Time to fill

Time to fill is the total elapsed calendar days from when a job requisition is approved and opened to when a candidate accepts the offer. It measures the full recruiting cycle from the organisation's perspective, encompassing every stage: requisition approval, job posting, sourcing, screening, interviewing, assessment, offer creation, and offer acceptance.

Time to fill is often confused with time to hire, but they measure different things. Time to hire measures the candidate's journey from entering the pipeline (typically the application date) to accepting the offer. Time to fill measures the organisation's journey from deciding to hire to securing a candidate. Time to fill is always equal to or longer than time to hire because it includes the pre-sourcing phases that happen before any candidate enters the pipeline.

This distinction matters operationally. A long time to fill with a short time to hire suggests that the bottleneck is in the early stages: getting requisitions approved, defining the role, writing the job description, or building the initial candidate pipeline. A long time to fill with a long time to hire suggests the bottleneck is in the selection process itself.

Time to fill has direct financial implications. Every day a role remains open represents lost productivity, revenue, or capacity. For revenue-generating roles, the cost of vacancy can be calculated by dividing the role's expected annual revenue contribution by 365. For enabling roles, the cost is harder to quantify but equally real: delayed projects, overburdened teams, and missed deadlines.

The calculation is straightforward: subtract the requisition open date from the offer acceptance date. The result is in calendar days. Most organisations calculate both the mean and median time to fill, as a small number of exceptionally long searches can skew the mean upward.

It is important to define the start point consistently. Some organisations use the date the hiring manager submits the requisition, while others use the date it is approved. Using the submission date captures approval delays; using the approval date excludes them. Both are valid, but consistency is essential for meaningful comparisons.

A metric tree breaks time to fill into its sequential stages, revealing where the calendar days are being consumed and which stages offer the greatest opportunity for improvement.

This stage-by-stage view transforms a single number into an actionable process map. If your average time to fill is 55 days, the tree might reveal that 12 days are spent between requisition approval and first candidates (sourcing lag), 8 days in screening (recruiter capacity), 20 days across interview rounds (too many stages and scheduling delays), 10 days from final interview to offer (decision and approval bottleneck), and 5 days in offer negotiation.

With this decomposition, you can prioritise the highest-impact improvements. If 20 days are consumed by the interview process, consolidating rounds or pre-scheduling interview panels will have a larger effect than optimising offer negotiation, which only accounts for 5 days. The tree ensures investment goes where the returns are greatest.

1. 1

   Streamline requisition approval

   Multi-level requisition approval is one of the most common hidden delays. If every new hire requires sign-off from the hiring manager, department head, HR, and finance, the requisition can sit in an approval queue for one to two weeks before recruiting even begins. Pre-approve headcount as part of the annual planning cycle so individual requisitions need only a single approval.

2. 2

   Maintain evergreen pipelines for recurring roles

   For roles you hire repeatedly (e.g. software engineers, sales development representatives, customer support), maintain a warm pipeline of pre-screened candidates. When a requisition opens, the recruiter can begin presenting candidates immediately rather than starting from scratch. This can reduce time to fill by two to three weeks.

3. 3

   Reduce interview rounds and consolidate stages

   Each interview round adds scheduling complexity and elapsed time. Audit your interview process to ensure each round provides unique evaluation signal. Combine overlapping assessments, use panel interviews instead of sequential one-on-ones, and eliminate rounds that do not meaningfully influence the hiring decision.

4. 4

   Set and enforce stage duration targets

   Define maximum acceptable durations for each hiring stage: no more than 3 days from application to screening call, no more than 5 days between interview rounds, and no more than 2 days from final interview to offer. Track adherence to these targets and flag roles that exceed them for immediate attention.

5. 5

   Use data to forecast and plan

   Historical time to fill data by role type enables accurate planning. If senior engineering roles consistently take 55 days to fill, begin sourcing 55 days before the target start date rather than waiting until the role is vacant. Proactive pipeline building prevents reactive, rush recruiting that paradoxically takes longer.

KPI Tree lets you model time to fill as a stage-by-stage pipeline with duration metrics at each node. The tree shows where days are being consumed, which stages are improving or deteriorating, and where the highest-impact interventions lie.

Segmenting by role type, department, and recruiter reveals whether time to fill variations are systemic or localised. If engineering consistently takes 60 days while sales takes 30, the intervention should be targeted at the engineering hiring process rather than applied generically. If one recruiter's average time to fill is 20% longer than their peers, coaching or workload rebalancing may be needed.

Connecting time to fill to cost metrics (cost of vacancy, cost per hire) and quality metrics (quality of hire, offer acceptance rate) provides the full picture. The goal is not the shortest possible time to fill but the fastest cycle that still produces high-quality hires at a reasonable cost.