Time to Fill

Shrink Your Time to Fill and Hire Faster

In a competitive talent market, time to fill is a simple but powerful metric. It’s the number of calendar days it takes to hire someone new, starting from the moment a job requisition is approved to the day a candidate formally accepts your offer. This number is a vital sign, giving you a clear picture of your recruitment efficiency and, believe it or not, your overall business health.

Why Your Time to Fill Is a Critical Business Metric

Think of your hiring process as a critical pipeline for your business. Every single day a key role sits empty, it’s like a leak in that pipeline. Productivity, revenue, and even team morale slowly drain away. This is precisely why managing your time to fill isn’t just an HR chore—it’s a strategic business imperative.

A lengthy hiring cycle is far more than just an inconvenience; it carries real, tangible costs. When a position remains vacant for too long, your existing team has to pick up the slack. This often leads to burnout, lower engagement, and a higher risk of good people leaving, which only makes your hiring challenges worse.

The True Cost of Slow Hiring

The fallout from a slow hiring process spreads throughout the entire organisation, touching everything from daily operations to long-term growth. A high time to fill can be a red flag, pointing to deeper problems in your recruitment strategy that need urgent attention.

To get a clearer picture of what’s at stake, this table breaks down the stages typically measured by time to fill. It’s a great way to see where your process might be slowing down.

Key Stages Measured by Time to Fill

Each of these stages is a potential friction point. By measuring them, you can pinpoint exactly where you need to make improvements.

Key areas impacted by a long time to fill include:

• Lost Productivity and Revenue: An empty desk, especially in a role like sales, directly translates to missed opportunities and lost income.
• Project Delays: Without the right people, crucial projects can grind to a halt, causing you to miss deadlines and lose your competitive edge.
• Reduced Team Morale: Overburdened employees can quickly become frustrated and disengaged, harming your work environment and company culture.
• Damaged Employer Brand: A slow, confusing hiring process creates a terrible candidate experience. This tarnishes your company’s reputation and makes it much harder to attract great talent down the road.

Setting the Right Expectations in India

In India’s dynamic and incredibly fast-paced job market, this metric is particularly vital. For example, recent reports show that large IT firms in hubs like Delhi often have an average time to fill of around 42 days. A delay of that scale can seriously disrupt project timelines and hurt business results. You can explore more about these Indian HR benchmarks to get a feel for the competitive landscape.

A lengthy hiring process tells top candidates that your organisation is indecisive or inefficient. In a market where skilled professionals have multiple options, speed and clarity are your greatest assets in securing the best talent before your competitors do.

Ultimately, your time to fill is a direct reflection of your organisation’s ability to attract, assess, and secure the talent it needs to thrive. It’s a key performance indicator that reveals the health of your entire talent acquisition function. By measuring it, you can spot the bottlenecks, streamline your process, and build a more agile and responsive hiring machine.

How To Calculate Time To Fill Accurately

Before you can even think about improving your time to fill, you have to know how to calculate it. Without a solid, accurate number, you’re essentially flying blind. The good news is that the basic formula is quite simple, giving you a powerful starting point to understand your own recruitment efficiency.

At its core, the calculation is just the number of calendar days between two key milestones: the day a job requisition gets the green light, and the day your chosen candidate officially accepts the job offer.

Time to Fill Formula: (Date Offer Accepted) – (Date Job Requisition Approved) = Time to Fill in Days

This simple equation gives you a single, powerful metric for every role you fill. The absolute key here is consistency. For this data to be useful across your company, everyone involved in hiring must use the exact same start and end points for every single calculation.

Distinguishing Time To Fill From Time To Hire

It’s incredibly common for teams to mix up time to fill with another crucial metric, time to hire. While they sound similar, they actually measure very different parts of the recruitment journey and answer different questions about your process.

• Time to Fill: Think of this as the business’s perspective. It measures the efficiency of the entire recruitment process, starting the moment the business formally acknowledges the need for a new hire (requisition approval).
• Time to Hire: This one is all about the candidate’s journey. It starts the clock when a candidate first applies for the role and stops it when they accept the offer.

Getting this distinction right is vital. A long time to fill might signal sluggish internal approval processes. On the other hand, a long time to hire could point to a clumsy interview process or a poor candidate experience. Both are valuable, but they shine a light on different bottlenecks.

For instance, this infographic breaks down how different stages add up, helping you see exactly where the delays might be hiding.

This particular flow shows a total of 15 working days from posting the job to making an offer, clearly highlighting how much time the screening and interviewing stages took up.

Putting The Calculation Into Practice

Let’s look at a couple of real-world examples to see how this works and what it can tell you.

Example 1: Hiring a Python Developer in Bangalore

• Job Requisition Approved: 1st May
• Candidate Accepts Offer: 15th June
• Calculation: 15th June – 1st May = 45 days

A 45-day timeframe for a technical role in a competitive city like Bangalore might be perfectly normal. The real power comes from tracking this over time to see if that number is creeping up or shrinking.

Example 2: Hiring a Marketing Manager in Mumbai

• Job Requisition Approved: 10th July
• Candidate Accepts Offer: 20th August
• Calculation: 20th August – 10th July = 41 days

By comparing these two hires, you can see the senior marketing role was filled slightly faster than the developer position. Collecting this kind of data for every single hire is what helps you build realistic benchmarks for different departments and seniority levels. This is where a Human Resource Management System (HRMS) becomes indispensable for tracking these dates accurately across the entire organisation.

What Is a Good Time to Fill in India?

So, your last hire took 45 days. Is that a reason to celebrate, or a sign your process is lagging? The honest answer is: it depends entirely on the context. A “good” time to fill isn’t a one-size-fits-all number. It’s a moving target, shaped by your industry, the role’s complexity, and even the city you’re hiring in.

Trying to compare your 45-day cycle for a niche data scientist with a 20-day hire for a customer service executive is like comparing apples and oranges. The skill sets, talent pools, and competitive pressures are worlds apart. Getting a grip on these nuances is the real key to setting practical benchmarks and knowing how your recruitment engine is truly performing.

Global averages can offer a broad sense of direction, but for insights that actually help, you need to zoom in on the Indian market. The hiring landscape in a metro like Bengaluru is fundamentally different from a Tier-2 city like Jaipur. This impacts everything from candidate availability to salary expectations and, ultimately, your hiring timeline.

Benchmarking by Industry and Role

The single biggest factor dictating your time to fill is the specific role you’re hiring for and the industry you operate in. It’s simple supply and demand. High-demand sectors with a clear skill shortage will naturally have longer hiring cycles because everyone is competing for the same limited pool of qualified talent.

Think about these common scenarios across India:

• Information Technology (IT) and Tech: This sector is notoriously competitive. Finding specialists like AI/ML engineers or cybersecurity experts can easily stretch beyond 60 days simply because the demand far outstrips the supply.
• Business Process Outsourcing (BPO): In stark contrast, many BPO roles see a much faster turnaround. With a larger talent pool available for voice and non-voice processes, the time to fill can be as quick as 15-25 days.
• Sales and Marketing: For entry-to-mid-level sales roles, most companies aim to close the position in under 30 days. But hiring a senior marketing leader with a proven track record is a different game altogether, demanding a more extended and strategic search.

Your time to fill is a story, not just a number. It tells you about the demand for the skills you need, the effectiveness of your sourcing channels, and your organisation’s standing in the talent market.

The Influence of Seniority and Location

Beyond the industry, seniority level plays a massive part. It’s only logical that hiring a Chief Financial Officer will take much longer than bringing on a junior accountant. The vetting process is more rigorous, the talent pool is significantly smaller, and the final decision involves more senior stakeholders.

Location adds yet another layer to the puzzle.

• Metro Cities (Mumbai, Delhi, Bengaluru): While talent is abundant here, so is the competition. Companies are all vying for the same top performers, which can easily drive up recruitment timelines and costs.
• Tier-2 and Tier-3 Cities: These locations might offer a less crowded hiring space, but you could struggle to find candidates with highly specialised or niche skills, potentially extending your search.

Understanding these benchmarks is vital, especially as India’s job market continues its powerful expansion. Reports on hiring trends show significant growth across sectors, which only intensifies the race for talent. To truly see how your company stacks up, you have to compare your performance against direct competitors hiring for similar roles in similar locations. That’s the only way to get a true measure of your recruitment efficiency.

The Hidden Costs of a Long Hiring Cycle

An empty desk is never just an empty desk. Think of it more as a slow leak in your company’s engine—a silent drain on productivity, revenue, and even team spirit that gets worse with every passing day. While it’s easy to add up the direct costs of recruitment, like job board fees, the real damage from a long time to fill is often hidden deep within your operations and culture. And frankly, these are the costs that can hurt the most.

To really grasp the damage, you have to look at the ripple effect of a single vacant role. Let’s say you have an unfilled sales territory. That’s not just a missing person on the team chart; it’s tangible, lost revenue and a missed chance to grow your market share. Or imagine delaying the hire of a key software developer. That one delay can bring entire projects to a halt, pushing back product launches and giving your competitors a golden opportunity to get ahead.

These are the direct financial blows. But the less obvious—and often more destructive—costs start piling up on the human side of your business.

The Strain on Your Existing Team

When a position stays open for too long, the work doesn’t just vanish. It lands on the shoulders of your current team. At first, colleagues might be happy to pitch in, but that goodwill has a very short shelf life. When weeks stretch into months, that extra load starts causing serious problems.

• Employee Burnout: Juggling two jobs at once isn’t sustainable. It’s a fast track to chronic stress and burnout, which tanks the quality of work and kills productivity.
• Decreased Morale: Overworked employees don’t stay engaged for long. They become resentful, and their focus shifts from innovating and collaborating to just making it through the week. This can poison a team’s entire culture.
• Higher Attrition Risk: Your best people are usually the first ones to jump ship. When they feel constantly overloaded and unsupported, they’ll start looking for opportunities at organisations that have their act together.

This kicks off a truly vicious cycle. A long hiring process causes burnout, which makes your good employees quit, which creates even more open roles and drags out the time to fill for everyone.

The Erosion of Your Employer Brand

For most candidates, your hiring process is their very first real look inside your company. A slow, chaotic, or unresponsive recruitment cycle sends a loud and clear message: this organisation is inefficient and can’t make a decision. In today’s competitive talent market, that’s a fatal mistake.

Top candidates have choices. They won’t wait around for a company that seems to be wasting their time. A poor candidate experience has consequences that linger long after the role is filled:

• It puts the current candidate off from accepting an offer, even if you finally make one.
• It damages your reputation when that candidate tells their professional network about their bad experience.
• It makes it harder to hire in the future because your talent pool shrinks as your brand gets tarnished.

An extended hiring cycle is a direct reflection of internal friction. It tells top talent that your organisation struggles with decision-making and execution—qualities that skilled professionals actively avoid in a potential employer.

The Vicious Cycle of Disengagement

All these issues feed into a much bigger problem: workforce disengagement. When your teams are overworked and see a constant revolving door of colleagues, their belief in the company’s mission starts to fade. The impact of this can be staggering. For instance, workforce engagement in India recently dropped to just 19%, a major dip on the global stage. This climate of disengagement makes hiring even tougher, as a detached workforce leads to higher turnover and a constant, urgent need to recruit. You can learn more about these critical engagement findings and how they affect the talent market.

At the end of the day, a long time to fill isn’t just another HR metric to stick on a dashboard. It’s a serious business risk that needs to be managed proactively. The hidden costs—from lost revenue and stalled projects to employee burnout and a damaged brand—are far greater than the temporary hassle of fixing your hiring process.

Finding the Bottlenecks in Your Hiring Process

So, what’s really causing those long hiring timelines? If a high time to fill is the symptom, the bottlenecks in your process are the disease. To really shrink your hiring cycle, you need to put on your detective hat and figure out precisely where the hold-ups are. The blockages are rarely in one single place; more often, they’re a series of smaller friction points that snowball into major delays.

These roadblocks generally fall into two buckets: internal friction and external pressures. Internal issues are the parts of your process you can actually fix, while external pressures are the market realities you have to work around. Nailing down these problems is the first step toward building a faster, more effective hiring machine.

Vague Job Descriptions and Mismatched Expectations

The race to hire begins long before you speak to a single candidate. It all starts with the job description. A poorly defined role is one of the most common—and completely avoidable—bottlenecks you can face. When a job description is vague or generic, it acts like a broken filter, letting in a flood of applicants who are either unqualified or simply not the right fit.

This immediately creates a mountain of extra work for your recruitment team. They end up wasting countless hours wading through resumes that should never have landed in their inbox in the first place. The problem doesn’t stop there; it trickles down, leading to unfocused interviews and a search that drags on and on.

Disorganised Interview Loops and Slow Approvals

Even if you have fantastic candidates lined up, a clunky internal process can stop everything dead in its tracks. One of the biggest offenders here is a disorganised interview loop. When interviewers aren’t on the same page about what they’re looking for, or when scheduling becomes a nightmare of back-and-forth emails, candidates get left in limbo for weeks between stages.

This indecisiveness screams “red flag” to top talent. Worse yet, slow internal approvals can be the final nail in the coffin. If your process demands sign-offs from multiple departments before an offer can even be made, you’re practically handing your best candidate over to a competitor who can act faster.

A slow and cumbersome approval process signals internal disorganisation. In a competitive market, top candidates interpret these delays as a sign that the company is inefficient, which can be enough for them to withdraw from the process entirely.

To streamline these internal stages and build a more efficient pipeline, you might want to look into some unique recruitment strategies to hire talent more effectively.

External Pressures and Talent Shortages

While you can overhaul your internal processes, some factors are just out of your hands. A severe talent shortage for a specific skill set is a classic example. This is especially true in India’s technology sector, where the clamour for specialised expertise often drowns out the available supply.

Consider this: by 2027, India is expected to face a huge gap in a critical field like artificial intelligence, with over 2.3 million job openings but only about 1.2 million qualified professionals available. This stark imbalance naturally pushes up the time to fill for any role in AI, cybersecurity, or data analytics, as companies all fight over the same small pool of experts.

By systematically going through each stage of your hiring journey—from the very first draft of the job description to the final offer letter—you can build a checklist of potential bottlenecks. This diagnostic approach lets you see exactly where your pipeline is leaking and gives you a clear roadmap for making smart, targeted improvements.

Proven Strategies to Shrink Your Hiring Time

Knowing where the logjams are in your hiring process is one thing; actually breaking them up is another. This is where you turn insight into action, transforming a slow, frustrating recruitment cycle into a swift, efficient one. This doesn’t require a massive organisational overhaul. It’s about applying a few smart, practical strategies to shorten your hiring timeline without ever compromising on the quality of talent you bring on board.

The idea is to shift from a reactive hiring model—where you only start looking when a role opens up—to a proactive one. It’s about building a system that anticipates what you’ll need and keeps potential candidates engaged, so you’re never starting from a dead stop. You’re creating a process so smooth that the best candidates will want to join you over anyone else.

Build a Proactive Talent Pipeline

Honestly, the best way to cut down your time to fill is to have great people lined up before you even post a job. That’s the whole point of a talent pipeline. Think of it as your own private, curated list of potential hires who are already interested in your company. These could be past applicants who were strong contenders or promising people your team has already connected with.

Instead of starting from scratch every time, you begin with a pre-vetted list. This takes consistent effort, but the payoff is huge.

• Nurture Relationships: Don’t just let the list sit there. Keep in touch with people in your pipeline. Send them company updates, interesting industry news, or a heads-up about future roles. This keeps your organisation at the forefront of their minds.
• Segment Your Pipeline: Organise your talent pool by role, skill set, or department. For example, you could have lists for ‘Future Marketing Leaders’ or ‘Senior Java Developers’. This makes your outreach targeted and much more effective when the right position opens up.

By building these relationships, you create a warm bench of talent that’s ready to go, which dramatically cuts down on the time you’d normally spend on sourcing and initial screening.

Write Job Ads That Attract the Right People

A clear, compelling job advertisement is your first defence against a wave of unsuitable applications. It needs to work as both a magnet for the right people and a filter for the wrong ones. Go beyond just listing duties and start selling the opportunity itself.

Talk about what makes the role exciting and what a new hire will get to achieve in their first year. Be very clear about what skills are “must-haves” versus “nice-to-haves”. This simple clarity helps candidates decide if they’re a good fit, meaning only the most relevant people apply and your team saves hours upon hours of screening time.

A well-crafted job description doesn’t just list tasks; it tells a story about the impact a person can make. It sets clear expectations from the very first interaction, which is vital for a fast and effective hiring process.

Streamline the Interview and Offer Process

Once you’ve found great candidates, speed is everything. A slow, chaotic interview process is one of the quickest ways to lose out on top talent to your competitors. Make sure you’re using structured interviews, where every candidate for a given role is asked the same core questions. This makes the comparison fair, objective, and much faster.

Use a central scheduling tool to kill the endless email chains trying to coordinate with multiple interviewers. Most importantly, make sure your internal process for getting an offer approved is quick and decisive. When you find the right person, you have to be ready to move fast. For a more detailed look at modernising your hiring, check out our guide on how to hire top talent and accelerate recruitment.

By combining a proactive talent pipeline, compelling job ads, and a faster interview stage, you can seriously shrink your time to fill and snap up the best people before your competition even has a chance.

Frequently Asked Questions About Time to Fill

Getting to grips with recruitment metrics can sometimes feel like you’re trying to read a new language. To make things clearer, let’s walk through some of the most common questions that pop up for HR professionals and hiring managers when they start digging into the time to fill metric.

This section is all about tackling those practical, real-world queries, so you can use what you’ve learned with total confidence. Nailing these details is the secret to actually measuring and improving how you hire.

Is It Better To Use Calendar Days or Business Days?

The short answer? Calendar days. It’s the standard practice for a reason. Using calendar days gives you a much more honest and complete picture of how long a role sits empty, which is what directly impacts your business.

If you only count business days, you’re hiding the delays that happen over weekends and public holidays. This can paint a falsely rosy picture of your efficiency. The reality is, productivity loss and the strain on your team don’t take a break on Fridays, so calendar days give you a truer measure of the real business cost.

The whole point of measuring time to fill is to understand the total period of lost productivity. Since the business doesn’t stop for weekends, using calendar days is the only way to get an accurate, honest reflection of your hiring efficiency and its impact on the company.

Should Time to Fill Be Calculated for Internal Hires?

Yes, absolutely. It’s just as crucial to track time to fill for internal promotions and transfers as it is for external hires. Even though you’re skipping the external sourcing stage, the internal process still has its own steps—approvals, interviews, and planning the transition.

Calculating this metric for your internal moves helps you figure out:

• How efficient your internal mobility programme really is.
• How quickly you can fill critical gaps with your own people.
• Where the bottlenecks are in your internal approval or handover processes.

Think about it: a long time to fill for an internal role can be a huge red flag. It can easily discourage your best employees from looking for growth inside the company.

What Is the Main Difference Between Time to Fill and Time to Hire?

This is a big one, and it causes a lot of confusion. They sound almost the same, but they measure two completely different parts of the recruitment journey. Understanding the difference tells you where to focus your improvement efforts.

• Time to Fill is all about the business’s perspective. It starts the moment a job requisition is approved and stops when your chosen candidate accepts the offer. This metric tells you one simple thing: how long did this position sit empty, costing the business time and money?
• Time to Hire focuses entirely on the candidate’s journey. It kicks off the moment a specific candidate applies or enters your pipeline and ends when they accept the offer. This metric reveals how fast and smooth your actual hiring process is for the people going through it.

A long time to fill could mean your internal approvals are dragging their feet. A long time to hire, on the other hand, points to a sluggish interview or screening process. You need both metrics to get a complete health check on your recruitment function.

Ready to shrink your hiring time and find top talent without the hassle? Taggd specialises in Recruitment Process Outsourcing, helping you build a faster, more effective hiring engine. Learn how we can optimise your recruitment process.