It’s Time For Talent Managers To Ditch Close Dates In Job Listings

People Ops teams are broken. 

It’s nobody’s fault. We are just following the traditional playbook of how hiring should be done. We are obsessed with BAU advice around hiring. We’ve told ourselves we have to hit time to fill metrics. We have to meet this target. We have to fill this position in X amount of days. 

But following one-size-fits-all advice can negatively impact how successful our hiring process is or worse — land us with a hire that… isn’t the right fit after all.

A huge reason behind bad hires is baked into (almost) every company’s hiring process: putting a close date on a job listing. Close dates make it easy to follow the traditional hiring playbook, but they also force talent managers to make a hire from a stagnant talent pool — one that only gets smaller when the interview process kicks off. 

We think constantly refilling that pool with a continuous talent funnel is a better approach. It gives talent teams some breathing room to wait for the right candidate to ensure the hire is what’s best for the company, not just the metrics dashboard. 

Here’s our playbook for building a continuous hiring funnel to avoid bad hires at Toggl (and why we think other People Ops teams should steal our process 😏)

Job application close dates are outdated

The way we approach hiring hasn’t changed that much in decades.

Sure, we have a lot of tech like ATS and skills tests. But so many companies are stuck in outdated methods like only accepting CVs or putting closing dates on job applications. What’s interesting is, according to LinkedIn, job applications will only stay live for an average of 30 days before they close and hiring for a role ramps up. 

There are plenty of reasons why companies put a closing date on a job application: 

💰 Cost. Some companies may have a strict budget they must adhere to. It’s common to post across on several job sites and this adds up if a listing is live for too long. 

🧑‍💻 Need. Hires may be urgent, so companies don’t feel like they have the luxury to take their time during the process. 

🧰 Resources. If a role gets a ton of applications, it can take a lot of time to process them if the hiring team isn’t using the right tools (just imagine how long it takes to assess 500 CVs… manually 😬)

But there is an argument for scrapping this rigid approach in favor of holding out for the best candidate for a position — not just the best candidate that happened to apply within a 30-day window.

Crunching the numbers: Why we don’t add closing dates to job listings

We don’t pay much attention to time to fill metrics for roles at Toggl. But some quick napkin math tells me our time to hire is approximately 49 days. 

When I say we don’t pay much attention, I mean hiring managers aren’t standing behind us saying “you MUST fill this position in a month.” We care more about the quality of the talent coming in rather than hitting a metric. 

Although we have a continuous talent pipeline flowing at all times, our time to hire is only a couple of days longer than industry benchmarks. According to a survey conducted by SHRM, the average time to fill a position in the US is 44 days. However, about 50% of our total hires are software engineers which take longer to fill — sometimes up to up to 82 days. 

Obviously these benchmarks depend on a bunch of parameters like industry, location, and organizational needs. But they prove that even if you keep a job application live — it won’t hurt you in the long run to wait for the right candidate. 

However, keeping your pipeline open to wait for the best candidate does carry some risks: 

💰 Roughly two-thirds of job applicants receive more than one offer. If you sleep on them during the hiring process, there’s a chance they will accept an offer somewhere else

🥱 46% of candidates lose interest if they don’t receive status updates within 1-2 weeks after their interview

But there is a huge upside to getting rid of close dates on your job applications.

A constant loop of applicants lets hiring managers see what’s coming down the pipeline and fasttrack promising candidates, but it also reduces the pressure to make a hire based on those who simply met the cut off deadline.

Hiring like this goes against all the traditional HR rules — scrapping the close date on a job listing means even if you track time to fill metrics, there won’t be a goal to measure them against. 

Hiring teams must get comfortable with a job listing being live for a little longer — sometimes months — until you find the right hire. But when you aren’t under pressure to hire someone simply to pump up internal metrics, it’s a lot easier to avoid making a bad hire because you’re backed into a corner.

How to create job applications (without close dates) to avoid bad hires

1. Align early, align purposefully

Before we’re even thinking about putting a job listing live or asking candidates to take our skills test, we put (a lot) of hours into designing the hiring process. 

There needs to be alignment with the manager of the department making the hire, and the talent person who will be in charge of hiring for the position. Everyone needs to be on the same page before the public knows we are filling a position. If you don’t know what you are looking for in a specific hire, it’s impossible to find it. 

Usually, we create a Slack channel and bring in all the necessary stakeholders. For most roles, this is a conversation between talent and then the hiring manager themselves and starts off with a message like this: 

Once we kick start the conversation, we then create a pre-written list of questions to help in the discovery process. Like many growing companies, we hire for brand new positions, so it’s really important to talk through what the hire should look like. Other times, the focus is around the dynamics of the team and finding a personality that matches their vibe.  

We then nail down who will be in charge of what during the hiring process with this checklist: 

And once everyone is happy with what the hire will look like, we start crafting a skills test. 

2. Ditch the CVs and create a custom hiring funnel instead

Part of the reason job listings have a close date is because hiring people is freaking expensive. 

Talent managers need to scrawl through hundreds of CVs, invite people to interview, eliminate people or put them through to the next round. It’s a lot. 

The truth is, People Ops don’t have the time to go through thousands of applications and CVs. Especially when hiring people remotely, where the number of job applications explode without geographical boundaries. 

We actually don’t use CVs at Toggl, and here’s why: 

🤐 Honesty isn’t a given. How do you know an applicant isn’t lying? Do you call up their previous managers or colleagues? It’s a waste of time

📦 CVs put everyone into a box. Talent managers are overwhelmed with old school CVs and cover letters. The core issue with hiring people using these documents is it doesn’t test candidates for actual knowledge. Instead of asking candidates to write a cover letter I’m never going to read, we ask specific questions and make quick decisions on whether to move forward with their application.

The way we make our continuous talent funnel work is placing a custom skills test at the very start of our hiring process. 

Let’s say we get 500 applications for a Java Backend Developer role. If we had to manually check every developer’s CV, it would take us (at least) two minutes for each one. This immediately adds 15 hours of manual work to the hiring process. 

A custom skills test cuts out this manual work while also making sure the developer knows what they are doing thanks to questions like this:

Let’s say 14% of all applicants pass the skills test we set. That leaves us with just 70 applicants to screen — saving us a ton of time. The best part is these 70 applicants have proven they have the technical skills we need for the job. 

3. Accept that hiring is a question of timing

Every talent acquisition manager’s fear is missing out on that candidate. 

Picture this: you are halfway through your hiring process. A bunch of (really promising) candidates have progressed through interviews and assignments. But for some reason, none of them feel quite right. 

I call it candidate FOMO. 

An outstanding candidate could arrive in the pipeline at any stage of the process. And that’s true whether you have a close date on your job listing or not. You could be one or two months into the hiring process and then an amazing candidate comes along and turns everything upside down. 

Even if a star-studded candidate comes along, it’s important to remember that hiring is always a question of timing: 

• No job role lives within a void. The hire needs to have certain skill sets, right cultural fit, and be happy with the salary offer
• Be (brutally) honest with yourself. Hiring is always a two way street. Talent managers must be realistic about what candidates you can attract in the first place with the offer you put out there
• Reality kills FOMO. If you know what you want (and what’s realistic) before the hiring process kicks off, you won’t get any FOMO on a “star” candidate

My advice is to come back down to earth and make sure these hiring decisions are based on data — not your gut. Go with the best person available for the role at the time you search for it. 

Which brings me to my next point about the star candidate. Tl;dr… they don’t actually exist.

4. Scrapping job close date gives you time to hold out for the best candidate

Not the star candidate — but the best candidate that was interested in working for your company at any given time. 

The real risk with putting a close date on any job application is a promising candidate can come into your hiring funnel at any time. Keep your funnel open so you don’t get stuck with a stagnant pool of candidates once a job listing is taken down. This also cuts the risk of making a bad hire if your hand is forced to pick someone out of a shrinking talent pool. 

However, you still need to manage that pipeline and keep an eye out for that top tier candidate if they come along: 

Constantly touch base with the rest of the People Ops team on the quality of candidates coming through the funnel so you can instantly spot them. Talent managers then have the ability to speed up or slow down the process if a promising candidate throws their hat into the ring.

If a really, really promising candidate passes the skills test and their background, experience and the answers they’ve given show they’re a promising hire, it’s best to squeeze the hiring process.  Instead of it taking two to three weeks, the promising candidate might have the cultural and tech interview the very next week to help them catch up. 

While we push the promising candidate through the process, we will also slow down any candidates further down the pipeline. For example, if a candidate is about to do their paid test week, we might push it back by a couple of days to allow the flagged candidate to catch up. 

An open talent pipeline can’t coexist with a traditional HR playbook

If you made it this far, holding out for traditional advice around hiring… Sorry 😬

We kind of threw out the traditional hiring book when we built our process at Toggl. And you should too.

It’s why we keep job listings open and don’t track traditional hiring metrics like time to fill. It’s why we don’t settle for just any candidate to join our team. 

My biggest takeaway is to forget about what a hiring process should look like. Design one to match the best outcome for your team — and your candidates.

The best part about our custom hiring process? It works. The average tenure at Toggl is nearly 4 years — so we must be doing something right 😏