Time to hire

Time to hire counts the days from when a candidate applies, or is sourced and enters the active pipeline, to when they accept an offer. It is one of the standard recruiting efficiency metrics, alongside time to fill, which instead measures from when a requisition opens to when it closes, a broader window that also includes the time spent sourcing candidates before anyone applies.

Because the two metrics start their clock at different points, comparing "time to hire" figures across companies or reports is unreliable unless both use the same definition; some organizations use the terms interchangeably, which the reader should watch for. Time to hire is usually broken down by role, level or department, since an executive search and a high-volume retail hire have very different natural timelines.

Recruiting teams use time to hire to find bottlenecks in the interview and approval process and to set candidate-experience expectations, since long processes lose strong candidates to faster-moving competitors. It should be read alongside quality of hire rather than optimized alone, because shortening the process by cutting screening steps can speed up hiring while quietly increasing employee turnover rate among the people hired that way.