The short answer
Time to hire is the number of days between when a candidate enters your hiring process, by applying or being sourced, and when that candidate accepts your offer. The time to hire formula is: time to hire = offer acceptance date - date the candidate entered the pipeline, averaged across all hires in a period. It matters because it measures how quickly your own process moves, and slow processes lose candidates to faster employers.
Time to hire explained
Time to hire tracks the candidate's journey, not the job's. It starts when the person you eventually hire first shows up, so it leaves out the days a job sat open before they applied. That makes it the best measure of your screening, interviewing and decision speed.
Decide two rules and write them down. First, the start point: application date for inbound candidates, and first contact date for sourced ones. Second, the period: count each hire in the month or quarter they accepted. Then report the median next to the average. One stalled hire can drag the average up even when most candidates move quickly.
Example: a time to hire calculation
The average is 132 / 5 = 26.4 days. The median is 21 days. Hire D is the outlier. If you break D's 44 days into stages (application to first screen, screen to final interview, final interview to offer, offer to acceptance), you can see where the time went. Usually it's waiting, not interviewing.
Time to hire vs time to fill
Time to fill starts when the job opens, not when the candidate arrives, so it's always as long as or longer than time to hire. A big gap between the two points to a sourcing problem. A long time to hire points to a slow process.
Benchmarks
We don't quote a time to hire benchmark, because we haven't found a current primary source that measures it the same way you would. The often-cited SHRM figure of 42 days is an average time to fill from fiscal 2015, which is a different measure. Your own median, tracked by role type, is the better yardstick.
How to shorten it
- Set a deadline for each stage, such as screening every application within three business days.
- Remove scheduling waits in the first round. Self-scheduling helps, and so does a live AI interview candidates can take any time.
- Book final interviews as one block instead of separate days.
- Agree on the decision criteria before interviews, with a scorecard, so debriefs end in a decision.
If you hire in volume, our list of high-volume hiring software covers tools built for speed.
Related terms
- Time to fill: days from job opening to accepted offer.
- Cost per hire: total recruiting spend divided by hires.
- Quality of hire: whether new hires perform and stay.
- Offer acceptance rate: offers accepted divided by offers made.
- Candidate experience: how the process feels to the people in it.
Questions
What is the time to hire formula?
Time to hire equals the date the candidate accepted the offer minus the date they entered your pipeline, by applying or being sourced. Calculate it for each hire, then report the average and the median for the period.
Should time to hire use the average or the median?
Report both. The median shows the typical candidate's experience and isn't thrown off by one stalled hire. The average shows the total drag that slow outliers put on your process. A big gap between them means a few hires are getting stuck.
What is a good time to hire?
There is no reliable universal number, because it depends on role, seniority and how you define the start point. Compare your median with your own past quarters for the same role type, and look at which stage holds most of the days.
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