Time to fill metrics: How to fill roles faster & improve recruitment efficiency

TL;DR

• Time to fill metrics track calendar days from requisition approval to offer acceptance and expose bottlenecks in your recruitment process.
• Define start/end points consistently, then calculate average time to fill across roles to benchmark and improve.
• Don’t confuse time to fill with time to hire — they measure different stages and both matter for hiring efficiency.
• Long time to fill drives lost revenue, higher costs, and candidate drop-off; speed is a competitive advantage.
• Biggest drags: CV screening at volume, unclear job descriptions, interview scheduling, slow decisions from hiring managers.
• Fixes: automate first-round screening, standardise job requests, tighten interview scheduling, and set decision SLAs.
• Use internal talent pools and referral programmes to fill roles faster without sacrificing quality.

Time to fill metrics are essential for understanding how long it takes to hire a candidate from the moment a job requisition is opened until an offer is accepted. As one of several key recruiting metrics, time to fill is widely used by HR professionals to evaluate and improve hiring efficiency. Understanding the difference between fill vs time is crucial for accurate measurement and process improvement.

The fill metric is a key measure used by the recruiting team to evaluate recruitment efficiency and identify bottlenecks in the hiring process. When comparing time to fill vs time to hire, it’s important to note that these metrics measure different aspects of the hiring process and are often analysed together by HR professionals to optimise recruitment strategies.

Have the average time to fill metrics genuinely improved over the years?

I think back to my days as a recruiter, when you filled jobs by posting adverts. That was 15 years ago. The saying was: “Post and pray” because you never knew what would come back. Crafting effective job posts was crucial to attract qualified applicants, as well as qualified candidates and talented candidates, and reduce time to fill.

The hiring process typically begins with a job request or job requisition approval, which signals the need to fill a position and initiates the recruitment workflow. The average time to fill a role, as we advised the business, was 30 days, measured from the moment the job opening was created.

After posting adverts, efficient job approval and standardised job requests can help streamline the process and reduce delays.

Even then, time to fill had flexibility because of the ‘war on talent’. It was challenging to fill roles faster. Skilled people. The ‘right’ talent. When we needed to fill positions faster than usual, we would engage a 3rd party recruiting agency to assist. Strong hiring efforts are essential for identifying the best candidates and improving recruitment outcomes. However, that was costly.

• So, even with the proper sourcing tools in hand, the business just needed to wait. Here were the reasons that recruiters gave for not delivering quickly:
• We’ve had a really low response rate. The calibre of applications isn’t quite right. Our salaries aren’t fitting with what the average time to fill a position in the market demands.

Sound familiar?

Reasons, and perhaps excuses. And the business just had to wait.

Fast forward 15 years, and from my observations, we are still seeing similar time to fill metrics.

According to Job Vite – average time to fill a position remains anywhere between 25 (retail) or 48 (hospitality) days (when I read this, I nearly fell off my chair!). This is surprising since technology has come such a long way since then. Time to fill is typically measured in calendar days from the moment a job vacancy is opened to when an offer is accepted.

To calculate time to fill, measure the number of calendar days between job requisition approval and offer acceptance. Defining these start and end points consistently is essential for accurate measurement.

Why are hiring managers waiting this long for these high-volume skills? And the wait will undoubtedly be increased due to the volumes of applications – thanks to C-19. What is the cost associated with waiting to fill a job vacancy? Understanding how long the hiring process takes can help organisations identify inefficiencies and improve their company’s time to fill. A straightforward formula I found published by Hudson (for non-revenue generating employees) is:

(Total Company Annual Revenue) ÷ (Number of Employees) ÷ 365 = Daily Lost Revenue

Here’s a working example. Let’s take a retailer. They generate 2.9 billion in revenues and have 11,000 employees. This means that their daily lost revenue PER vacant position is $722.

When evaluating your recruitment process, it’s important to compare your company’s average time to fill against industry benchmarks to identify areas for improvement. To calculate average time to fill, sum the time to fill for each position and divide by the number of roles filled, making sure to use consistent time periods and exclude perpetually open positions. Compare your company’s average time to the global average time to fill to see how your hiring process measures up and where improvements can be made.

If it takes 25 days to fill this position, then it costs the business $18,057 in lost revenue. The time it is taking to fill roles is costing the business too much.  Speed is of the essence.

A recent study found that it takes an average of 25 days to fill a position, costing companies thousands in lost productivity. Prolonged time to fill not only increases recruitment costs, but can also cause top candidates to lose interest and accept offers elsewhere. This underscores the importance of improving hiring efficiency to streamline the recruitment process, move quickly to secure the best talent, and engage top candidates before competitors do.

Volume recruiting and time-to-fill considerations:

I’ve observed talent teams who recruit in high-volume scenarios, grappling with time to fill metrics; spending hours screening thousands of CVs – with inherent biases creeping in by the 13th CV. Then fatigue sets in. And by the 135th CV, unconscious biases have turned into bold conscious judgments:

• Their CV is not long enough – “reject”
• Their CV is too short – “reject”
• The layout of their CV wasn’t professional enough – “reject”
• Don’t put education at the back,  have it at the front – “reject”
• They are not descriptive enough – “reject”
• They do not have enough retail experience – “reject”. And what even is this arbitrary average time to fill a position based on years of experience? If you have hit the two-year mark within a profession, how does that automatically make you qualified?
• The job descriptions were unclear, leading to unsuitable applicants – “reject”. Poor hiring practices and unclear job posts can result in lower-performing teams and significantly longer hiring timelines.

Leveraging your internal talent pool can help speed up the screening process and improve candidate fit, as these candidates are already familiar with your company culture and processes.

In the context of volume recruiting, keeping your process consistent and aiming to fill roles faster is a challenge. The quality of the screening process diminishes as the average time to fill increases, especially if job descriptions are not clear and well-defined, which can attract the wrong potential candidates. Optimising job postings and job ads is essential to attract more suitable applicants and improve hiring outcomes.

If it takes 6 seconds to review a CV, that’s 1.6 hours to get through 1000, impacting your time to fill metrics. Maintaining candidate engagement during lengthy screening processes is crucial to prevent losing top potential candidates to other opportunities.

Then there is the phone screen. If you only took 30 potential candidates into this stage and spoke to them for 10 minutes each, then it will take the recruiter five hours.

And time to fill is not concentrated nor time-bound to one session – it elapses. You aren’t sitting for 1.6 hours at a time nor can you schedule back-to-back phone screens, so the realistic time to fill frame for this is about a week.

From there, it’s coordinating Hiring Manager interviews, conducting their interviews, getting feedback, making decisions, giving offers, taking reference checks, and finalising compliance steps to fill positions faster. Interview scheduling is often a common bottleneck that can affect time to fill. Adopting effective hiring practices and streamlining recruitment processes are key to reducing time to fill and improving overall efficiency. Highlighting company culture in your job postings can also improve candidate fit and hiring efficiency. This is where you question, “what is the average time to fill a position?” as it ends up being a long and drawn-out process.

By automating the first pre-screening steps recruiters can seriously slash the time it takes to fill.

Plus they can drive a far better process. How? By getting a trustworthy understanding of the candidate and their personality modelled against the organisation’s success DNA (the “Success DNA” is the profile of what success looks like in your organisation).

When candidates apply, their first step is an automated interview. Modern recruitment software and recruitment technology enable a more efficient hiring process by streamlining pre-screening steps, reducing manual effort and speeding up candidate evaluation. Streamlining the recruiting process and interview process can further reduce time to fill and improve candidate experience. Implementing an employee referral program or referral program can also help attract high-quality candidates and speed up the hiring process.

It takes 15-20 minutes to complete, and all candidates receive a personality assessment based on what they wrote (which they love).Personality can be deduced from the text that candidates write (scientifically proven) and then there is also the feedback from thousands of candidates talking to the accuracy of these personality assessments. The entire recruitment process, from the moment a candidate applies to when the candidate accepts the offer, can be optimized through automation and technology.

When candidates apply their first step is an automated interview.

It takes 15-20 minutes to complete, and all candidates receive a personality assessment based on what they wrote (which they love).  

Personality can be deduced from the text that candidates write (scientifically proven) and then there is also the feedback from thousands of candidates talking to the accuracy of these personality assessments. 

Here’s a tiny sample of all the feedback >>

What took weeks to get to the interview stage can now be done in minutes following an application.

For Talent Acquisition to build its credibility in the business, it needs to demonstrate its impact on the bottom line and provide tangible solutions to address this need for speed. Tools like Sapia.ai can help with solving for these speed and cost challenges, and the benefits of providing a consistent, bias-free candidate experience are just the icing on the cake.

Implementing an employee referral program or referral program is another effective strategy to speed up hiring and attract high-quality candidates. In the current hiring landscape, organisations must adopt innovative strategies like employee referral programs to remain competitive and efficiently source top talent.

Moving quickly to the interview stage is crucial, but it also depends on the hiring team’s ability to make timely decisions. Effective decision-making by the hiring team ensures candidates progress efficiently through the process, reducing delays and improving overall recruitment outcomes. When measuring time to fill, it’s important to note that this metric typically ends at the point when the candidate accepts the job offer, which is a key milestone in assessing recruitment efficiency.

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FAQ — time to fill metrics

About Author

Laura Belfield

Head of Marketing