Subscribe for updates
Get talent acquisition best practices, trends, and news delivered directly to your inbox.
By entering your email, you agree to receive marketing emails from JobScore
You’re not alone if you’re seeing shifts in your recruitment metrics. Key performance indicators (KPIs) like time to fill, cost per hire, and applicants per role are increasing for many hiring teams. But how do you know if changes to your hiring team’s KPIs are aligned with what others are seeing in the market?
These recruiting benchmarks can give you an idea of how your KPIs compare to those of other organizations — and where you may have opportunities for improvement. But it’s important to keep in mind that benchmarks can vary by factors such as location, company size, industry, and role.
Let’s explore the most current recruitment benchmark data available, broken down where the data allows so you can compare your metrics against similar organizations.
At a glance: recruiting benchmarks summary
Here’s a quick snapshot of the key numbers covered in this article.
| Metric | Benchmark data |
|---|
| Time to hire | 16–23 days |
| Time to fill | 44–45 days |
| Cost per hire | $1,340 |
| Source of hire | Job boards: 43% of hires Careers site: 27% of hires Referrals: 11% of hires Sponsored job ads: 9% of hires |
| Offer acceptance rate | 75% |
Time to hire
Time to hire measures the number of days from when a candidate enters your pipeline to when they accept an offer. Measuring the length of your candidate journey can help you optimize your hiring process for a positive candidate experience while reducing candidate churn. Perhaps that’s why it’s one of the most commonly used metrics, with 42% of organizations measuring time to hire — second only to quality of hire (46%).
Time to hire for small businesses ranges from 16–23 days, depending on the industry.
| Industry | Time to hire |
|---|
| Restaurant and food service | 16 days |
| Automotive | 17 days |
| Cleaning services | 18 days |
| Retail | 19 days |
| Healthcare | 20 days |
| Home and commercial services | 21 days |
| Hospitality, entertainment, and recreation | 21 days |
| Personal care | 21 days |
| Education and childcare | 22 days |
| Fitness | 23 days |
Most companies (60%) report that time to hire increased last year, with only 12% of teams managing to reduce it. Those that were able to reduce time to hire last year were:
Time to fill
Time to fill measures the number of days from when a job requisition is approved to when a candidate accepts an offer. It reflects the health of your entire hiring process so you can track your team’s hiring efficiency and potentially reduce your cost of vacancy.
This benchmark varies slightly by seniority:
Extra-large organizations have a significantly higher time to hire: 61 days for nonexecutive positions and 60 days for executive positions. That’s because they allocate nearly twice as much time to getting positions approved, getting jobs posted, and conducting interviews.
While only 31% of organizations track time to fill, 42% say they’re facing growing pressure to fill roles faster. Tracking this metric and addressing bottlenecks can help you work toward a more efficient hiring process.
Cost per hire
Cost per hire is your total recruiting spend (internal costs, job advertising, recruiter time, tools, agency fees) divided by the number of hires made in a given time period. While only 8% of organizations say it’s the most important metric, 30% say they plan to reduce their cost per hire in 2026.
The median cost per hire is $1340 and varies widely by occupational group.
| Occupational group | Cost per hire |
|---|
| Technology | $2795 |
| Healthcare | $2100 |
| Science and engineering | $1942 |
| Construction and skilled trades | $1663 |
| Human resources | $1270 |
| Education | $1143 |
| Sales | $1095 |
| Finance | $1077 |
| Manufacturing | $1046 |
| Food service | $627 |
| Marketing and advertising | $615 |
| Retail | $590 |
| Legal | $528 |
| Insurance | $513 |
| Customer service | $483 |
There’s also a striking difference in this benchmark by job level. The cost per hire for nonexecutive roles is $1,200, compared to $10,625 for executive roles. It’s also worth noting that cost per hire for executive roles increased as time to fill dropped from 60 days to 45 days. This indicates that organizations invested in efficiency and underscores the importance of finding the right balance among your hiring metrics.
Source of hire
Source of hire tells you where your hires come from so you can identify the most successful channels for your organization.
It’s also useful to take source quality into consideration if you want to improve hiring efficiency. For example, employee referrals account for only 2% of applicants at small businesses, but 11% of hires. That’s much more efficient than job boards, which account for 61% of applicants but only 43% of hires. In fact, referral candidates are more than 10x more likely to be hired than applicants from a job board.
| Source | Applicants | Hires |
|---|
| Job boards | 61% of applicants | 43% of hires |
| Careers site | 13% of applicants | 27% of hires |
| Employee referrals | 2% of applicants | 11% of hires |
| Sponsored job ads | 23% of applicants | 9% of hires |
Internal mobility is underused — especially at small and medium sized businesses. Only 7% of nonexecutive positions are filled internally across all organizations — and that number drops to effectively 0% at small businesses. Medium organizations fill 10% of roles internally, large organizations 20%, and extra-large organizations 28%. Internal mobility is one of the most cost-effective hiring channels available, and small businesses are leaving it almost entirely on the table.
Offer acceptance rate
Offer acceptance rate is the percentage of job offers extended that are accepted by candidates. A higher conversion rate means you win more of your top-choice candidates and potentially improve your quality of hire. A lower conversion rate often means increasing your time to fill as you pursue other candidates.
The average offer acceptance rate is 75%, meaning that one in four offers are declined. Whether your rate is above or below that benchmark depends heavily on factors within and outside your control: compensation alignment, candidate experience during the process, and competing offers.
About a third of organizations (31%) plan to improve offer acceptance rates in 2026. Make sure to survey withdrawn candidates to learn why they declined your offer so you can make improvements.
Final thoughts on these recruiting benchmarks
Benchmarks are a great way to identify opportunities for recruitment process optimization, but keep in mind that they may not apply to your industry, role, or location. A 45-day time to fill may be perfectly normal for similar organizations hiring for similar positions — even if it isn’t standard elsewhere.
Use these hiring benchmarks as a rough guide to help you continually improve and keep in mind that most organizations won’t align with them exactly.
