What is time-to-fill?

Time-to-fill is the amount of time it takes to find and hire a new candidate. It’s often measured from the day the job post is published to the day a candidate is hired.

Why is it important to track your time-to-fill? It’s a great way to get a holistic view of how efficient your recruitment strategy is. This metric gives a picture of how quickly you were able to address your company’s headcount needs, which helps as you plan when you should launch a role in the future. Having this data at your fingertips means you can be a better partner to hiring managers, executives, finance team members and anyone else who needs an accurate estimate of when you’ll be likely to fill an open role.

Here’s how Tony Payne, Head of Talent at Oodle Financial Services, explained why his team chose to focus on time-to-fill: “From the minute the business releases a job, we can fairly accurately – depending on the location and department – predict how long it’s going to take.”

Knowing your average time-to-fill across different roles also helps you pinpoint recruitment bottlenecks and trends. By refining your strategies, your team can hire faster and more effectively, aiding your company’s growth and scaling efforts. Learn more about how using structured hiring helped Wrike reduce their time-to-fill by ten days in this case study.

How to calculate time-to-fill

The formula for calculating time-to-fill subtracts the day a job requisition is approved from the day the job offer is accepted.

Example: Let’s say a company approves a job requisition (which means they officially start looking for candidates) on March 1. Then, a candidate accepts a job offer for this position on March 30.

According to the formula:

• Time-to-fill = day job offer is accepted – day job requisition is approved

So in this example: Time-to-fill = March 30 – March 1 = 29 days

Therefore, the time-to-fill for this particular job would be 29 days.

There are a number of factors that can impact your time-to-fill, including how long it takes:

• For prospective candidates to find and apply for the role or for recruiters to source prospective candidates
• For recruiters to review applications and conduct phone screens
• To schedule each stage of an interview
• For hiring managers and hiring teams to submit interview scorecard feedback and come to a hiring decision
• For the candidate to accept an offer

You can see that some of these stages are within your control as a recruiter and some of them rely on other people’s actions or external factors.

Time-to-fill vs. time-to-hire

Time-to-fill and time-to-hire are similar metrics, but they’re not exactly the same. While time-to-fill starts with the date a job requisition is approved, time-to-hire starts with the date a candidate enters your pipeline.

So, while you’d calculate time-to-fill by subtracting the day a job requisition is approved from the day a job offer is accepted, when calculating time-to-hire, you subtract the day a candidate enters the pipeline from the day a job offer is accepted.

Why would you want to measure both? Time-to-fill gives you the big-picture view of how long it generally takes you to fill roles (and therefore make predictions about the future), while time-to-hire narrows in on the efficiency of your hiring process. Time-to-hire allows you to focus on the aspects that are within your control – every touchpoint once a candidate enters the pipeline.

Learn more about the difference between time-to-fill and time-to-hire in this article.

Benchmarking time-to-fill

Here at Greenhouse, we have an overall goal of 45 days for time-to-fill across all roles we hire for. However, Senior Talent Planning Operations Manager Melissa Lobel noted, “It’s important that we view this as an average across roles because we know that roles will vary by difficulty, leveling and functional area.”

Melissa also shared that at Greenhouse, the specific goals for time-to-hire for different functional areas include 45 days for general business roles, 55 days for tech roles such as product and engineering and 85 days for leadership roles (such as vice president and above).

Once you’ve determined your own benchmarks of time-to-fill for different roles, it’s important to regularly track how you’re performing against those benchmarks.

What should you do if you realize you’re not meeting them? Melissa offered the following tips:

• Reflect on the nuances for the given time period at your organization. Was hiring disrupted? Were roles reprioritized or paused? What was happening at the company level that might have caused a longer search?

If you’re a Greenhouse customer, you can use other reporting available in Greenhouse to help determine where there might have been hiring delays.

• Offer activity - What does the offer acceptance rate look like? Are your searches taking longer than usual because candidates are not accepting your offers?
• Time-to-hire - How long did it take you to put your eventual hires through the interview process? If this is significantly longer for one period over another, were there inefficiencies in your hiring plan/interview process? Is there an opportunity to streamline?
• Pipeline history and pass-through rates - Were there delays in your process because the recruiter and hiring team were not aligned on the target profile? If there are significant dips in pass-through rates at any given stage, it could signal the need for stronger alignment on what a successful candidate looks like.

Reducing time-to-fill

If you find that your time-to-fill is consistently longer than your benchmarks, there are a few steps you can take to reduce it. These include:

• Streamlining your recruiting process: Look for any bottlenecks or places where you can minimize friction, including the job requisition approval process, your approach to writing and approving job descriptions and any manual processes you can speed up with automation. If you don’t already have an applicant tracking system (ATS), investing in one can save you countless hours by automating mundane tasks. This keeps your recruiting process running smoothly and helps you avoid delays and inefficiencies.
• Accelerating your candidate sourcing: Because time-to-fill starts the day a job post goes live, you may see a lag between this date and the day when you begin to receive applications. Luckily, several tactics can help you speed up candidate sourcing, including asking your current employees to refer candidates, having your recruiters proactively source candidates and relying on a candidate relationship management tool or talent pool to source from your past candidates
• Investing in your employer brand: If you’re finding it difficult to fill your hiring funnel, it could be because candidates are not aware of your company or what makes you an appealing employer. Spending time and resources to build your employer brand (for example, by creating content for social media or your company blog) can help you better showcase your company culture, work environment and the professional development opportunities you offer.
• Enhancing your candidate experience: A positive candidate experience can drastically improve your offer acceptance rate and employer brand. Keep candidates informed, provide timely feedback and make the interview process as smooth as possible. Regular updates and communication may sound like table stakes (and they should be!), but our candidate experience report revealed that 52% of candidates in the US and 42% of candidates in the UK had been ghosted by an employer.
• Fostering collaboration between hiring managers and recruiters: One of the reasons for a less-than-ideal time-to-fill can be friction or misalignment between hiring managers and recruiters. Take the time to clearly define expectations and timelines for each role you’ll collaborate on. Consider questions like who is responsible for completing the initial application review, who will write the interview questions and how long it should take for someone to provide feedback after an interview.

The impact of time-to-fill on hiring

Why is it important to keep tabs on time-to-fill and regularly look for ways to reduce it? Here are a few ways time-to-fill can impact hiring at your company.

• A longer time-to-fill can hurt your candidate experience. The more time that passes between each stage of the hiring process, the more likely candidates will drop out and accept offers from competitors. Candidates see the hiring process as a preview of what to expect as an employee, and they consider it a major red flag if they feel disrespected or ignored.
• A longer time-to-fill can be more expensive: The longer a role remains open, the more it costs your company in terms of advertising, recruiter and hiring manager time and lost productivity (both for the unfilled role and for current employees who have to participate in interviews and cover the responsibilities of the role you’re hiring for). If you’re working with agencies to fill leadership or highly specialized roles, their fees can add up quickly as well.
• Time-to-fill helps you assess your past hiring performance and make accurate predictions about future performance. Remember: time-to-fill is a useful metric for looking both backwards and forwards. Checking in on your time-to-fill and measuring it against your benchmarks (looking backwards) helps you get a sense for how you’re performing right now. But if your stakeholders are asking you about timelines for new roles, you can use time-to-fill to look forward and make accurate projections for the future.