Time to fill

The opening has its own clock

Time to fill follows a vacancy, rather than one candidate. A team may start the clock when a requisition is approved, when an opening is created in its system, or when the job is published. Those dates can differ, so the label alone does not make two reports comparable.

For this entry, the convention is opening date to accepted offer. Other systems use other endpoints. Greenhouse, for example, calculates its time-to-fill report from an opening’s open date to the candidate’s hire date, and exposes offer, acceptance and start dates alongside it in the report. Its documentation is a useful reminder to name the events rather than assume them.

How it differs from time to hire

Time to hire follows the selected candidate’s progress. Greenhouse’s candidate report measures application date to offer date in one report, while its dashboard calculation can use the hire date. The same product therefore documents two endpoint conventions.

An illustrative role opened on 1 September, received the successful application on 12 September, and reached offer acceptance on 30 September. Under the convention above, time to fill is 29 calendar days and time to hire is 18 calendar days. The difference describes time before that candidate entered the process; it does not establish what the team did during it.

Where comparisons go wrong

Compare roles with similar conditions and retain the reason for unusual durations: a changed brief, a pause in recruitment, an assessment step, or a delayed approval can all matter. If one advert advertises several openings, record the opening and filling event for each position. A continuously published advert cannot, by itself, supply the start date for every hire.

Use the measure to plan work

Time to fill can inform a hiring plan when the team knows its boundaries. It does not forecast the next vacancy on its own. Review the individual event dates before shortening a process: removing a necessary assessment merely to reduce the number changes the metric without necessarily improving the hire.

A lower figure only helps when the opening is genuinely filled and the report retains the event dates that changed. A number that falls because the end event was redefined is not an operational improvement.