Organisational behaviourFramework / modelModelAccessible

Time to hire

How can time to hire support strategic choice or positioning?

AccessibleOperationalTeam3 min read

Contents

Helps managers answer: How well are we able to fill vacant positions in our business?

Time to hire measures how long an organisation takes to move from an open vacancy to a new employee starting work. Long delays can leave essential work uncovered, overload existing employees, postpone revenue and increase expenditure on temporary or agency support.

When to use it

Answer the performance question: “How well are we able to fill vacant positions in our business?”
Monitor recruitment as part of the employee perspective.
Diagnose delay across approval, sourcing, selection, offer and onboarding stages.
Compare similar roles over time and evaluate whether process changes improve speed without reducing hiring quality.

Origins

Time to hire emerged from personnel and recruitment operations rather than from a single named inventor. As employers formalised requisitions, selection stages and personnel records, elapsed-time measures became a practical way to monitor staffing delays. Applicant-tracking systems later made stage-by-stage measurement routine. Definitions vary, so organisations must distinguish time to fill, which commonly begins when a vacancy is approved or posted, from narrower uses of time to hire, which may begin when a candidate enters the process. This item uses the period from vacancy posting to the employee’s first day.

What it is

Perspective: Employee perspective.

Key performance question: How well are we able to fill vacant positions in our business?

The KPI captures the elapsed calendar time required to staff an approved vacancy. It extends beyond HR’s administrative efficiency because the business receives value only when the successful candidate actually begins work.

Traditional time-to-fill measures may stop when a qualified candidate accepts the offer. For strategic workforce planning, measuring through the start date is often more useful: notice periods, checks and onboarding delays continue to affect capacity even after acceptance.

How to use it

Measurement

Define the start and end events precisely, apply them consistently and segment the result by role family, location, seniority or hiring route. Track the total alongside stage durations so an overall change can be traced to its cause.

Data collection method

Capture the posting date, application and selection milestones, offer acceptance and start date in the HR or applicant-tracking system. Where those fields are unavailable, maintain a controlled manual log. Validate that postponed requisitions and candidate-requested start delays are handled consistently.

Formula

Time to hire = elapsed calendar time between posting the vacancy and the new recruit starting work

Calculate the measure for each completed hire, then report distributions or averages for comparable job groups and for the organisation where meaningful.

Frequency

Review the KPI quarterly, with more frequent operational monitoring when recruitment volume or business impact warrants it.

Source of the data

Use the applicant-tracking or HR system, supplemented by controlled manual records where milestone dates are not captured automatically.

Cost/effort in collecting the data

Collection effort is low when workflow milestones are mandatory system fields. It can be relatively high when posting dates, pauses or start dates must be reconstructed manually.

Target setting/benchmarks

Targets should reflect role scarcity, seniority, geography, checks and notice periods. Historical commercial benchmarks cited for this KPI ranged from about 20 to 80 days. A US public-sector figure reported 110 days in October 2010, down from 180 days, while the US Office of Personnel Management sought a maximum of 80 days. Treat these as historical context rather than current universal standards; a credible internal baseline for comparable roles is usually more actionable.

Example

In an example from Creelman (2001), a vacancy is posted on 5 January, the selected candidate accepts on 20 January and begins on 10 February. Under the posting-to-start definition:

Time to hire = 36 days

Enterprise Rent-A-Car illustrates the operational use of the measure. The company, described in the example as having more than 7,000 US offices and more than 900 across Canada, Puerto Rico, the UK, Germany and Ireland, used its recruitment website to publish vacancies and track applicants through the hiring process.

The US government also made hiring speed a policy concern. President Barack Obama’s 2010 directive, Improving the Federal Recruitment and Hiring Process, argued that complexity and inefficiency deter qualified candidates and instructed agencies to improve the federal hiring experience.

Top practical tip

Report the median and spread for comparable role groups, then examine stage-level delays and outliers. A single company-wide average can conceal both an excellent high-volume process and severe delays in a critical specialist pipeline.

Top pitfall

Do not reward speed in isolation. A shorter cycle achieved through weak assessment, poor candidate communication or rushed onboarding may increase early attrition and reduce quality of hire. Interpret this KPI with quality, acceptance and retention measures.