Time to Hire: What It Is and How to Optimize It

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Time to hire measures how long your recruitment process takes from a candidate’s perspective. It tracks the duration between when a candidate enters your pipeline (either by applying or being sourced) to when they accept your job offer.

For example, if a candidate applies on May 1st and accepts your offer on May 30th, your time to hire for that position is 29 days. This calculation remains the same regardless of how long the job was open before they apply or how long after acceptance they actually start work.

Unlike other recruiting metrics that focus on the position itself, time to hire zeroes in on the candidate’s journey through your hiring process.

The benefits of tracking time to hire

Tracking your time to hire opens a window into how effectively your recruitment process works. You might think you’re moving candidates through your pipeline quickly, but you can’t know for sure without measuring it.

Tracking your time to hire helps you:

Set realistic candidate expectations. Knowing your typical time to hire allows you to share it with candidates upfront. Candidates appreciate the transparency and can plan accordingly when you communicate your process length from the start. This proactive approach builds trust and demonstrates respect for their time, setting a positive tone for your entire working relationship.
Reduce candidate dropouts – A lengthy hiring process directly impacts your ability to secure top talent. Each additional day in your process increases the risk of losing qualified candidates to competitors with faster offers.
Identify recruitment bottlenecks. Tracking time to hire helps you pinpoint exactly where delays occur in your recruiting process. You might discover that candidates consistently wait too long between the first and second interview or that your offer approval process takes longer than necessary. Without tracking this metric, these issues often remain invisible until a candidate withdraws from consideration.
Measure process improvements. Time to hire helps you evaluate the effectiveness of changes you make to your recruitment process. If you implement a new interview structure or streamline your application review process, your time to hire metric will show whether these changes actually improved efficiency or not.

Time to hire is the second most commonly tracked recruiting metric (42% of organizations), just behind quality of hire (46%). This prevalence highlights the value recruiters place on understanding their internal recruitment efficiency.

Benefits of reducing your time to hire

Reducing your time to hire delivers significant advantages that directly impact your bottom line and recruitment success:

Increase offer acceptance rates. The best candidates may receive multiple offers and tend to accept the first good offer that comes their way. Moving quickly helps you reduce the risk of losing qualified candidates to companies with faster processes.
Enhance candidate experience and employer brand. Job seekers appreciate employers who respect their time and make decisions efficiently. Candidates are more likely to form a positive impression of your organization when they move through your process quickly, even if they don’t ultimately receive an offer. This positive reputation spreads through professional networks and strengthens your employer brand.
Reduce burden on existing team members. When roles remain unfilled for extended periods, your current team often shoulders additional responsibilities, leading to potential burnout and decreased productivity. Filling positions more quickly helps you maintain team morale and operational continuity, allowing team members to focus on their primary responsibilities.
Lower recruitment costs. Every day a position remains open represents costs related to advertising, recruiter time, and lost productivity. Improving time to hire can lead to substantial savings.
Increase HR capacity. A streamlined hiring process allows your HR function to handle more requisitions with the same resources. This increased capacity is particularly valuable for teams where HR team members wear multiple hats and need to maximize their efficiency.
Improve business agility. A reduced time to hire helps you adapt more quickly to changing business needs. Your ability to rapidly fill positions becomes a strategic advantage when new projects arise or unexpected vacancies occur.

How to improve time to hire

Given the benefits of a shorter time to hire, it’s no surprise that nearly a third of hiring teams are actively working to improve it.

Improving your time to hire requires a strategic approach focused on removing friction from your recruitment process. Implementing these improvements doesn’t necessarily require significant resources — just thoughtful analysis and targeted adjustments.

Here are proven tactics to streamline your hiring timeline:

Map your entire hiring process. Document each step from application to offer acceptance, including who’s involved and how long each phase typically takes. This visualization often reveals unexpected bottlenecks or redundancies you can address immediately. For instance, you might discover that scheduling interviews across multiple team members adds days to your process, or that offer approvals get stuck waiting for signatures.
Streamline initial screening protocols. The application review phase consumes significant time for many hiring teams. Consider implementing structured screening questions and candidate scoring to quickly identify candidates with must-have qualifications. This approach allows you to focus your limited time on truly viable candidates.
Standardize your interview process. Create clear interview guides for each position type, and train your team members on effective interviewing techniques. When everyone knows their role in the process and the specific qualities they should assess, interviews become more efficient and productive, eliminating confusion and redundancy.
Leverage technology for administrative tasks. The right technology can dramatically reduce the time spent on coordination. For example, using calendar scheduling links instead of back-and-forth emails can cut days from your interview scheduling process.
Communicate proactively with candidates. When candidates know what to expect next and when, they’re less likely to accept other offers while waiting to hear from you. Regular updates also reduce the time lost to candidate follow-up questions and demonstrate your organization’s professionalism.
Implement same-day feedback protocols. Rather than waiting to gather feedback from interviewers days later, request immediate input while impressions are fresh. This approach prevents the common delay where feedback collection becomes a bottleneck in your hiring process.
Streamline your offer approval process. Establish clear guidelines in advance for extending offers. When a suitable candidate emerges, you should be able to move quickly without lengthy internal deliberations.This might mean empowering hiring managers with pre-approved salary ranges and offer templates they can use without additional approvals.
Regularly analyze your time-to-hire data. Track how long candidates spend in each stage of your process and focus your efforts on the longest phases. Small improvements across multiple stages compound to create significant overall reductions in your time to hire.
Conduct surveys with withdrawn candidates. Their feedback often highlights issues you might not recognize internally, providing valuable insights for future improvements to your recruitment process.

Difference between time to hire and time to fill

Understanding the distinction between time to hire and time to fill helps you target your recruitment improvements more effectively. Though these metrics sound similar, they measure different aspects of your hiring process and provide distinct insights for small businesses.

Time to hire focuses on the candidate’s journey through your recruitment pipeline. It starts when a candidate enters your process and ends when they accept your offer. This metric reflects how efficiently you move candidates from application to offer acceptance.

In contrast, time to fill measures the entire lifecycle of the open position. It begins when a job requisition is created or approved and ends when a candidate accepts an offer. Time to fill includes the time spent sourcing candidates before anyone applies, making it a broader measure of your overall recruitment efficiency.

For example, imagine you open a position on January 1st. After three weeks of advertising, a promising candidate applies on January 22nd. You interview them and extend an offer, which they accept on February 5th. In this scenario, your time to fill is 35 days (January 1st to February 5th), while your time to hire is just 14 days (January 22nd to February 5th).

Time to fill provides insight into your ability to attract qualified candidates and the effectiveness of your sourcing strategies. A long time to fill might indicate that your job descriptions aren’t appealing to the right candidates, your compensation isn’t competitive, or your sourcing channels aren’t reaching your target talent pool.

Time to hire, on the other hand, reveals how efficiently you evaluate and process candidates once they enter your pipeline. A lengthy time to hire suggests internal bottlenecks in your interview process, decision-making protocols, or offer approval procedures.

Both metrics provide valuable information, but they serve different purposes. Time to fill helps you understand your position in the talent market and the effectiveness of your employer brand. Time to hire helps you identify internal process improvements that could make your recruitment more efficient.

Some organizations also track a third related metric: time to start. This measures the period from job requisition to the candidate’s first day of work, including any notice period they need to give their current employer. For workforce planning purposes, especially in roles with specialized skills, time to start provides the most complete picture of how long positions remain effectively vacant.

The role of an applicant tracking system in reducing time to hire

An applicant tracking system (ATS) can transform how you manage and improve your time to hire. For organizations that have been tracking recruitment metrics manually or not at all, implementing an ATS represents a significant step toward more efficient hiring practices.

Here’s how an ATS can streamline your recruitment process:

Automate metric tracking. Modern ATS platforms automatically calculate time to hire and other key metrics, eliminating the need for manual tracking and reducing the possibility of human error. This automation gives you consistent, reliable data about your recruitment process without adding to your team’s workload.
Identify specific bottlenecks. An ATS provides visibility into how long candidates spend in each stage of your hiring process. This granular view helps you identify precisely where delays occur, whether it’s in application review, interview scheduling, or offer approval. With this information, you can make targeted improvements to the specific stages that need attention rather than overhauling your entire process.
Streamline communication. For organizations with limited HR resources, an ATS improves communication between hiring managers, recruiters, and candidates. Automated updates and reminders reduce the administrative burden of keeping all parties informed and moving the process forward. This efficiency is particularly valuable when team members juggle recruitment responsibilities alongside their primary roles.
Standardize your hiring process. An ATS helps create consistent workflows and evaluation criteria across different positions and departments, reducing the variability that often extends time to hire. This standardization is especially beneficial for organizations where hiring practices might otherwise vary significantly depending on who’s leading the recruitment effort.
Simplify interview scheduling. Many modern ATS platforms include scheduling tools that dramatically reduce the time spent coordinating interviews. Rather than exchanging multiple emails to find suitable times, candidates can select from available slots based on interviewers’ calendars. This self-scheduling capability often eliminates days of back-and-forth communication.
Scale with your business growth. For growing businesses, an ATS provides scalability that manual processes lack. As your hiring volume increases, an ATS helps you maintain or even improve your time to hire despite the increased workload. The system grows with your business, adapting to more complex recruitment needs without requiring proportional increases in your HR resources.
Establish data-driven benchmarks. An ATS creates a repository of historical recruitment data that allows you to track improvements over time and establish realistic benchmarks for different position types. This historical perspective helps you set appropriate expectations with hiring managers and candidates about how long the process typically takes for similar roles.

Final thoughts on time to hire

Time to hire stands as a pivotal metric for organizations looking to optimize their recruitment processes. By understanding, tracking, and actively working to improve this measurement, you gain a significant competitive advantage in securing top talent efficiently and cost-effectively.

The insights you gather from monitoring your time to hire illuminate opportunities for improvement throughout your recruitment pipeline. Whether you discover that interview scheduling creates unnecessary delays or that your decision-making process needs streamlining, these revelations guide targeted enhancements that produce tangible results.

As you implement the strategies to reduce time to hire, remember that improvement is typically incremental. Focus on addressing one bottleneck at a time, measure the results, and then move on to the next opportunity. This methodical approach builds steady momentum toward a more efficient recruitment process.

Consider that your time to hire doesn’t just impact operational metrics — it shapes how candidates experience your organization. In a marketplace where talent has options, providing a smooth, efficient hiring process differentiates your organization as a responsive, professional employer of choice.

Ultimately, your goal should be to create a hiring process that respects everyone’s time — yours, your team’s, and your candidates’. By focusing on time to hire as a key performance indicator, you align your recruitment practices with this principle, creating value for all stakeholders while strengthening your business’s ability to attract and secure the talent you need to thrive.