Time to fill
Also called:fill time
Time to fill vs. time to hire
The most common metric confusion in recruiting:
- Time to fill: starts when the job opens (you publish the posting or approve the requisition). Measures how long the role sits open.
- Time to hire: starts when a candidate enters your pipeline (applied, sourced, referred). Measures how long the candidate takes through your process.
Time to fill is always longer than time to hire for the same role — it includes the period before the candidate appears.
Pick one and stick to it. Reporting different metrics in different meetings makes them look like different stories.
Typical European SMB benchmarks
Indicative, not prescriptive:
- Time to fill, all roles, European SMB: 30-50 days.
- Time to fill, engineering: 45-70 days.
- Time to fill, customer-facing operations: 25-40 days.
Hiring manager seniority, location, and labor market tightness move these substantially.
What makes time to fill drift
The biggest contributors:
- Lag between role opening and first sourcing activity. Often a week.
- Wait for hiring manager to engage with screening candidates. Often another week.
- Scheduling friction for the panel. Usually 5-10 days per stage.
Each of these compounds. Cut a few days from each and time to fill drops 10-15 days.
Where Join fits
Join logs the role-open timestamp and the offer-accepted timestamp, computing time to fill automatically per role. See the features page.
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between time to fill and time to hire?
They start at different moments. Time to fill runs from the day the job opens, so it captures everything including the wait for the first decent candidate; time to hire runs from the moment a specific candidate enters the pipeline. For the same role, fill is always the longer number, and mixing the two in reports makes one process look like two different ones.
What does a long time to fill actually signal?
Usually dead time rather than slow interviews: a gap before anyone starts sourcing, screened candidates waiting on the hiring manager, and panel scheduling that eats days at every stage. Each of those stacks on the others. Meanwhile the vacancy has a cost of its own, because the team absorbs the missing role's work.
