Hiring Metrics in Focus: Time to Fill | Breakdown, Bottlenecks, and Best Practices

Picture this: Your star salesperson just handed in their two weeks’ notice, and you’re staring at a pipeline worth millions that needs immediate attention. Fast-forward six weeks, and you’re still sorting through resumes while revenue opportunities slip through your fingers. Sound familiar?

You’re not alone. According to SHRM, each unfilled position costs companies an average of $4,700. That number can go as high as an average of $28,329 for an executive-level role, according to Toggl. In other words, every day a role stays unfilled counts.

Time to Fill vs. Time to Hire: What Are They and Why the Distinction Matters

Before diving into benchmarks, let’s clarify two often-confused metrics:

• Time to Fill measures the complete hiring lifecycle, from the moment a job requisition is approved to when a candidate accepts your offer. This captures your entire organizational hiring velocity, including internal approvals and process efficiency.
• Time to Hire focuses specifically on the candidate journey, starting when they enter your pipeline (application or sourcing) and ending at offer acceptance. This metric reveals how efficiently you’re moving candidates through your evaluation process.

Tracking both metrics gives you complete visibility: Time to Fill shows organizational efficiency, while Time to Hire reveals more about your candidate experience. Smart HR leaders optimize both simultaneously.

Why Time to Fill Should Be Your North Star Metric

Time to Fill isn’t just a number on your recruiting dashboard, it’s a direct indicator of your organization’s competitive advantage in securing top talent. While slower-moving companies are deliberating, your streamlined process is already extending offers to the candidates everyone wants.

The stakes have never been higher. Time to hire has increased from 31 days in 2023 to even longer cycles in 2024 (Genius, 2024), making efficient hiring a genuine competitive differentiator.

When your competitors are taking weeks to make decisions, speed becomes your secret weapon.

The Hidden Costs of Slow Hiring

Every additional day an important position remains unfilled creates a cascade of negative impacts:

• Direct Financial Impact: Extended hiring timelines create measurable costs beyond just recruiting expenses. These include overtime pay for existing staff covering additional responsibilities, lost productivity during the vacancy period, and potential revenue impact for client-facing or revenue-generating roles.
• Team Productivity Drain: When key roles remain unfilled, other team members are often required to pick up the slack, leading to increased workloads and potentially longer hours. This creates a domino effect of decreased morale, increased burnout risk, and potential secondary turnover.
• Competitive Disadvantage: In fast-moving industries, delayed hiring means delayed product launches, missed client deadlines, and lost market opportunities. Your competitors aren’t waiting for you to get organized.
• Employer Brand Damage: Extended hiring processes signal organizational dysfunction to candidates. Top talent interprets slow decision-making as a preview of working conditions, leading them to accept offers elsewhere.

Five Time to Fill Bottlenecks

While every organization’s hiring challenges are unique, certain bottlenecks appear consistently across industries and company sizes. These are common pain points that often account for the unnecessary delays in the hiring process:

1. Approval Delays: Many organizations still require multiple approval layers for new hires, creating delays before recruiting even begins.
2. Interview Scheduling Chaos: Coordinating multiple stakeholders’ calendars can add days to your process. Worse yet, last-minute cancellations often restart the scheduling cycle entirely.
3. Decision-Making Paralysis: When hiring decisions require consensus from multiple stakeholders without clear criteria, debates can extend indefinitely.
4. Manual Process Dependencies: Email chains, spreadsheet tracking, and paper-based feedback and approvals create countless opportunities for delays. Every manual handoff risks dropping the ball.
5. Unrealistic Job Requirements: “Purple unicorn” job descriptions that demand impossible skill combinations naturally extend search timelines. Worse, they discourage qualified candidates from applying.

Strategic Solutions That Actually Work

The key to reducing time to fill isn’t cutting corners, it’s eliminating unnecessary friction while preserving the elements that lead to quality hires. The most effective improvements focus on process efficiency rather than rushing decisions. By identifying where time is wasted rather than invested, organizations can often cut significant amounts of wasted time from their hiring timeline without sacrificing the thoroughness needed to make good hiring decisions.

Here are some proven strategies that can help reduce time to fill while maintaining hiring quality:

• Streamline Approval Workflows: Implement standardized hiring charters that pre-approve common roles and salary ranges. Create escalation paths only for unusual situations, not routine hires.
• Perfect Your Job Descriptions: Clear, compelling job descriptions attract better-matched candidates faster. Focus on must-have requirements versus nice-to-have preferences. Include realistic timelines and next steps to set proper expectations.
• Implement Video Screening: One-way video interviews allow candidates to respond on their schedule while giving your team asynchronous review capabilities. This eliminates the first-round scheduling bottleneck entirely.
• Automate Administrative Tasks: Modern ATS systems can handle scheduling, send automated updates, and track candidate progress without human intervention. Free your recruiters to focus on relationship-building and evaluation. Plus, the video interviewing and scheduling tools you’re using can often integrate with your ATS or HRIS systems.
• Create Structured Interview Processes: Standardized interview guides and scoring rubrics speed decision-making while improving hiring quality. When everyone evaluates candidates using the same criteria, consensus happens faster.
• Build Talent Pipelines: Proactive candidate relationship management means starting with warm leads rather than cold searches. Maintain relationships with previous strong candidates and industry contacts.

Technology as a Force Multiplier

One of the most common misconception about hiring technology is that it dehumanizes the process. In reality, smart hiring technology doesn’t replace the human element, it amplifies it. The right tools eliminate administrative friction while preserving the personal touch that attracts top talent.

When recruiters spend less time coordinating schedules and tracking spreadsheets, they can invest more time in meaningful candidate conversations and strategic thinking. The goal isn’t automation for its own sake, it’s strategic automation that frees up human capacity for the judgment calls that determine hiring success.

• Video Interview Platforms enable asynchronous screening at scale, letting you evaluate more candidates in less time. Candidates appreciate the flexibility, and recruiters can review submissions during peak productivity hours.
• Intelligent Scheduling Systems eliminate the back-and-forth emails required to coordinate multiple calendars. Self-booking capabilities with automated reminders drastically reduce no-shows and rescheduling delays.
• Analytics Dashboards provide real-time visibility into where candidates are getting stuck in your funnel. For example, when you can see where candidates are dropping out of your interview processes, you know exactly where to focus improvement efforts.

Implementation Roadmap: Your 90-Day Time to Fill Improvement Plan

Days 1-30: Foundation Setting

• Audit your current process and identify the top 3 bottlenecks
• Establish baseline metrics for time to fill by role and department
• Standardize job description templates and approval workflows

Days 31-60: Process Optimization

• Implement structured interview guides and scoring systems
• Deploy automated scheduling and communication tools
• Train hiring managers on efficient evaluation techniques

Days 61-90: Technology Integration

• Launch video screening to save time in early stage interviews
• Implement real-time analytics tracking
• Create candidate pipeline programs for critical roles

Ongoing: Continuous Improvement

• Monthly metric reviews with hiring managers
• Quarterly process refinements based on data insights
• Regular candidate experience surveys to maintain quality

Measuring Success: Beyond the Numbers

While time to fill is crucial, it’s only one piece of the hiring effectiveness puzzle. Speed without quality is counterproductive. Once you’ve made progress on the bottleneck issues, take a look at balancing time to fill with these quality indicators:

• New Hire Performance Ratings at 90 Days: Early performance indicators reveal whether faster processes still identify capable candidates.
• First-Year Retention Rates: Track by role and hiring manager to identify patterns in turnover.
• Hiring Manager Satisfaction Scores: Regular feedback ensures streamlined processes deliver candidates who meet actual job requirements.
• Candidate Experience Feedback: Poor experiences damage employer brand and reduce future application rates.

The goal isn’t just faster hiring, it’s faster hiring of better candidates who stay longer and perform better.

Taking Action: Your Next Steps

Ready to accelerate your hiring without cutting corners? Start with these immediate actions:

1. Calculate your current cost of vacancy for key roles
2. Map your hiring process from requisition to acceptance, timing each stage
3. Identify your biggest bottleneck and implement one improvement this month
4. Set realistic but ambitious targets based on industry benchmarks

Remember: a one-week reduction in time to fill can save thousands of dollars per hire while improving candidate experience and team productivity.

Want to see how leading organizations are cutting their time to fill? Book a demo with interviewstream to explore how video screening and intelligent scheduling can transform your hiring speed without sacrificing quality.

About The Author

Drew Whitehurst is the Director of Marketing, RevOps, and Product Strategy at interviewstream. He's been with the company since 2014 working in client services and marketing. He is an analytical thinker, coffee enthusiast, and hobbyist at heart.