So how long does it take to fill a job? I mean, it depends who you're asking, right? The current benchmarks I trust run from 38 days to 63.5 days, and you know what, most of them are right. Why? Everybody's starting and stopping a different clock.
That matters because this metric gets dropped into slide decks and vendor pitches with no definition attached. A lot of times in hiring they talk about time to fill. I'm more interested in time to productivity, right? But you can't get to productivity until the seat is filled, so let's get the fill number right first.
I went and pulled every current time to fill and time to hire benchmark I could verify at its source, and for each one I wrote down where the count starts and where it stops, because that's the part everybody skips. Then I broke them out by role, industry and hiring model, with every source listed at the end. Let's get into it.
How Long Does It Take to Fill a Job in 2026?
The short answer is 39 days if you ask HR leaders and closer to two months if you ask some hiring platforms. SHRM's 2026 benchmarking research, drawn from more than 4,600 organizations, reports a median time to fill of 39 calendar days for nonexecutive roles. Employ's 2026 Hiring Benchmarks report, built on platform data from 6,640 customers, clocked an average of 63.5 days from job posting to accepted offer in 2025, according to HR Dive.
Line up the eight headline benchmarks below and the median lands at 45.6 days. That's our math on their published numbers, so cite it as an MSH calculation.
If you need one number for a workforce plan, pick the benchmark that starts and stops counting where you do. If you need one for a slide, say five to nine weeks and name the source.
Why Do Time to Fill Benchmarks Disagree So Much?
You've heard the cliché, men lie, women lie, numbers don't, and that's not true, because people cherry pick statistics to tell the story they want to tell. With time to fill nobody even has to cherry pick. It's like putting one guy's 40-yard dash next to another guy's 100-meter time and arguing about who's faster, right? Five things move the number before anybody's opinion gets involved.
- Where the clock starts. SHRM counts from the day the requisition opens and Ashby from the day the job opens, while Employ's time to fill waits for the job posting. Time to hire is a different measure, because Employ starts it at the candidate's first interaction. Employ reports both on the same data, and they land 17.3 days apart.
- Where the clock stops. Most benchmarks that define their clock stop at the accepted offer, Ashby stops when the first hire is made and Gartner's widely repeated 71 days, from a 2019 analysis, ran all the way to the start date.
- Median or average. SHRM, SmartRecruiters and Ashby give you medians while Employ and Gem give you averages, which matters more than people think, because a handful of roles stuck open for six months will drag an average up and barely move a median.
- Survey or system data. A survey is HR leaders telling you what they remember, and a platform is logging every requisition, including the ones everybody would rather forget.
- Who's in the sample. Each platform dataset reflects that vendor's own customers. NSI covers hospitals. SHRM surveys HR leaders at organizations from small shops to companies with 5,000 or more employees.
The sharpest example came from Employ itself. In its survey of more than 1,200 U.S. HR recruiters and managers, fielded in September 2025, 74% said they fill roles in under 30 days (2025 Recruiter Nation Report). Employ's own platform logged an average of 63.5 days from posting to accepted offer that same year. Same publisher, same year, and the recruiters in the survey remember hiring a whole lot faster than Employ's platform logged it.
Is Hiring Getting Faster or Slower?
That depends on whose numbers you trust. SHRM's survey shows executive time to fill dropping from 60 days in 2022 to 45 days in 2025 (SHRM 2025 report), and its 2026 edition reports a nonexecutive median of 39 days. The platforms tell the opposite story. Greenhouse's Hire Standard shows time to fill climbing from 43.64 in 2022 to 59.67 in 2025, up 37%. Gem's 2025 benchmarks show average time to hire rising from 33 days in 2021 to 41 days in 2024, up 24%.
Not every platform agrees on the slowdown. Employ's average time to fill dipped from 67.7 days in 2024 to 63.5 days in 2025. But two of the three big platform datasets say hiring is getting slower, so I'd build the plan around the longer number.
So who's lying? I don't think anybody is, because a leader answering a survey is picturing a typical role, and the system is quietly logging the slow ones too.
One driver I see is volume. Greenhouse found applications per job more than doubled, from 116 in 2022 to 244 in 2025, and Employ saw applications per job jump from 207.2 to 257.6 in a single year. It's AI fighting AI, with résumés put together by AI getting shotgunned out to a thousand jobs and AI reading the résumés on the other end, shortlisting or down listing people before anybody picks up a phone. That puts a huge load on recruitment. The trust has completely eroded.
Time to Fill by Role Family
There's no silver bullet here, right? You can put these wide sweeping statistics out there, but depending on your industry and depending on your function, those can all be different factors. The kind of role you're hiring for can swing the number by a month.
In Gem's 2024 data, IT and information security roles took an average of 58 days to hire, up 23 days since 2021 and the biggest jump of any department, and engineering and design aren't far behind at 53. On the other end, operations and customer support close in 25 and 26 days.
Ashby's 2026 benchmarks, built on data from 2021 to 2026, measure from job opening to first hire, and they point the same way. Technical roles take a median of 75 days against 60 days for business roles. Senior roles take 71 days, 37% longer than the 52 days for junior roles.
Clinical roles run longer still, and the 2026 NSI National Health Care Retention and RN Staffing Report found it takes an average of 78 days to recruit an experienced registered nurse across 527 hospitals, five days faster than the year before. Telemetry nurses take 87 days and ER nurses take 70. If you're building a clinical team, our healthcare recruiting team can help you plan around those numbers.
Time to Fill by Industry
Listen, this is where I'd be careful. With industry numbers, whose customers got counted decides a lot of the answer.
Look at manufacturing. Gem's 2024 customers hired manufacturing roles in 36 days on average, and SmartRecruiters' 2025 benchmarks show a 55-day median. Gem's numbers come from its own customers, while SmartRecruiters covers 1.5 million jobs in 95 countries, so they're looking at two very different groups of employers.
Financial services is the slowest industry in Gem's data at 63 days, up 12 days since 2021. If you're hiring for compliance-heavy finance roles, our finance and banking recruiting team can walk you through what's realistic.
Company size gets murkier the closer you look. In HR Dive's coverage of Employ, small and midsize companies took 83.5 days from posting to accepted offer, against 51.7 days for enterprises, while Gem's data, on different size bands and a different clock, points the other way, 34 days for companies under 250 employees and 41 days for companies with 5,000 or more. I don't want to pick a winner there. I'd benchmark against companies your own size.
Time to Fill by Hiring Model
This is the comparison buyers want, and nobody publishes it on one clock. So here's what's out there, with the start point and the year next to every number.
SHRM's 39-day median isn't split by hiring channel and runs from the opened requisition to the accepted offer. Staffing is where the data gets thin. The most recent public benchmark I could find is still Staffing Industry Analysts' 2021 survey, which found a median of 9 days to candidate acceptance for professional temporary roles and 14 days to start. SIA measures the time a staffing supplier takes to fill a position and doesn't publish where that count begins. Bullhorn's 2026 GRID report adds that 56% of the fastest-growing staffing firms, those growing revenue more than 25%, say their average placement time is under 10 days (Hunt Scanlon coverage).
The newest public figure from a recruitment process outsourcing provider is three years old. AMS, an RPO provider, and The Josh Bersin Company reported an average time to hire of 44 days in the first quarter of 2023 (SIA coverage). If you're weighing that route, our list of top RPO companies compares the providers.
In our own direct hire data from October 2021 to October 2023, the average time to fill for permanent roles was 28 days. Today, qualified candidates typically reach the hiring manager's inbox within 48 to 72 hours of engagement.
Listen, we're in this business, so I'd love to tell you an agency is four times faster than your internal team, but I don't think this evidence says that, because a staffing firm's count likely begins later than yours, contract roles usually run a shorter interview and offer process than a permanent hire and the newest public staffing benchmark is five years old. Compare clocks before you compare vendors. If you're choosing between models, the Sourcing Model Scorecard walks you through direct hire, staff augmentation, managed services and RPO.
Senior hires need their own math. SHRM's 45-day executive median is a general executive number, and a retained search is its own animal, so treat 45 days as a floor when you plan a search for a senior leader. Going a week or two longer because you wanted to make sure you got it right is a lot cheaper than the wrong hire. I only want to hire hell yes.
Where Do the Days Go?
SmartRecruiters' figures put first review at about day 6, first interview at about day 14 and the hire at day 38. That leaves roughly 24 of the 38 days after the first interview. SmartRecruiters doesn't publish where those counts start, and medians don't add up perfectly, so treat that split as a sketch.
Ashby measures the span from first interview to last interview at 14.4 days for business roles and 17.9 days for technical roles. Employ cut the average wait from application to first screen to 7.2 days in 2025, down from 8.3, and its time to hire still rose from 45.7 to 46.2 days. Screening got faster and deciding didn't, and that's where I'd look first.
The front end still matters too. Even now, if you look at most internal talent acquisition departments, they sit back and wait. You've got to get candidates on the phone. After that, here are the two fixes I'd try first.
- Scheduling and the interview loop. Hold interview blocks on the calendar before the role opens, and cut any round that asks a question another round already covered.
- Offer approval. Agree on the band and who signs off before the final interview starts.
How to Benchmark Your Own Time to Fill
Be data informed, not data driven. I'll use a benchmark to see what the market's doing, and then I want my own numbers sitting next to it before I make a call. Here's how I'd set that up.
- Pick one definition and write it down. Requisition opened to offer accepted, SHRM's definition, is a solid default, so use that same definition on every role you track.
- Report the median and the 75th percentile. The average hides the roles that are hurting you.
- Split before you compare. Compare engineering to engineering and contract to contract, because a blended number hides which team is slow.
- Track time to start too. The seat's still empty until somebody shows up on day one. SIA's staffing data puts acceptance and start about five days apart, and notice periods add more for permanent roles.
- Put a daily cost on the empty seat. In my experience working with hiring managers over the years, I've only met one company that knew exactly what an open role cost per day. She measured hiring on a per day basis because she knew what it cost to not have that person in, and that was super rare. And listen, there is absolutely a bottom line cost tied to how long a role is open, but I promise you it quadruples if you hire the wrong person and bring them on staff and then you got to remove them.
- Then measure time to productivity. I've always called engagement, attrition and tenure the RBIs and home runs of people analytics, the box-score stats, and time to fill belongs on that list. Time to productivity is closer to on-base percentage, the number that tells you whether you're going to win.
If you want more metrics to sit next to time to fill, our guide to talent acquisition KPIs covers them, and our roundup of hiring and recruiting trends has the wider picture. For tech teams, our IT staffing ratios benchmark shows how many IT staff companies run per employee.
Frequently Asked Questions
What Is a Good Time to Fill?
A good time to fill beats the median for your role family, measured the same way your benchmark measures it. For most nonexecutive roles that means beating SHRM's 39-day median from opened requisition to accepted offer. If you track time to hire instead, SmartRecruiters' U.S. median is 35 days. For technical roles, Ashby's 75-day median to first hire is the fairer comparison.
What Is the Difference Between Time to Fill and Time to Hire?
Where does the clock start? Time to fill starts when the role opens, either when the requisition opens or at posting, and ends when a candidate accepts the offer. Time to hire starts when the candidate you hire first enters the process. In Employ's 2025 data, the two were 17.3 days apart.
How Do You Calculate Time to Fill?
Count the calendar days from the day the requisition opens to the day a candidate accepts, do it for every role you filled in the period and report the median and the 75th percentile next to the average.
Why Is Time to Fill Going Up?
Platform data from Greenhouse since 2022 and Gem since 2021 shows hiring taking longer. Applications per job at Greenhouse more than doubled between 2022 and 2025, but in SmartRecruiters' data most of the clock still runs after the first interview.
How Long Does a Staffing Agency Take to Fill a Role?
The most recent public survey, from Staffing Industry Analysts in 2021, found a median of 9 days to candidate acceptance for professional temporary roles and 14 days to start. For commercial roles, the same survey found a median of 4 to 5 days. SIA doesn't publish where its count starts, so compare it to an in-house time to fill with care.
How Long Does It Take to Hire an Executive?
Executive roles took SHRM members a median of 45 days in 2025, down from 60 in 2022, and the 2026 edition says it held steady. Retained C-suite searches often run longer, so plan around your search firm's own track record.
Sources
- SHRM, 2026 Recruiting Executives Benchmarking
- SHRM, 2025 Recruiting Benchmarking Report
- Employ, 2026 Hiring Benchmarks Report press release
- HR Dive, coverage of the Employ Hiring Benchmarks report
- Employ, 2025 Recruiter Nation Report
- Greenhouse, The Hire Standard
- Ashby, Recruiting Operations Benchmarks
- Gem, 2025 Recruiting Benchmarks
- SmartRecruiters, Recruitment Benchmarks 2025
- NSI Nursing Solutions, 2026 National Health Care Retention and RN Staffing Report
- Staffing Industry Analysts, time to fill benchmarks for professional and commercial staffing
- Hunt Scanlon, coverage of the Bullhorn GRID 2026 report
- Staffing Industry Analysts, coverage of AMS and Josh Bersin time to hire data
- Workable, average time to hire by industry
- TechTarget, coverage of Gartner's 71-day time to fill
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