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Time-to-fill

Time-to-fill is the number of days from opening a role to a candidate accepting the offer. It is a core hiring-speed metric and a practical proxy for how long a critical gap stays open on the team.

Tracked alongside quality of hire, time-to-fill keeps a search honest and surfaces bottlenecks in the process. It should never be optimised at the expense of fit, though: a fast bad hire is far more expensive than a slower good one.

A long time-to-fill is not just an HR statistic. Every extra week the seat sits empty compounds into a real cost of vacancy.