A Must-Know Recruiting Metric: Time to Fill

Recruitment metrics are one of the biggest tools for meeting hiring goals and creating a better recruitment experience overall.

When talking about recruiting and hiring, there is no doubt that we are talking about highly complex processes. Aside from finding and enticing the most skilled individuals, recruiters have more on their plates. So, while searching, sourcing, and even after the position is filled, there are several crucial metrics to keep track of. And time to fill is essential.

Companies rely on recruiters to find the most competent, hard-working people amongst the sea of passive talent and applicants. One of the greatest difficulties they face is finding qualified workers open for new job opportunities. Without them, a firm can’t function the way it’s supposed to — not to mention its odds of making progress will be slim. And that is why it’s imperative to continuously assess and refine recruitment strategies and their outcomes — and track recruiting metrics.

Recruiting Metrics to Keep Track of

Recruiters practically build a company from the ground up. Still, some say that HR is a dead-end job. But, on the contrary — it’s always progressing and expanding. Especially now, with technology changing the staffing industry and surprising us daily with brand-new ways to get in touch with people.

It can sometimes be tricky to set up ground rules and manage everything in such an enormous playing field. That is why recruiters have developed many tricks to track their work and make it a bit easier. One of those tricks, probably the magicians’ best ones, is recruiting metrics!

Recruiting metrics are specific measurements that keep the process of hiring applicants on track. They include statistics of recruiters’ hiring success that can help them in the future by optimizing the hiring process and making it as smooth as possible. There are many recruiting metrics out there at your disposal, but nobody can keep track of all of them. Here is our pick of the best ones:

• Time to Fill
• Time to Hire
• Applicants per Hire
• Candidate Experience.

Today, we will dig a little deeper into explaining and researching time to fill.

What Is Time to Fill?

Time to fill is pretty much the period of time that passes between a recruiter posting about a job opening and someone popping the champagne because they got that job. In other words, time to fill is an excellent recruiting metric that measures how long it takes a company to hire someone after their job opening got approved.

It represents the exact number of calendar days that it takes to hire an employee for a vacancy after a job requisition has been approved. The position could be filled with someone new just arriving at the company or an employee that has already been working there and got promoted.

For those wondering, a job requisition is a very first step in any recruitment process. Long before any candidate sees any kind of job advertisement, even before an HR writes a job description, there has to be an agreement within a company that there is a need for hiring a new employee. Any employee can send a request in the form of a document to their supervisor (or to HR) asking for a new job opening. That document should state the essential information about the position, whether it is full-time, part-time, or freelance; if it’s a position as a substitute or a permanent one, and so on. If the supervisor in charge allows it, the job requisition has been approved, and there will be a new job opening.

Usually, from this point on, right after the job requisition has been approved, the clock measuring time to fill starts ticking. Some people have different opinions on the starting point of measuring time to fill. For example, it could also be calculated from the moment the job advertisement is posted or even before the job requisition gets approval, right when it’s first sent out to a supervisor.

The ending points of this metric could also differ from company to company. Some say it’s the moment when the new employee closes the pen after signing the contract, and others say it’s a little later — the first day on the new job. This doesn’t mean that one company can switch up the starting and ending points to its liking. If you want to measure time to fill correctly, you need to be consistent with your starting and ending points, decide on one option, and stick to it.

How Is Time to Fill Measured?

We’ve already covered how time to fill is measured when talking about one job position. And if we set aside the fact that the starting and ending points can vary, it’s pretty simple — just take a calendar and count the days.

But, what about the situations where there is the need to hire multiple people? Let’s say a new restaurant had just opened, and they need to hire a chef, two waitresses, and a bartender. We need to calculate the average time it takes to fill out all these positions. It requires a little math knowledge, but don’t be scared. We’ll show you how it’s done.

Here is the secret time to fill formula: first, see how many days it takes to fill each position. Add it all up, and then divide the total number of days it took to fill out all the jobs with the number of people you hired for those roles. In the end, you’ll get your average result.

Let’s take a look at our restaurant again. The chef was hired after 20 days, the first waitress after 10, the second one after 25 days, and finding the bartender only took 5 days. Now we add that information into the formula: (20+10+25+5) / 4 = 60 / 4 = 15

So the hiring efficiency or the average time to fill for this restaurant is 15 days.

But why in the world would we need this information? How can this help anyone when hiring? It’s not useless, we promise you. Let’s take a look at the pros of this method.

The Uses of Time to Fill

There are many uses and benefits of this metric. It will help you enhance more than one aspect of the hiring processes, and that is not nearly all it does! Be sure to know the advantages of measuring each result — and get going!

The Perks of Proper Business Planning

Time to fill metrics are an excellent method for business planning and preparing for unexpected situations. For there to be new hiring, there has to be a need for a new employee. Every job position has its purpose, and when one of them becomes vacant — maybe someone quits or gets fired — the company becomes understaffed. The employees that are still working are left faced with workloads, added responsibilities, and impossible to meet deadlines. That creates a lot of stress for the employees and unforeseen costs for the company — people have to be paid more if they’re working overtime. The only solution is hiring a replacement to help out and reduce the burnout employees are facing. This metric lets you plan ahead — knowing the exact moment your company will need to attract and hire a replacement lets you figure out how to manage and reschedule the workload over the time it takes to fill out the vacancy left behind by a departing employee.

Improving the Entire Recruiting Process

This HR metric can help you acknowledge and fix some flaws in your recruitment process. Have you ever wondered why it takes you so long to fill out a position? It’s a great job, pays well. It’s like there is a bump in the road! When consistently tracking time to fill, you can get a sense of what you’re doing wrong by looking at every step of the recruitment process individually. Maybe your job application process is too long and complicated, and it needs some alterations. Perhaps you need to speed up the resume screening part and call people for interviews faster. It could be any number of things you never paid attention to before.

Cutting Some Costs & Thriving

By regularly measuring and tracking time to fill metrics, you will be able to cut back and save some money! You will start noticing some patterns when hiring, like where to reach the best talent source. For example, you’re more likely to find a proofreader on LinkedIn, totally free, whereas quality engineers will probably be found much faster through job advertisements.

Get Ready to Track Your Progress!

In such a competitive job market, companies are always trying to one-up each other and snatch the best people to work for them. Tracking HR metrics such as time to fill can be very handy and raise your recruitment strategy to the next level, so get out your calendars and start counting the days!

Tracking time to fill can contribute to overall stability and improve the efficiency of your recruitment process. It serves as a warning sign if your hiring process is taking too long, which reflects poorly on your company, resulting in a bad candidate experience. Roughly half of the applicants will lose interest in working for your company if they don’t get any feedback in two weeks.

So, are you ready to analyze your efforts and boost them additionally? Start with the metrics — and watch how it transforms your hiring outcomes!