Time to Hire

How it works

Time to hire is the number of calendar days between a candidate applying (or entering the pipeline) and that same candidate accepting an offer. Unlike time to fill, it follows the candidate, not the requisition — so it's a measure of how efficiently your process moves any given applicant through it.

The formula: time to hire = offer-accepted date minus the date that specific candidate first applied or entered the pipeline. Because it's tracked per candidate rather than per requisition, it can be averaged across everyone hired in a period, which makes it a cleaner measure of process speed than time to fill — a requisition that takes 40 days to fill because it sat unposted for three weeks might still have a fast 8-day time to hire for the person who eventually got it, since their personal clock only started once they applied.

In staffing & high-volume hiring

The two metrics get mixed up constantly, and the mix-up matters: a long time to fill can mean a requisition sat open for weeks before anyone applied (a sourcing problem), while a long time to hire means candidates are applying but the process itself is slow to move them through (a pipeline or communication problem). In high-volume hiring, time to hire is usually the more actionable of the two, because it isolates exactly the parts of the funnel — screening speed, interview scheduling, follow-up cadence — that a recruiting team directly controls.

Common mistakes

• Using time to fill and time to hire interchangeably in reporting, which makes it impossible to tell whether a slow number reflects a sourcing problem or a pipeline-speed problem.
• Trying to fix a slow time to hire by sourcing more candidates faster — that's the fix for time to fill; a slow time to hire needs fixes inside the pipeline itself (screening, scheduling, follow-up).
• Averaging time to hire across roles with very different interview-process lengths (a one-step hourly role vs. a multi-round specialized one) and treating the blended number as meaningful.