Time to hire measures how long your recruitment process takes; from the moment a candidate applies to the moment they accept your offer.
What is time to hire?
Time to hire is a recruitment metric that counts the number of days between a candidate entering your hiring process and accepting a job offer. It tells you how fast your team moves once the right person is in the pipeline.
A shorter time to hire points to a well-run recruitment process. A longer one usually signals bottlenecks; slow interview scheduling, delayed decisions, or approval steps that take longer than they should.
Time to hire vs. time to fill: what is the difference?
These two metrics are often confused, but they measure different things.
| Time to hire | Time to fill | |
|---|---|---|
| What it measures | Days from candidate applying to offer accepted | Days from job opening to offer accepted |
| Starting point | Candidate applies or enters pipeline | Job requisition approved / role posted |
| What it tells you | How efficiently your team processes candidates | How long it takes to fill a role end to end |
| Who it reflects | Your hiring team's speed and process quality | Broader recruitment funnel, including sourcing |
| Best used for | Improving candidate experience and internal efficiency | Workforce planning and headcount forecasting |
Key difference: time to fill captures everything including the sourcing phase before candidates apply. Time to hire focuses purely on the candidate's journey through your process. Both matter, but they answer different questions.
How to calculate time to hire
The formula:
Time to hire = date candidate accepted offer - date candidate applied (or entered pipeline)
To find your average time to hire across multiple hires:
- Calculate the number of days from application to acceptance for each hire
- Add all those figures together
- Divide by the number of hires
Most applicant tracking systems calculate this automatically. If you are tracking manually, use a simple spreadsheet with application date and acceptance date columns per candidate.
What are the stages that make up time to hire?
Each stage of the hiring process contributes to your overall time to hire. Here is where time typically accumulates:
| Stage | What happens | Common cause of delay |
|---|---|---|
| Job requisition | Role is identified and approved internally | Slow sign-off or unclear approval chain |
| Job posting and sourcing | Role is advertised; candidates are sourced | Poorly written job descriptions; narrow sourcing channels |
| Application review | Applications are screened and shortlisted | No applicant tracking system; manual review |
| Interview process | Candidates are assessed across one or more rounds | Scheduling delays; too many interview stages |
| Assessment and decision | Hiring manager and HR team select a candidate | Slow internal alignment; unclear decision criteria |
| Job offer and acceptance | Offer is made; candidate accepts or negotiates | Offer below market rate; no urgency communicated |
Reducing time to hire usually means identifying which stage is slowest and fixing it, not trying to compress every stage at once.
What is a good time to hire?
There is no single answer, but here are useful reference points for UK employers:
According to industry research, the average time to hire in the UK sits between 27 and 35 days across sectors. In practice, it varies considerably by role type and industry:
- Hospitality and retail: Typically faster; 7 to 14 days for hourly and shift-based roles. Speed matters here because unfilled shifts have an immediate operational cost.
- Professional and office roles: Usually 3 to 6 weeks, with more interview stages.
- Specialist or senior roles: Can extend to 8 weeks or more, depending on the talent pool.
For most shift-based businesses hiring team members, front-of-house staff, or supervisors, anything over three weeks is worth investigating. Slow hiring in these roles means uncovered shifts, pressure on existing staff, and risk of losing candidates to faster-moving competitors.
A good time to hire is one that is fast enough to secure top candidates without rushing your assessment. The two goals are not in conflict; streamlining your process typically improves both speed and quality.
What affects time to hire?
Several factors push time to hire up or down:
Internal factors (within your control)
- Complexity of the role: Specialist or senior positions take longer to fill due to a smaller qualified talent pool and more interview stages.
- Hiring team efficiency: A well-coordinated team with clear responsibilities and decision authority moves faster than one where accountability is unclear.
- Quality of your applicant tracking system: Good tooling, including AI-powered recruitment tools, reduces manual steps, surfaces the right candidates faster, and removes bottlenecks in the review and scheduling process.
- Internal approval processes: Slow sign-off at job requisition or offer stage can add days to a process that is otherwise running smoothly.
- Job description quality: Vague or inaccurate job descriptions attract unsuitable candidates and slow down shortlisting.
External factors (harder to control)
- Labour market demand: In a competitive market for certain skills, candidates have more options and move faster. Slow processes lose them.
- Employer brand: Businesses with a strong reputation attract interest faster and see higher offer acceptance rates.
- Seasonal demand: Hospitality and retail businesses often need to hire at pace during peak periods, which can strain an unprepared recruitment process and make managing seasonal employment more complex.
How to benchmark your time to hire
Benchmarking means comparing your time to hire against relevant reference points; not just industry averages, but your own historical data.
Steps to benchmark effectively:
- Track your data consistently. You cannot benchmark what you do not measure. Log application date and acceptance date for every hire.
- Segment by role type. A 14-day time to hire for a kitchen porter and a 14-day time to hire for a general manager are very different stories.
- Compare against industry data. Use sector-specific benchmarks where available (see above) and broader HR KPI benchmarks for 2024 where relevant. Generic averages are less useful for shift-based businesses.
- Compare against your own history. Is your time to hire improving, stable, or worsening quarter on quarter? Your own trend is often more actionable than an industry number.
- Set realistic targets. If you are currently averaging 40 days for a role that should take 14, do not set a target of 14 immediately. Reduce in stages and fix the bottleneck first.
How to reduce time to hire
- Streamline your process: Remove steps that do not add value. If you have three interview rounds for a front-of-house role, ask whether each one is genuinely necessary. Fewer stages, clear timelines, and fast internal communication all reduce time without affecting quality.
- Write better job descriptions: A clear, accurate job description attracts stronger candidates from the start and reduces time wasted reviewing unsuitable applications. State the role, the hours, the pay range, and what you are actually looking for.
- Use an applicant tracking system: An applicant tracking system (ATS) automates the admin-heavy parts of recruitment: screening, scheduling interviews, sending updates to candidates. For businesses hiring regularly, this is one of the highest-impact changes you can make to recruitment efficiency.
- Build a talent pipeline: Businesses that only start sourcing when a role opens are slower than those with a pre-existing pool of interested candidates. Referral schemes, stay-in-touch sequences with previous applicants, and a good employer reputation, built around the qualities you value in employees, all contribute to a shorter time to hire when you need it most.
- Move faster at the offer stage: Many businesses run a tight recruitment process and then lose days at the offer stage. Candidates are still in the market. If you have made a decision, communicate it. A delayed offer is one of the most preventable causes of a slow time to hire.
How does time to hire connect to candidate experience?
The speed of your hiring process sends a signal to candidates about how you operate. A slow, disorganised process (with long gaps between stages, no updates on status, and delayed decisions) reflects poorly on your business before someone has even started.
Candidate experience matters for three reasons:
- Top candidates have options. Strong applicants are typically running multiple processes in parallel. A 30-day process risks losing them to a business that decided in 14.
- Employer brand is built in the process. Candidates who have a good experience (even if they do not get the job) are more likely to reapply, refer others, and speak positively about your business.
- It predicts the employee experience. How you treat candidates is often how you treat employees. A well-run hiring process is a signal of a well-run business.
For shift-based businesses in hospitality and retail, where reputation among local job seekers spreads quickly, this matters more than many owners realise and connects directly to how you manage rosters and team scheduling.
Related recruitment metrics
Time to hire sits alongside several other metrics that together give a complete picture of your recruitment process:
- Time to fill: Total days from job opening to offer accepted. Includes sourcing phase and is one of several core HR KPIs used in recruitment.
- Offer acceptance rate: The percentage of job offers that candidates accept. A low rate often signals a pay or process problem, such as uncompetitive hourly pay rates, not a sourcing problem.
- Quality of hire: A measure of how well a new hire performs and fits the role. Speed and quality are not mutually exclusive, a streamlined process typically improves both.
- Recruitment funnel conversion rate: How many candidates progress from each stage to the next. A sharp drop at any stage reveals a specific bottleneck.
- Cost per hire: The total cost of filling a role, including advertising, recruiter time, and onboarding. Reducing time to hire typically reduces cost per hire too.
For a broader overview of the metrics HR teams use to measure workforce performance, see the recruiting KPIs glossary and explore our HR news and blogs hub for the latest workforce management insights.
Reducing time to hire with better hiring tools
For hospitality, retail, and services businesses that hire regularly, the administrative side of recruitment adds up fast. Chasing contracts over email, manually entering new hire details, and coordinating signatures across multiple tools all slow the process down before a candidate's first shift.
Shiftbase HR Pro handles the hire flow from inside the same platform your team uses for scheduling. New hires receive a link, fill in their details, and sign their contract digitally, the same day in most cases. For returning seasonal workers, contract renewals take minutes rather than restarting the full process.
If reducing your time to hire is a priority, see how HR Pro works.
