I gathered data from around 13,000 sources to get the most accurate Days to Fill metric that I could. It is one of the most asked questions I get from the audience!
So, what’s the number? 37*.
Cool, now can we stop asking? Did that just solve all of your hiring problems?
No, it didn’t. Why?
Because Time to Fill is a worthless recruiting metric for the most part. There is zero correlation between how fast you fill a job to how well your talent acquisition function is performing.
37 days is meaningless out of context, as a comparison, every job is different, every organization is different, and every market is different.
So, if you are currently at 37 days time to fill a job, and in 2022 you magically get to 36.2 days to fill, are you better at recruiting? Are you? Maybe you hired too fast and now your turnover is increased. Maybe the economy went south for a bit and increased the labor pool and now you have more candidates applying. Zero. Correlation. To. Talent. Acquisition. Success.
So, why do we use it? Frankly, and this hurts because you know I love talent acquisition and the pros that work in it every single day, we’re lazy. We’re too lazy to measure what really matters. That hurts. That should make you mad. We are better than this.
Can your Time to Fill matter at all? Yes, as a health metric of your TA function. If your industry average is 37 days, and you’re at 54, your function might have cancer! That being said, you have to support that with other stuff. Your 54-day hiring process might have reduced your turnover to 15% in an industry that has 50%, then your 54 days is understandable. But, what I usually find in most industries and jobs are fairly close to the mean on time to fill. So, it can be used as a universal health TA metric.
But, once you start trying to reduce by .4 days or .3 days, you’ve lost your way.
*For those wanting to now use “37” days as the average time to fill in the world, I totally made that metric up! Stop it! Be Better!
What to measure today:
• time to engage
• time to interview
• time to offer
“Average” Time to Hire? Like you stated, has no relevance. Because no job or job search or job market is like another.
As we know, it’s a job seeker / candidate market.
Candidates know their worth and they aren’t willing to wait in the shadows until hiring authorities get their schtuff together.
And now, candidates are doing what recruiters have always done: ghosting. Hurts, huh?
Tim, I share your viewpoint! Exactly, time to hire differs from job to job and we should measure the metrics separately. For instance, with Hirebee hiring solution, recruiters get access to advanced analytics tool as well and measure time to fill for each job and recruiter.
Client, a TA leader, told me his KPI metric for this year was “speed to hire”. I asked why not time to fill, quality of hire, success in role, etc. He said that is what his senior leadership told hime was mission critical in today’s environment. Oy vey.
Mark,
I do think we need a paradigm shift around candidate SLA contact time. Traditionally, it’s been 24-48 hours. Once someone applies, we’ll get back to them in that time frame. In today’s world, that needs to be 24-48 minutes!
T
Or 2 to 4 minutes. Great post. Thanks, Tim.
Preach it Brother!