a candidate must be able to do to succeed in your open role.

All this would be done at the very start of the process to create the foundation of the job hiring process. This refinement process will also minimize back-and-forth later in the process, improve job ad targeting, and prevent delays in making offers because of misalignment.

Conducting Structured Interviews

Structured interviews should be developed and conducted for each candidate. Recruiters should have a set of standardized questions, consistent evaluation criteria to assess the candidates, and a clear scoring rubric.

This helps prevent unclear comparisons or needing to rely on gut feelings—with a clear scoring rubric to finalize each candidate, you’ll have a clear picture of who your superior candidates are. But after your structured interviews, there’s a way to further filter for the best of the best: pre-assessments.

Pre-Assessments

Pre-assessments are an excellent way to gain insight into a candidate’s true technical prowess. After the interview, the candidate can be given a take-home project to complete such as a problem-solving scenario or a timed coding challenge. These kinds of assessments will help filter out unqualified candidates and ensure you’re getting the candidate quality that you want.

Together, these three hiring measures will help you get your most qualified candidates as soon as possible. Time and money will also be saved by minimizing the risk of choosing the wrong candidate and then going through the hiring process all over again.

Now you can fully appreciate how to hire faster and how faster hiring improves your ROI.

But if your internal HR team doesn’t have the resources to employ this framework and carry out your fast hiring plans, your technical roles may lose priority, leaving the empty chair open and collecting dust. Soon those 90 days of vacancy will lead to project deadlines being missed and your organization having to pay for it.

This is when you should strongly consider engaging with a staffing partner to make sure you get your hiring done swiftly and correctly.

Why Should You Partner with a Staffing Agency to Improve Speed-to-Hire?

If your hiring has stalled, partnering with a tech-savvy staffing agency like Provato Staffing will improve your speed-to-hire by bringing to you pre-vetted and pre-screened candidates, saving you time and allowing you to confidently select your new hire. What’s more, a staffing agency can offer you insights into the market and give you access to their pool of passive talent.

This can turn months of searching into weeks or days, especially useful if you’re looking to fill a technical role where their skills are both niche and already scarce.

With Provato Staffing, you’ll have staffing specialists who have direct experience in the IT and engineering fields, leveraging their own industry experience to help match you with the best fit candidates to meet your technical expertise needs.

Our recruiters will perform the screening and vetting, saving you from the noise and hassle. The only candidates you’ll see from us are qualified finalists who are truly qualified!