7 Real-World Ways to Speed Up Your Hiring (Without Cutting Corners)
Tips to streamline your hiring process, boost candidate experience, and make faster, better decisions
Hiring is taking longer than ever. The average time to fill a role is now 66 days, up from 52 in 2021. That means more stress on your team, more candidates dropping off, and more missed opportunities.
The good news? There are plenty of ways to speed things up without lowering your standards. In fact, tightening your process usually leads to better hires because you’re not losing top candidates to companies that move faster.
At Mega HR, we believe hiring should feel less like a slow process and more like a smooth one. Here are seven ways to do that.
1. Make Hiring a Team Sport
If hiring feels like it only lives in HR, you’re probably slowing things down. Great teams get everyone involved. When employees know what roles are open and why they matter, it creates momentum.
Try things like:
Sharing hiring updates regularly with your team
Making referrals easy through your ATS (Mega HR handles this naturally)
Encouraging employees to post about their work on LinkedIn, Glassdoor, or in blog posts
This kind of culture shift helps align everyone around hiring as a shared goal. Business Insider's take on the hiring slump is a good reminder that alignment matters more than ever.
2. Build a Strong Employer Brand
Three out of four candidates check out your company before applying. If your brand is weak or unclear, you may never even know what great candidates you missed. Harvard Business Reviews’s guide to Building Your Employer Brand is worth a look.
A few ways to make your brand stand out:
Add employee testimonials and values to your careers page
Share content that shows your culture and growth on social media
Make sure your leaders are visible and accessible online
This doesn’t need to be fancy. Real stories from your team are more powerful than polished marketing. And Megan, our AI assistant at Mega HR, can help highlight the right things automatically in job listings.
3. Keep a Warm Talent Pipeline
If you’re starting from scratch every time a job opens, you're adding unnecessary lag. A strong talent pipeline means you already have a bench of people who are familiar with your company and might be a fit—now or soon.
You can build and maintain a pipeline by:
Capturing contact info from interested candidates, even if there’s no immediate fit
Reaching back out to past candidates who made it far in the process
Keeping in touch with former employees who might be open to returning
And here’s where AI really shines: tools like Megan can automatically maintain conversations with these candidates over time, checking in periodically, sharing relevant openings when they pop up, and keeping your company top of mind without someone on your team manually managing every touchpoint.
4. Don’t Drown in Resumes
In 2021, you might have gotten 80 applicants. Now it's more like 222. That can lead to major delays unless you have a plan.
Here’s how to manage high volume:
Get clear on must-haves and create a basic checklist
Use AI tools like Megan to instantly filter and score candidates
Add smart screening questions (but keep them short)
For more insight on applicant expectations, check out this Candidate Expectations Report.
5. Make the Candidate Experience Actually Good
Half of candidates say they’d reject a great offer if the process sucked. That’s a pretty clear message.
You can improve the experience by:
Communicating early and often about timelines
Giving candidates all the interview details up front
Letting them ask questions and get answers throughout the process
LinkedIn has a great simple candidate experience hack and some helpful stats from BCG.
Mega HR automates candidate updates so no one is left in the dark. And Megan makes sure even rejections feel like human conversations.
6. Speed Up the Interview Process
Interviews are where good candidates disappear. Nearly half of employers take four weeks or more, with multiple interviews that often say the same thing.
You can cut the timeline by:
Removing stages that don’t add value
Stacking interviews into a single day
Training more interviewers so scheduling is easier
Using async video tools or skill tests candidates can do on their time
Getting feedback fast with post-interview forms and quick debriefs
Aptitude Research has great data on this. Mega HR helps streamline scheduling and nudges your team to give timely feedback.
7. Streamline the Offer Stage
You’ve found the one. Now don’t let paperwork and delays ruin it. The average candidate expects an offer within one week of their final interview.
Here’s how to keep the momentum:
Create offer templates by level, location, and role
Pre-approve salary bands so there’s no last-minute wrangling
Include a reasonable expiration date
“Pre-close” candidates with a friendly call before the official offer
Need some data to back this up? Check the 2023 Candidate Experience Benchmark Report.
Megan can even draft and send offers automatically once a decision is made.
One More Thing: Measure What Matters
Only 12 percent of companies track time to fill. That’s a big miss. If you don’t know where your bottlenecks are, you can’t fix them.
Track:
Time spent in each stage
Candidate satisfaction
Offer acceptance rates
Mega HR gives you all of this out of the box. But no matter what system you use, make tracking a habit.
For a broader view on hiring trends, Lighthouse Research’s TA Trends is worth a read.
Hiring faster doesn’t mean rushing. It means being thoughtful, consistent, and using the right tools to remove friction. Your candidates will feel the difference. So will your team.
If you’re looking to improve time to fill, Megan can help, quietly and reliably, in the background, so your hiring never slows down.