Time-to-Fill – Definition for enterprise companies/businesses
The clock starts when a requisition is approved and opened, and it ends when the worker begins work, not when an offer is accepted or a contract is signed. That distinction matters because a slow onboarding step can inflate the real number even when sourcing itself moved quickly. Long time-to-fill has a direct behavioral cost in contingent workforce programs: while the project sits unstaffed, unofficial workarounds start to look more attractive than the official process.
How enterprise organizations use Time-to-Fill for measuring and improving hiring speed
Program managers benchmark time-to-fill against internal targets and against what a hiring manager could achieve by going around the program. It's the number that determines whether the official intake process can actually compete with informal sourcing.
Time-to-Fill use cases
A program office tracks time-to-fill by supplier to identify which ones are creating bottlenecks.
A hiring manager compares the program's time-to-fill against how fast they could bring in someone they already know.
A supplier evaluation scorecard weights time-to-fill alongside cost and compliance as a core KPI.
How Lifted handles Time-to-Fill
Lifted's average time-to-fill is under 3 days, drawn from a global active talent pool of 18M+ active profiles across 10K+ distinct skills, so the official channel is consistently faster than the workaround.
Related resources
Frequently asked questions
How is time-to-fill calculated?
From the date a requisition is approved and opened to the date the worker actually starts work, not the date an offer or contract is signed.
What's a good time-to-fill benchmark for contingent workers?
It depends on role complexity, but the comparison that matters most is against the fastest alternative a hiring manager could access on their own, since that's what determines whether they use the official process.
Why does time-to-fill matter more than placement fees for program adoption?
Because speed is usually the deciding factor in whether a hiring manager uses the program or works around it. A cheaper but slower process still loses to a faster unofficial one.
