Time to hire
Also called: TTH, hiring speed
Time to hire is what the hiring manager actually feels. Everything else is a proxy for it.
How time to hire is measured
The canonical definition is straightforward: start the clock when a candidate is identified (applies, is sourced, gets referred) and stop it when the candidate signs the offer. The result, in days, is time to hire for that one role. Average across the last quarter’s hires and you have a team-level number.
A few decisions affect the number:
- Start point. Some teams start the clock at job posting, not at first candidate. That metric is ”time to fill,” not time to hire. Don’t mix them.
- Stop point. Acceptance, signature, or start date — pick one and stick to it. Most teams use signed offer.
- Outliers. A role that took 180 days because the hiring manager went on parental leave is not a process problem. Either exclude or compute the median, not the mean.
Why time to hire matters
Two reasons. First, candidates lose interest fast. A candidate who applied 21 days ago is mostly gone — they’ve taken another offer, lost momentum, or convinced themselves they don’t want the role after all. Second, every extra week of an open role is a week the team carries the work.
The benchmark range for European SMBs is roughly 25-40 days per hire, depending on role seniority. Engineering tends to be slower; sales and operations tend to be faster.
What actually moves the metric
Most teams that try to “reduce time to hire” start by adding more interview stages or stricter screening. That makes it worse. The levers that work:
- Reply within 48 hours of application. Half the gap between application and offer is response-time gaps, not interview slots.
- Schedule the next step at the same time as you give feedback on the current one. Two emails become one.
- Set a one-page hiring plan before the job posts. Stages, decision-makers, expected start date — agreed once, not re-litigated at each stage.
- Default to written take-home or async work samples when possible. Asynchronous beats synchronous for scheduling friction.
What time to hire does not tell you
Speed without quality is bad hiring. Pair time to hire with quality of hire and offer-acceptance rate. A team hiring fast and losing candidates at offer is solving the wrong problem.
Where Join fits
Join’s pipeline view surfaces each candidate’s days-in-stage so the team sees where time is being lost. See the features page.
