UK 
United States
It’s what you might call the power of Parliament.
On a freezing cold November day, employers from all over the country – from Morgan Stanley to the Port of Felixstowe – all travelled to the home of UK democracy to hear about the launch of an initiative that everyone in attendance was in agreement has been long overdue: a new National Hiring Strategy.
Devised by the Better Hiring Institute, with support of the government big hitters including Lee Baron MP, Chair of the All Parliamentary Group on Modernising Employment, this is an initiative where if all the assembled employers in the room integrated its findings into their own hiring procedures, it would mean 5% of the UK workforce would be guaranteed better hiring practices.
The hiring process is broken. Just imagine the benefits we would all enjoy if we could halve time-to-hire?
“There is a £75 billion cost to this country every year through not getting hiring right,” announced House of Lords member, Viscount Camrose.
“Until employers can answer basic questions around whether their hiring is fast, fair, and trusted, no progress will be made to addressing it.”
Added Keith Rosser, Reed Director of Screening and BHI advisory member: “There are 150 job applications send every year – that’s 6,000 every ten minutes. And yet 78% of applicants will withdraw at some point during the process; 27% of new joiners won’t even show up on their first day of employment, and over 40% of new joiners to organisations leave within their first 12 weeks.” He continued: “The hiring process is broken. Just imagine the benefits we would all enjoy if we could halve time-to-hire [currently it’s still 50 days – despite improvements in sifting technology], and had much more improved job matching. This is the prize on offer.”
Fair, faster, safer
The ambition of the strategy is to make hiring ‘faster, fairer, and safer’ (the latter aspect was around an co-initiative also launched, tackling hiring fraud).
And the reason, say the BHI, is stark. Hiring, it was claimed, is suffering from a doom-loop of conspiring elements: the presence of AI making it easier for candidates already distrusting current processes (such as perceived bias), to flood employers with more applications – some of which are fake.
AI must be our servant, not our master. We need proper auditing of AI models.
Meanwhile, it’s precisely due to this surge in applications that causes employers to now take twice as long to hire in 2025 than they did a year ago (it’s now eight weeks, up from 4.8 weeks in 2024). And this, say the BHI, also creates the consequences of job hunters being ‘ghosted’, and/or not even hearing why their application wasn’t progressed.
