HR teams and businesses today use time to hire or time to fill to measure how successful their hiring processes are. While doing this, hiring managers often mix up both metrics because they’re both used to measure time within the recruitment phase. However, there are actually notable differences between the two.
In this guide, we will explain the definitions of time to hire vs time to fill, how to calculate both, and how to improve your business’s performance in these metrics. In line with this, we will also directly compare time to hire vs time to fill so you can easily tell the difference between the two. Let’s begin.
Time to hire vs time to fill
| Aspect | Time to hire | Time to fill |
| Focus | It measures the efficiency of the recruitment process from the candidate’s perspective. | Measures the efficiency of the overall hiring process from the company’s perspective. |
| Start point | When the candidate enters the pipeline (application or sourcing date). | When the job requisition is officially opened/approved |
| Purpose | To evaluate how quickly candidates move through hiring stages. | To evaluate how long it takes a company to fill a position. |
| Insights provided | Tracking issues that arise in the candidate evaluation process and the timing required for decision-making. | Overall speed of the hiring process, including the duration of approval and talent sourcing. |
What is time to hire?
Time to hire is a recruitment metric that measures the number of days between when a candidate first applies (or is sourced) and when they accept the job offer. It is often used as a KPI to evaluate the efficiency of the hiring process from the candidate’s perspective, tracking how quickly they move through stages like screening, interviews, and final selection.
This hiring metric is important because it highlights how streamlined or delayed a company’s recruitment process is. A shorter time to hire usually means a smoother candidate experience, while a longer one may indicate bottlenecks, inefficiencies, or increased risks of losing top talent.
How to calculate time to hire
To calculate time to hire, you’ll first need to determine the start and end dates of your recruitment. With time to hire, the start date marks the specific day a candidate first applied to your posted job. The end date, on the other hand, is the day the candidate accepts your offer letter, though some businesses may choose to make the end date the day the new hire officially starts their job.
Once you have these dates on hand, simply calculate how many days passed between them. To do this, subtract the date the candidate applied for the job from when they accepted the offer. Mathematically:
Time to hire = End date – Start date
Or
Time to hire = Day Candidate Accepted Job Offer – Day Candidate Applied for Job
Before calculating your time to hire, though, it’s important to set a benchmark at the start of your recruitment process. However, the average time to hire you should aim for will likely depend on your industry.
For example, a LinkedIn study revealed that businesses in the engineering industry and other technical positions in research and finance have the longest average time to hire (as long as 49 days). In contrast, the sales and customer service industries tend to have much faster times to hire (averaging around 33 days).
With that said, if your company happens to work within a technical field, you may want to consider assessing your current hiring practices to see if there’s room to make them more efficient. To do this, you’d need to find out the time to hire for your company’s previous hiring processes and compare them with current hiring practices, replacing more time-consuming and ineffective practices with modern, effective ones.
For example, imagine your previous average time to hire for the past three years is 50 days, and you use traditional processes like resume screening, which takes more time to complete. You can replace it with a skill assessment, which is less time-consuming and thus shortens the time to hire significantly.
How to improve time to hire
Before trying to improve your company’s time to hire, you’ll first need to assess various data points that influence this metric. For example, how long your recruiting team or an RPO outsourcing service takes to reach candidates between screening stages, and how responsive candidates are to new communication. Knowing this additional information will allow you to pinpoint what exactly in the hiring funnel needs improvement.
From there, you can use the strategies below to reduce your time to hire while maintaining recruitment efficiency:
1. Refine job descriptions and careers pages
Well-written job descriptions help attract candidates who truly match the role, reducing the chances of irrelevant applications and speeding up the screening process. Instead of vague responsibilities, clearly outlining skills, qualifications, and expectations ensures only the right talent applies.
Additionally, updating the careers page to highlight your employee value proposition, such as growth opportunities, workplace culture, and benefits, sets your organization apart. When candidates instantly see why they should work for you, they’re more likely to apply promptly, leading to quicker and higher-quality hires.
2. Simplify the application process
Lengthy and complicated applications discourage qualified candidates and slow down the hiring process. So, simplifying the application processes by reducing unnecessary fields, allowing resume uploads, or enabling one-click applications, removes barriers that cause drop-offs.
It’s also important to adopt mobile-friendly designs to improve accessibility, ensuring candidates can apply quickly from any device. In all, this attracts more relevant applications, boosts candidate experience, and helps recruiters review submissions faster, thus speeding up time to hire.
3. Implement structured interview phases
Implementing structured interview phases creates a clear roadmap for both recruiters and candidates in the interview process, ensuring each stage has defined objectives, questions, and decision points. This reduces unnecessary back-and-forth and helps hiring teams quickly identify the right fit.
Structured interviews also make it easier to compare candidates fairly and avoid subjective delays or bias in decision-making. This means you know exactly what to assess and when, making the process faster without compromising quality.
4. Use skills assessments
Relying only on resumes and interviews can prolong decision-making and increase the risk of mismatched hires. Fortunately, skills assessments provide an objective way to quickly evaluate whether candidates can perform the tasks required for the role.
These assessments typically include a combination of problem-solving exercises, technical tasks, and situational questions that give the recruiters clear evidence of candidate ability early in the process. In the end, it minimizes wasted time on unsuitable applicants and ensures only strong candidates advance to later stages.
Automated assessment tools like Vervoe can further speed up evaluation by automatically grading candidate performances, presenting the results, and reducing hiring bias. This not only shortens the time to hire but also improves the quality and accuracy of hiring decisions.
5. Invest in applicant tracking software (ATS) or online recruitment strategies
Managing applications manually can slow down recruitment, especially when dealing with large candidate pools. To handle this, about 67% of companies are using technology, including applicant tracking software, to offset talent shortages.
Investing in an applicant tracking system (ATS) or using online recruitment platforms streamlines the entire process by automating tasks such as job postings, resume screening, and candidate communication. With these strategies, recruiters can quickly filter applicants based on specific criteria, reducing the time spent reviewing irrelevant profiles, a notable benefit especially in high-volume hiring.
What is time to fill?
Time to fill is a recruitment metric that measures the total number of days it takes for a company to fill an open position, starting from when a job requisition is officially opened until the moment a candidate accepts the job offer. Unlike time to hire, which focuses on the candidate’s journey after they enter the pipeline, time to fill covers the entire hiring lifecycle, including internal approvals, job postings, sourcing, screening, interviews, and final acceptance.
This metric reflects the company’s overall efficiency in filling vacancies and highlights how external factors, such as market conditions or talent availability, affect recruitment. While time to hire is candidate-centered, time to fill is organization-centered, showing how long positions remain open and potentially unproductive.
How to calculate time to fill
To calculate time to fill, you first identify the point when the hiring process officially begins, which is usually the date a job requisition is opened or approved. This marks the moment the company starts actively looking to fill a role. Next, you track the endpoint, which is the date when a candidate accepts the job offer. The time between these two dates represents how long it took the company to fill that position.
Mathematically:
Time to fill = Day Candidate Accepted Job Offer – Day Job Post Went Live
For example:
Job requisition opening date: April 1
Candidate accepted offer: May 10
Time to fill = 39 days
To calculate time to fill across positions, companies track the average time to fill by adding the time to fill for all positions in a period and dividing by the number of roles filled. This average time to fill can vary depending on the industry, place of business, and other factors.
How to reduce time to fill
With a longer time to fill, you risk incurring greater recruitment costs, being without a key role for an extended period, and potentially losing great candidates in the process. With that said, you’ll want to reduce your company’s time to fill to save on your hiring budget, stay on track within the business, and improve efficiency.
Like with time to hire, you’ll want first to assess several hiring metrics to see where your business stands. Then, you can choose from any of the following methods to reduce your company’s time to fill:
1. Implement skills assessments, job simulations, or automated ATS
Reducing time to fill requires tools that speed up both candidate evaluation and process management, such as skills assessments, job simulations, and applicant tracking software.
Skills assessments allow recruiters to verify a candidate’s abilities early, and job simulations use realistic previews of actual tasks characteristic of the role to give the recruiter a real-time understanding of whether or not the candidate can do the job. Combined with applicant tracking systems, these strategies ensure only qualified applicants move forward in the recruitment process and shorten the time to make a decision and fill a role.
2. Contact previous applicants
Reaching out to previous applicants or passive candidates reduces time to fill by eliminating the need to start sourcing from scratch. Past applicants are already familiar with the company and may still be interested, requiring less effort to engage. Similarly, passive candidates, who aren’t actively applying but open to opportunities, can be contacted directly, bypassing job postings and long sourcing cycles.
This approach shortens the overall process by leveraging an existing pool of qualified talent instead of waiting for new applicants. It also ensures recruiters spend more time assessing fit and extending offers, rather than building a candidate pipeline from the ground up.
3. Improve communications between your business and candidates
Improving communication speed with candidates directly reduces time to fill by cutting down delays between hiring stages. Slow responses cause candidate drop-offs, which can reduce the amount of talent you have access to and extend the hiring cycle. To improve business-candidate communication, you can:
- Set response time targets (for example, reply to candidates within 24 hours at each stage).
- Use automated emails for application confirmations, interview invites, and status updates.
- Adopt scheduling tools that allow candidates to book interview slots instantly.
- Centralize communication in an ATS to avoid missed messages or bottlenecks.
- Assign management of candidate communication within the hiring team.
Benefits of measuring time to hire and time to fill
Although time to hire and time to fill measures have their differences, both of them have significant benefits, some of which include:
1. It helps identify recruitment bottlenecks
Measuring time to hire and time to fill helps reveal exactly where delays occur in the recruitment process. For example, data might show that too much time is spent in screening or that approvals for job requisitions take longer than necessary.
Identifying these problem areas allows HR teams to focus on improving specific stages rather than guessing what slows hiring down. With this visibility, hiring managers can implement changes such as clearer approval workflows, faster shortlisting methods, or structured interviews.
2. It improves overall hiring efficiency
Tracking these metrics encourages organizations to streamline their hiring practices. When companies know how long it takes to move from requisition to acceptance, they can evaluate whether each step in the process adds value or creates waste. For instance, removing redundant interview rounds or automating resume screening can save significant time.
By comparing data about how quickly the company recruits talent across roles and departments, recruiters can adopt best practices where hiring is already efficient and apply them elsewhere. This focus on efficiency ensures resources are used effectively, vacancies are filled faster, and the company gains a more agile and responsive recruitment process overall.
3. It enhances candidate experience
Delays in recruitment often frustrate candidates, leading to disengagement or even withdrawal from the process. Measuring time to hire and time to fill – and not time to hire vs time to fill – ensures organizations stay aware of how quickly they respond to and progress applicants.
In turn, this ensures faster, more organized recruitment, which creates a positive impression, showing candidates that the company values their time. In competitive markets, this can be a deciding factor in attracting top talent.
Hire the best talent in half the time with Vervoe
Hiring top talent quickly is tougher than ever, and every extra day in the process increases the risk of losing great candidates. While streamlining job descriptions, simplifying applications, and improving communication are vital steps for streamlining this process, to retain efficiency and successfully shorten your hiring duration, you’d need the right tools.
Vervoe provides AI-powered skills assessments, job simulations, and automated workflows that ensure only the most qualified candidates move forward. With our advanced candidate evaluation platform, you can build your own skill assessments, remove hiring bias, save time, and improve your hiring accuracy without stress. Ready to optimize your recruitment? Get a demo with Vervoe to begin!
