Time to fill is the number of calendar days from the day a job requisition is approved (or opened) to the day the chosen candidate accepts the offer. It is the employer’s clock for one vacancy, and it starts before a single candidate has applied.

How it differs from time to hire

The end point is the same for both metrics. The start point is not. Time to hire starts when the person you eventually hire enters your pipeline; time to fill starts when the seat was approved. The gap between the two is everything that happens before the right candidate shows up: posting delays, sourcing, a slow first shortlist.

Take one requisition approved on 3 March. The eventual hire applies on 20 March and accepts the offer on 28 April.

• Time to fill: 3 March to 28 April = 56 days
• Time to hire: 20 March to 28 April = 39 days
• The 17-day difference is the time the role sat before this candidate arrived

If the hire then serves a 60-day notice period, they start around 27 June. Some companies stop the clock at the joining date instead of offer acceptance. Either choice is fine, but write it down, because a number measured one way cannot be compared with a number measured the other way.

Reading the number

Averages hide a lot. A 30-day average made of fast clerical hires and a few 90-day leadership searches tells you nothing. Report time to fill by role family and level, and use the median alongside the mean so one stuck requisition does not distort the month. Published benchmarks exist, but they mix definitions and industries, so compare against your own last four quarters instead.

Long time to fill also shows up in vacancy rate, since every extra day is a day the seat stays empty. In practice, the delays sit in three places: requisition approval waiting in someone’s inbox, interview rounds that cannot be scheduled, and offer approvals that need three signatures.

Frequently asked questions

Should the clock start at approval or at job posting?

Approval is the cleaner start because it captures internal delays before posting. If your ATS only logs the posting date, use that, but say so, and do not mix the two in one report.

Do weekends and holidays count?

Most teams count calendar days. Counting working days is also acceptable, as long as it is applied consistently across every requisition you report.

What about requisitions that are put on hold?

Pause the clock or exclude them, and note the exclusion. A role frozen for six weeks by a budget decision says nothing about recruiter performance, but it will wreck your average if left in.

Where can I calculate it quickly?

The time to hire calculator handles the date arithmetic; run it twice, once from the requisition date and once from the application date, to see both metrics.

For the stage-by-stage view of where those days go, use the recruitment funnel calculator.