Time to Fill: A Key Recruitment Metric

Time to fill is one of the most important recruitment metrics that every hiring manager should know. Let’s say, for example, that the hiring manager received an offer on 12 December 2022 for a specific job requisition number (JRN). Now, the question is: How long did it take to hire that candidate, from the day the hiring manager posted the opening (definitely before 12 December 2022 since the offer was received on that date) to the candidate accepting and starting the job?

More than a number, it provides an insight into the strengths and weaknesses of your recruitment strategy. In most cases, it serves as the key performance indicator (KPI) of the ability of a company’s hiring efforts to attract and hire high-potential candidates, and also a reflection of the robustness of the talent acquisition process.

Not necessarily just speeding up the process – although speeding up is also good for candidate experience – but, more fundamentally, improving your time to fill can vastly improve the recruitment process, increase the quality and volume of candidates, and drive your business success.

That is to say, what is it, how is it calculated and, most importantly, why is it so essential from the perspective of recruitment?

TL;DR — Key Takeaways

• Time to fill measures entire recruitment cycle time from job post to acceptance Time to hire measures number of days from application through to offer acceptance. Both metrics gauge organisational efficiency in the hiring process.
• SHRM notes that the average time to fill the position was 36 days in 2024, but then added the caveat: ‘What’s ideal? Time-to-fill will depend on your industry, emerging technologies, region, and the unique needs of your organisation.’
• Speeding up time to fill lets companies reduce recruitment costs, cut the time between workers’ departures and replacements, and improve their alignment with stellar staff.
• Optimising hiring for your business goals helps you both improve your operational efficiency and ensure financial stability. Today’s HR tools enable you to find the sweet spot between hiring quickly and hiring right, by automating and optimising the processes.

What is time to fill in recruitment?

Time to fill, which is the leading indicator in most recruiting metrics, is an important term for you as a recruiter to really understand and follow. Time to fill is the number of days it takes to fill a job vacancy from the point of posting to the point when the offer is accepted.

This is crucial as the duration can potentially result in lost sales and productivity, affect candidate experience, and make them feel less favorably about your organisation. Longer recruitment periods mean more possibilities of top talent losing interest and applying elsewhere.

You must walk a fine line between allowing sufficient time to make good, strategic hiring decisions, and not risking the loss of qualified candidates to other opportunities while you dawdle. The only way you can walk that line is through measurement and optimisation of time to fill, as a means to improve your hiring process, and provide your business with better outcomes.

The two metrics are similar in that they both measure effectiveness, but they’re different in how they measure the process. The degree to which they help you is dependent on your specific goals as an organisation, and where the bottlenecks or problems are in your hiring process.

So, who monitors what?

Time to fill is tracked by the recruiting team or HR department that owns the recruitment process (advertising the position, assessing candidates, etc, and taking care of all the hiring logistics). Time to hire is tied to candidate selection, and it’s more often the responsibility of a hiring manager who will actually meet with candidates and make the final hiring decision.

The shorter the time to fill, the swifter the process. It emphasises the company’s ability to fill an open spot quickly and efficiently so business flows seamlessly. A shorter time to hire, on the other hand, reveals good appraisal and decision-making skills, showcasing your ability to recruit, assess, test, select and onboard great talent quickly.

Time to fill vs time to hire

One of the most popular metrics used in recruitment is time to fill, and another is time to hire. Though informally they are often used interchangeably, in reality the two don’t mean the same thing. They are measuring diffent parts of the recruitment process and serve different functions. Time-to-fill typically refers to the time taken to onboard a candidate into a role, whereas time-to-hire is the time taken to locate, interview, select and offer a candidate a position. To illustrate the difference more effectively, our team at Davies had the idea to create a table.

Factors such as industry and position impact both metrics. Some roles are much more challenging to recruit for than other roles. The same goes for industries, so it’s essential to keep these differences in mind.

What’s a good benchmark for time to fill?

For the past four years, it’s been taking longer and longer for companies to hire new employees. In 2014, it took an average of ‘44 days’, although that is actually a big range, from 14 calendar days if you’re in retail to more than 60 for more complicated industries.

AMS and The Josh Bersin Co note an uptick in the time it takes employers to fill open jobs, due to increased complexity in the hiring landscape. There are several reasons for the surge in the average calendar days to fill:

• The Great Resignation, which has led to a shortage of qualified candidates.
• Increased skills gap, as employers asking for increasingly specific skills and changes in technology.
• The rise in flexible working arrangements means candidates are looking for work nationally and internationally, creating a more competitive talent pool.
• The applicant tracking systems (ATS) are in use, which, while they can help to filter out unqualified personnel, are also time consuming, tedious process for the human resources team.

In the midst of record-breaking hiring in 2023, 9 in 10 hiring managers reported difficulty finding the right candidate skills, and antiquated recruitment software is a major bottleneck. To consider for what jobs and why fill time is high is crucial.

Does the process have too many steps? Did you attract too few candidates or the wrong candidates? Are interviewers late following up with candidates, or in scheduling a time to interview? Is the hiring team (or the boss) a poor manager of the process, leading to poor decisions, or no decisions at all?

Generate your own answers to use those industry benchmarks for time to fill as a better reflection of your hiring efficiency. Industry benchmarks for time to fill, like other recruiting performance metrics, will be a quick tool for you to compare your company against your competition.

As you start comparing your company’s time to fill to time to fill benchmarks, take into consideration the following:

• Make sure you have data you can work with – today’s data – and that the jobs you’re looking at are right for the one you do. Otherwise, you’re going to have plans for the wrong century.
• Bearing in mind that the proprietor described a small company and a network of staff in a single geographic region, please take into account such benchmarks in terms of scale and reach. It makes all the differences in hiring times and processes, and a custom approach is demanded.
• Make sure you are responsive to new changes and trends in your industry. Companies that succeed at adapting to a new way of doing things are less likely to be left behind.
• Think of your internal and external factors specific to your company. Now we are able to design a good recruitment process and know where your company stands in the industry.

What’s a good average time to fill?

Knowing the average time to fill by industry and position enables you to get actionable, relevant insights, helping you fine-tune your recruitment strategy – making sure it’s efficient and effective. In particular, you should look at whether the averages are for your industry and/or level of position and whether you’re using the most up-to-date and relevant data.

There’s a noticeable difference between the top performing recruiters and the lower performers: top performers fill a position in an average of 34 days, whereas lower performing teams fill a position in an average of 91 days.

But that average time can be a reflection of all sorts of things: ‘low-performing’ teams who lacked the tools to recruit and vet appropriately, bad job descriptions, poor benefits that couldn’t draw in the best candidates, and more.

The average time to fill by industry

Here’s a breakdown of time to fill by industries, measured in days:

• Energy & Defense: 67
• Engineering: 62
• Investment Banking: 60
• IT: 41
• Tech & Media: 20
• Professional Services: 47
• Automotive: 16
• Cleaning Services: 14
• Education & Child Care: 18
• Fitness: 22
• Healthcare: 18
• Home & Commercial Services: 17
• Hospitality: 14
• Personal Care: 17
• Restaurant & Food Services: 18
• Retail: 18

The average time to fill by seniority

Below are a few examples of time to fill at the job category level, measured by days:

• Executive Level: ~120
• Director Level: ~90
• Senior Leadership: ~75
• Mid-Senior Level: ~60
  • Manager: 75
  • Sales Staff: 53
• Associate Level: Mid-Senior Level: ~60
  • Professional Staff: 48
  • Operations Staff: 48
  • Service Staff: 35
• Entry Level: ~30
  • Support Staff: 28
  • Administration: 24

Although it is valuable to see how your firm’s average time to fill compares with other companies in your sector, this isn’t the most crucial metric – the most useful measure is whether or not your current time to fill compares favourably with averages from previous quarters. This analysis will ensure that you’re always optimising your recruiting funnel to reduce bottlenecks, enhance candidate experience and drive hiring efficiencies.

How does time to fill impact the hiring process?

Enhancing time to fill is imperative for the majority of organisations because it is directly linked to hiring the most talented candidates, providing a positive candidate experience, and reducing the overall cost of hiring. After optimising the precious input variable, most organisations benefit from the following.

Smoother hiring

By reducing time to fill through better hiring practices, better skills testing, and other tactics, you enable your company to hire the right people for a job more quickly. To candidates, that indicates that the company has an effective process for finding and hiring employees – and an effective process usually indicates an effective business.

Consistent production

When someone quits or gets fired (often taking a big mid-senior or senior-level contribution), it causes severe drops in productivity. When you have a team that hires fast and efficient, you keep production rolling smoothly. You don’t have to delay or push back any big deliveries, and you don’t throw more on to everyone else’s plate when the member leaves, or if you have to open a new position.

Attract top talent

Candidates at the upper end of the spectrum often are courted by multiple employers, so you can’t afford to make them wait too long to know whether they’ve won one of your jobs. By making a job offer quickly (and by being known for making offers quickly), you can maximise the appeal of your jobs to the strongest pool of candidates. There’s a greater chance that the best talent will choose to work for you.

The drawbacks of a longer time to hire

according to hiring managers, it takes on average 11 weeks to fill a vacancy, compared to 7 weeks in 2021. as such, when jobs are left open for too long, your organisation will likely face a set of problems, including the following.

Missing out on good talent

A crucial statistic for all hiring managers to remember is that most – about two-thirds – of job candidates receive more than one offer. The longer it takes your company to make an offer, the more likely it is that your preferred candidate will lose interest and decide to accept an offer from another company. A gradual trickle of candidates might seem better as you seek to fill your manager’s vacancy with the highest-quality candidate you can.

Unproductive, unhappy teams

When it takes months to fill a position, the people who still work there end up picking up the slack to make up for the missing person. This slows things down, affects workflows, and in the worst case can cause more people to leave your company.

Increased hiring costs

The longer it takes for you to find a replacement, the more you spend on job ads and interviews. All of this impacts hiring budgets, eats into other work, and adds costs all around.

10 most effective strategies to reduce time to fill

Having trouble getting job offers out on time? Struggling with writing job posts that will help you to attract dispositionally qualified people who are actually good matches for the work? Here are 10 top tips from our experts on how to get your time to fill and time to hire down

1. Strengthen your company image
2. Utilize social media
3. Optimize the interview process
4. Send job offers quickly
5. Use modern HR tools
6. Communicate efficiently
7. Build talent pools
8. Use skills testing
9. Promote internal collaboration
10. Implement an employee referral program

1. Strengthen your company image

A good employer brand also allows you to cut down on the amount of time you spend hiring: if your company comes across as a great place to work, you’ll find yourself acquiring good quality applicants who are all vying to get in – reducing the need for extended hiring periods.

2. Utilize social media

You could start by optimising time to fill by assessing your working culture. Is your organisation seen as a great place to work? If not, start investing some time and resources in your employer brand and make sure it’s talked about externally (press releases, vlogs, photos, articles, etc.) on social media.

3. Optimize the interview process

A third of candidates, 33%, will abandon the process if they don’t get an update in 3-4 weeks after their interview. And it gets worse: 46 per cent will drop out if they don’t hear anything after 1-2 weeks of the interview. Yikes. The best way to combat this is to make sure the interview process is as candidate-friendly and as quick as possible. You can achieve this by having open communication and cutting out unnecessary steps.

4. Send job offers quickly

Sending a job offer to the right candidate quickly signals decisiveness, and that candidate feels valued as a result. They accept it more quickly. And, to return full circle, doing that means that teams staff up more swiftly, and your reputation as a reasonable, speedy employer starts to precede you.

5. Use modern HR tools

Use the recruitment technology of today to enhance your hiring workflow and improve your candidate experience. There are many user-friendly, customisable features available for you to utilise, such as skills tests and automatic pass threshold, or email templates for bulk rejections. Optimise your recruiting process by using these tools.

6. Communicate efficiently

Send text alerts for every part of the process Keeping potential candidates up to date with text or email at every step of the process is an easy way to ensure that they remain in the running. Best recruitment practice where hiring managers or HR use text recruitment means that hiring processes move more quickly, are more transparent to candidates and faster to fill.

7. Build talent pools

Maintain their interest in being part of your company by storing profiles of people in a ‘pipeline’ where they can be considered for future openings. Have lots of candidates ready for the future hiring process, from whom you can pick the best dozen and hire them on the spot, bypassing weeks of search and screening from scratch.

8. Use skills testing

As pre-employement tests help companies find the best candidates more quickly, and spend less time on interviewing people who are not good fit for the role. Toggl Hire helps weed out those applicants by setting a minimum pass threshold (we recommend 80 per cent); any applicants who fail will be automatically notified and can come back another day when they are more prepared.

9. Promote internal collaboration

By creating a collaborative environment for hiring managers and recruiters, you expedite decision-making and make it faster to evaluate and approve hires. Make sure everyone knows what their part of the process is – and have leadership teams give input before you put a new process into practice.

10. Implement an employee referral program

Referrals are usually higher quality, a better fit and 40 per cent more likely to be retained after one year than non-referral hires. A referral programme is also inexpensive in that it requires little outreach or ad dollars.

Fill your job openings fast

As we transition to a candidate-driven hiring market, developing the hiring process is becoming one of the most crucial ways for employers to entice talent.

Time to fill is a crucial statistic that can improve business performance by removing potential waste and inefficiencies from the hiring process, while also improving candidate experience and enhancing quality of hire.

Ready to attract quality candidates (ASAP)? With Upstaff innovative, expert-designed approach recruiters, hiring managers and business owners find and hire the best candidate faster – making the recruitment process more effective, efficient and less costly.

We offer one of the most efficient way to engage software engineers.
That means clients can get rid of all routine with job descriptions, candidate sourcing, interviews & testing, offers, onboarding and supervision. 

Time to Hire

• 80% deduction in Time-to-Fill  position with pre-vetted experts (from 8 to 1 week)

Cost to Hire:

• Internal costs
  job ads, hiring events, HR software, pre-employment assessments, and other admin activities avg. 100+ hours or $4.7K.
• External recruitment costs.
  Different types of recruiters, staffing agencies, payroll specialists, and digital startups avg $3K.
• Taxes, Bonuses, Benefits, Perks.
  In many countries, employer taxes, and benefits can make up anywhere between 1.25 to 2.5 of the base salary.