What is time to fill?
Time to fill is the number of days between opening a role and getting an offer accepted. In its benchmarking work, SHRM counts it in calendar days from the time the job requisition was opened to the time the offer was accepted.
Some organisations start the clock at requisition approval instead of opening. Both are defensible. What matters is to state which convention you use, or comparisons between teams become meaningless.
Why does time to fill measure the organisation, not just the recruiter?
Because most of what sits inside it is not recruitment work. The role waits for budget approval, the brief waits for the hiring manager, the shortlist waits for feedback and the offer waits for sign-off.
When time to fill is long, the first question is not whether the recruiter is fast enough. It is how many of those days were spent waiting for a decision inside the company.
How is time to fill different from time to hire?
Time to fill starts when the need is declared. Time to hire starts when a candidate enters the process. The gap between them is the time it took to find the right person.
Reading both together locates the problem. A scarce profile shows a long gap before the candidate appears. A slow company shows a long time to hire once they have.
What does time to fill reward, and what can go wrong?
It rewards closing roles, and a team judged on it will be tempted to close them with whoever is available. Filling a role in three weeks with the wrong person scores better than filling it well in eight.
It is also sensitive to the starting date. Opening the requisition late, once a candidate is already in sight, makes the number look good and tells you nothing. It belongs next to quality of hire, never alone. For recurring roles, the managed services model is often where time to fill is reported to procurement.
