Time to Fill vs Time to Hire: How to Gauge Your Recruitment

November 5, 2024
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Ann
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Recruitment metrics are crucial for tracking and optimizing hiring efforts, especially at agencies where time directly impacts revenue. Expert recruiters rely on metrics like time-to-hire (time from first contact to acceptance) and time-to-fill (total time from job posting to offer acceptance) to gauge efficiency and streamline processes. Reducing these timeframes helps agencies quickly place top talent, increasing profitability and client satisfaction. By analyzing these and other metrics, like cost-per-hire and source of hire, recruiters can focus on high-impact activities that enhance both speed and quality of hire.

What Is Time to Fill?

Time to fill measures the days between posting a job and a candidate accepting an offer. It shows the total length of the hiring process, from sourcing to screening and interviewing. This metric varies by industry, role, and location, helping agencies assess hiring efficiency. For example, if an agency's average time to fill a tech role is 45 days but exceeds this, they may analyze steps like sourcing or interviewing to identify bottlenecks. Reducing time to fill means securing top talent quickly, minimizing the risk of losing candidates to competitors while optimizing resources. To calculate it, subtract the job posting date from the offer acceptance date.

Calculating Time to Fill:

  • Day Candidate Accepted Job Offer - Day Job Ad Published = Time to Fill
  • If you want to calculate your average time to fill for a given period (e.g., a year), you can add up all the time to fill measurements for each position you filled in that period and then divide by the number of roles.
    (Time to Fill for Role A + Time to Fill for Role B + Time to Fill for Role C) / 3 = Average Time to Fill

What Is Time to Hire?

Time to hire measures the duration between a candidate applying for a job and their acceptance of an offer. It starts when a candidate enters the talent pipeline and ends when they become a new hire, reflecting the effectiveness of the selection process, including screening and interviewing. Typically measured in days, the global average time to hire is three to six weeks, but this can vary by industry. For instance, LinkedIn reports that engineering positions average around 49 days, while sales roles typically take about 33 days.

Time to hire is crucial for assessing selection efficiency and improving candidate experience. If it’s too long, candidates may lose interest or develop a negative impression of the company; if too short, recruiters might rush decisions and overlook vital information.

Calculating Time to Hire:

  • Time to Hire = Date of Offer Acceptance - Date of Candidate Application
    An agency could use the time to hire calculation to optimize its recruitment strategies. For instance, if they find the average time to hire for software developer positions is 45 days—longer than the industry average of 30 days—they might:
  • Analyze the Selection Process: Identify bottlenecks, such as lengthy resume screening, and implement an Applicant Tracking System (ATS) to streamline this stage.
  • Enhance Candidate Engagement: Improve communication with applicants by sending regular updates during the hiring process to maintain interest.
  • Refine Job Descriptions: Adjust descriptions to better attract suitable candidates and reduce lengthy interview processes.
  • Expand Talent Pool: Broaden sourcing channels or offer competitive incentives to attract candidates more quickly.

How to Track Time to Fill & Time to Hire Automatically

To further enhance your recruitment efforts, Manatal's recruitment software offers comprehensive solutions to streamline hiring processes and generate detailed reports. With features like automated report generation and advanced analytics, Manatal enables agencies to track their hiring metrics, including time to hire, and visualize performance trends over time. This capability empowers teams to identify areas for improvement, optimize their recruitment strategies, and ultimately enhance their candidate experience, ensuring you attract and retain top talent efficiently.

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Time to Fill vs Time to Hire: What Are the Differences?

The main difference when it comes to time to fill vs time to hire is the point you start counting. You may start counting time to fill before a job is published. But your time to hire timeline starts when your best candidate applies or gets sourced. So, time to fill tells you how fast your hiring process moves.

Here are some other differences between time to fill and time to hire that recruiters need to know and focus on:

Time to Fill Time to Hire
Influenced by external factors, such as market conditions, talent availability, employer branding, and job advertising. Influenced by internal factors, such as hiring team collaboration, candidate communication, screening methods, and decision making.
Helps you plan your hiring better and avoid talent shortages Helps you assess your hiring quality and avoid losing top candidates
Can vary significantly depending on the industry and role. For example, the average global time to fill in Engineering is 62 days Can vary depending on the candidate pool and competition. For example, the average global time to hire in Sales is 33 days
Can be reduced by using more efficient recruiting strategies, such as building a candidate database, creating talent pools, using referrals, and streamlining your hiring workflow Can be improved by using more effective screening tools, such as skills assessments, video interviews, and automated scoring

Optimize Your Recruitment with Data from Time to Fill & Time to Hire

You can leverage time to fill and time to hire data from a tool like Applicant Tracking System (ATS). It is a software that helps you manage your entire hiring process from sourcing to hiring. ATS automates tedious tasks, organizes candidate information, and tracks key metrics.

Beyond that, an ATS can also optimize your recruitment process with many abilities. You can create and publish attractive job ads on multiple platforms, find and reach out to passive candidates on social media and professional networks, filter candidates based on their qualifications, skills, and fit for the role, schedule interviews with candidates, and hiring team members easily, as well as generate and send personalized offer letters with electronic signatures. All can be done within a few clicks.

There are many ATS systems available on the market today, but one of the most reliable ATS that is specifically tuned to make your day easier is Manatal. It is an innovative cloud-based recruitment solution that offers powerful features that enable you to source, screen, and hire top talent faster and smarter.

Some of Manatal’s features include:

  • Multi-Channel Sourcing: Manatal offers a seamless candidate sourcing experience by providing access to a wide range of job boards, both free and paid. Platforms like Indeed, Monster, ZipRecruiter, Glassdoor, and others are at your disposal. Additionally, Manatal simplifies the process of sourcing candidates from social media platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and more. This feature is crucial in reducing the time it takes to hire, as it increases the visibility of your job openings and accelerates the arrival of candidates.
  • Branded Career Page: Moreover, you can create and customize your own branded career page and integrate it into your existing website with no coding required.
  • AI-powered Recommendations: Many companies have extensive databases of past candidates, but efficiently locating the ideal candidates can be a laborious task without the appropriate tool. Manatal simplifies this process with its AI recommendation feature, which swiftly identifies the best candidates for a specific role based solely on a job description. This significantly reduces the time required to fill the position by streamlining the sourcing phase.
  • Candidate Scoring: You can also rank candidates based on their skills, experience, and fit for the role using AI algorithms. This can substantially shorten screening time and allow recruiters to focus their time and energy on the most promising candidates.
  • Social Media Enrichment: Manatal enables you to enhance candidate profiles by incorporating data from various platforms such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and others. This further streamlines the screening process and improves the chances of finding a candidate who aligns well with your company culture.

Recruitment involves multiple stakeholders, including recruiters, HR personnel, and hiring managers. However, using traditional tools can lead to bottlenecks, with emails getting lost and unclear deadlines or responsibilities. Manatal solves this problem by centralizing all interactions related to the hiring process within the platform. This streamlined approach accelerates the recruitment process, resulting in a positive impact on the time to hire.

One of Manatal’s highlights is its Reports & Analytics feature that provides time to fill and time to hire data. With this feature, you can:

  • Track your average time to fill and time to hire across different roles, teams, and locations.
  • Compare your time to fill and time to hire with industry benchmarks and best practices.
  • Identify bottlenecks and areas of improvement in your hiring process.
  • Optimize your recruitment strategies based on data-driven insights.

Imagine if you can smoothly ride through a hiring process from end to end while being certain that you’ll have full visibility of important metrics. Start a 14-day Free Trial with Manatal now and see for yourself how our ATS can elevate your recruitment game within a few tabs.

Citations:

1. Top 100 Hiring Statistics for 2022|LinkedIn

2. How Long Does It Take to Get Hired?|LinkedIn

3. Can you wait 49 days? Why getting hired takes so long in engineering|LinkedIn

Ann Schumann

As a former recruiter turned content writer, Ann specializes in creating engaging content. With a passion for the recruitment industry, she helps businesses streamline hiring and attract top talent using innovative solutions.

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Bill Twinning
Talent Resources & Development Director - Charoen Pokphand Group
Manatal is the best ATS we worked with. Simplicity, efficiency and the latest technologies combined make it an indispensable tool for any large-scale HR team. Since its adoption, we've seen a huge increase across all our key recruitment metrics. To summarize, it is a must-have.
Dina Demajo
Senior Talent Acquisition - Manpower Group
Manpower has been using Manatal and we couldn't be happier as a team with the services this platform has provided. The application is extremely user-friendly and very well equipped with all the useful functions one would require for successful recruitment. The support team is also excellent with very fast response time.
Ahmed Firdaus
Director - MRI Network, Executive Search Firm
I've been using Manatal for the past couple of months and the platform is excellent, user-friendly and it has helped me a lot in my recruitment process, operation and database management. I'm very happy with their great support. Whenever I ask something they come back to me within minutes.
Edmund Yeo
Human Resources Manager - Oakwood
Manatal is a sophisticated, easy-to-use, mobile-friendly, and cloud-based applicant tracking system that helps companies achieve digitalization and seamless integration to LinkedIn and other job boards. The team at Manatal is very supportive, helpful, prompt in their replies and we were pleased to see that the support they offer exceeded our expectations.
Maxime Ferreira
International Director - JB Hired
Manatal has been at the core of our agency's expansion. Using it has greatly improved and simplified our recruitment processes. Incredibly easy and intuitive to use, customizable to a tee, and offers top-tier live support. Our recruiters love it. A must-have for all recruitment agencies. Definitely recommend!
Ngoc-Thinh Tran
HR Manager, Talent Sourcing & Acquisition - Suntory PepsiCo Beverage
I am using Manatal for talent sourcing and it is the best platform ever. I am so impressed, the Manatal team did an excellent job. This is so awesome I am recommending the solution to all recruiters I know.
Bill Twinning
Talent Resources & Development Director - Charoen Pokphand Group
Manatal is the best ATS we worked with. Simplicity, efficiency and the latest technologies combined make it an indispensable tool for any large-scale HR team. Since its adoption, we've seen a huge increase across all our key recruitment metrics. To summarize. it is a must-have.
Ahmed Firdaus
Director - MRINetwork, Executive Search Firm
I've been using Manatal for the past couple of months and the platform is excellent, user-friendly and it has helped me a lot in my recruitment process, operation and database management. I'm very happy with their great support. Whenever I ask something they come back to me within minutes.
Dina Demajo
Senior Talent Acquisition - Manpower Group
Manpower has been using Manatal and we couldn't be happier as a team with the services this platform has provided. The application is extremely user-friendly and very well equipped with all the useful functions one would require for successful recruitment. The support team is also excellent with very fast response time.
Kevin Martin
Human Resources Manager - Oakwood
Manatal is a sophisticated, easy-to-use, mobile-friendly, and cloud-based applicant tracking system that helps companies achieve digitalization and seamless integration to LinkedIn and other job boards. The team at Manatal is very supportive, helpful, prompt in their replies and we were pleased to see that the support they offer exceeded our expectations.
Maxime Ferreira
International Director - JB Hired
Manatal has been at the core of our agency's expansion. Using it has greatly improved and simplified our recruitment processes. Incredibly easy and intuitive to use, customizable to a tee, and offers top-tier live support. Our recruiters love it. A must-have for all recruitment agencies. Definitely recommend!
Ngoc-Thinh Tran
HR Manager, Talent Sourcing & Acquisition - Suntory PepsiCo Beverage
I am using Manatal for talent sourcing and it is the best platform ever. I am so impressed, the Manatal team did an excellent job. This is so awesome I am recommending the solution to all recruiters I know.

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