Hiring Speed· 7 min read
Technician Time-to-Hire: Benchmarks and Where the Days Go
Days-to-fill is the most actionable hiring metric you have. We break the 27-day average into its parts and show which are automatable.
If you only track one recruiting metric, track days-to-fill. It correlates directly with throughput and is almost entirely composed of removable delay.
The anatomy of 27 days
- Cold start: ~5–10 days lost before sourcing even begins
- Time to first contact: applicants sit days before a human responds
- Scheduling tag: a week of email back-and-forth
- Decision latency: unstructured screening drags the close
What's automatable
Three of the four buckets are pure process latency. An always-on pipeline removes the cold start, automated first-touch collapses response time, and structured screening plus self-booking removes the scheduling tag — without adding a single recruiter.
You don't get to 16 days by working the same process harder. You get there by deleting the delay between steps.