One of the most important metrics in your hiring process is time-to-hire. Discovering where your company experiences delays and bottlenecks can help you apply best practices to shorten the metric overall. Consider some of the ways to attack this problem head-on.
What Is Time-to-Hire?
Time-to-hire refers to the number of days between a candidate’s application for an open position and the official acceptance of an offer. The first day can also start when a recruiter introduces a candidate to your company. Though the metric is simple to calculate, it can reveal some more complex inefficiencies in your company’s hiring process.
Average Time-to-Hire
According to some recent statistics, time-to-hire is increasing across many industries compared to previous years. Large companies hover around 46 to 51 days, but small and medium businesses are almost double that at 83 days. Some of that difference can be explained by larger, more focused hiring teams, but it may also reveal patterns that can be resolved without a huge budget investment.
Each day that’s added to the time-to-hire metric costs your company money; SHRM suggests the minimum average cost to hire is $5,700, with executive hiring coming in at almost seven times that, at $36,000. Your company’s hiring costs could fall anywhere within that wide range, underscoring the importance of a streamlined timeline.
Calculating Time-to-Hire
As you consider your company’s most recent hires, you can calculate your average using the following formula:
The chosen candidate, Sarah, accepted your offer on day 41. She submitted her resume 16 days after you posted the position.
41 – 16 = 25 days for Sarah’s time-to-hire
Calculate the data from other recent hires:
- Hank = 29 days
- Teri = 38 days
- Holly = 41 days
- Abby = 19 days
25 + 29 + 38 + 41 + 19 = 152 days / divided by 5 hires = 30.4 days average
The data shows it takes about a month for your company to fill a position. Metrics are a useful way to make positive changes in processes; if you asked four different people in the company to guess how long it takes, you’d likely get four different answers.
A month-long open position likely entails potential monetary and opportunity costs:
- Productivity goes down
- Projects remain unfinished
- Unhappy clients take their business elsewhere
- Current employees take on extra work to fill the gaps, leading to costly overtime or worker burnout
- Teams are overstressed, and morale suffers
Identifying Hiring Delays
A typical hiring process looks something like this:
- Step 1: Identify job needs
- Step 2: Write job description
- Step 3: Advertise the job
- Step 4: Receive applications
- Step 5: Screen applications
- Step 6: Interview candidates
- Step 7: Identify the chosen candidate
- Step 8: Extend offer
At each of those eight steps, there is the possibility of delay.
Automating hiring
Automation tools can help you chip away at compounding delays before they become long bottlenecks. ApplicantStack Recruit provides a central place to store previous job descriptions, ready for editing and updating. With its customizable dashboard, you can organize your open positions using relevant data, such as creation and modification dates, department, salary range, and more. It provides at-a-glance status updates to your hiring team without time-consuming meetings.
Customizing notifications
A customizable notification system can prompt managers to approve the creation of new jobs in the dashboard, then notify the hiring team to proceed with the next steps.
Each candidate can designate their preferred method of contact (email or text message) to allow for quick and easy interview scheduling requests. The status of each interviewee is available to your entire team, eliminating communication delays that can cause you to lose out on top talent.
Reviewing data
The Pipeline Summary shows the number of applicants and their place in the process, customizable to your company’s hiring practices. When you see 25 new applicants and zeros across the rest of the steps, you’ll know that screening and interview scheduling need immediate attention.
Utilizing screening tools
Screening tools allow you to filter candidates using customizable keywords or search terms, and then apply filters such as scores, ratings, and stages. You can assign access to each member of the hiring team so they can make unilateral decisions or flag specific candidates for broader review.
With a data-driven, automated system, your team can feel confident in the steps taken to arrive at the best candidate for a role and extend the offer within the workflow. A structured and organized approach prevents overlooked steps and keeps the process efficient and on time.
Implement ApplicantStack to Speed Up Time-to-Hire
An investment in an ATS can reveal where your process was bogged down by cumbersome email threads, delays in response, and even the overlooking of quality candidates due to a disorganized approach. ApplicantStack is your partner in reducing time-to-hire while helping you source the best people for your open positions.
- How to Build a Hiring Process From Scratch - August 5, 2026
- Skills-Based Hiring in Hourly and Frontline Roles: A Practical Guide - July 29, 2026
- How to Reduce Time-to-Hire Without Cutting Corners - July 22, 2026
