Time to hire calculator
Slow hiring has a price. This puts a number on it, per role.
Time to hire measures the days between a candidate entering your process and accepting an offer. Each day carries a cost: the vacancy producing no output, recruiter and interviewer time, and candidates lost to companies that moved faster. Reducing time to hire by a week is often worth more than any single sourcing improvement.
Why aggregate time to hire misleads
An average across every role hides the problem. Two roles with an identical 42-day average can be slow for completely unrelated reasons — one because sourcing takes six weeks, the other because candidates wait ten days between the final interview and an offer. The interventions are different, so the average tells you nothing you can act on.
Measure time in each stage, per role. The bottleneck is almost always one specific stage, and it is usually a scheduling or decision delay rather than a shortage of candidates.
Where the days usually go
- Scheduling. Coordinating four calendars routinely adds a week. Batch interviews or offer fixed slots.
- Debrief delay. Interviews finish Tuesday, the debrief is Friday, the decision lands Monday. That is five days of pure latency.
- Feedback chasing. Interviewers who submit feedback three days later hold up everyone.
- Offer approval. If the sign-off chain is not agreed before you start, it will cost you days at the worst possible moment.
The single cheapest fix for most teams: require interview feedback within 24 hours, and schedule the debrief before the interviews happen rather than after.
Common questions
What is a good time to hire?
It varies enormously by role and market. Rather than benchmark against an industry figure, track your own trend and the time spent in each stage — improvement against yourself is more actionable than comparison with an average.
What is the difference between time to hire and time to fill?
Time to hire starts when a candidate enters your process. Time to fill starts when the role opens, so it includes the sourcing period. Comparing the two tells you whether your problem is finding candidates or processing them.