Time in stage

Two clocks, two uses

For an application still in interview, stage age runs from the move into interview to today. It helps a team find records that may need attention. For a completed passage, the clock stops when the application moves out of the stage. The two measurements should not be pooled.

In an illustrative case, a candidate enters a stage on 4 September and exits on 9 September: the completed duration is five calendar days. A candidate still there on 9 September has a stage age of five days, but their final duration remains unknown.

What the pipeline records

JOIN describes a pipeline as the journey of an application from applying to being hired or rejected. It has fixed stages including Applied, Application Review, Offer and Hired, with custom interview or review stages in between. The pipeline documentation explains that teams can sort candidates to prioritise review; this provides the first-hand product context for using stage age as a work queue.

Stage time complements, rather than replaces, an end-to-end metric. Greenhouse’s candidate report illustrates that time to hire is reported across a candidate’s process. Stage durations divide that total into events that can be examined.

Define a comparable stage

An “interview” stage that contains every assessment cannot be compared directly with a single panel interview elsewhere. State how returns to a stage, pauses and withdrawn applications are treated. Keep completed durations separate from still-open ages, because a simple average can obscure the oldest waiting records.

Investigate the action, not the label

Use the longest or oldest cases to ask what is expected next and who owns it. A delay may be deliberate, such as an agreed appointment, or it may need a follow-up. A higher median does not by itself justify deleting a necessary step. Read it alongside time to hire to place a stage in the full candidate journey.