Frustrated by how long it takes to fill resource gaps? Here’s 5+ ways to accelerate your Time to Fill.
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When you’re short-staffed, you want new roles approved, advertised, and filled quickly. Every day a role remains vacant increases strain on your team and risks project outcomes.
But clunky processes, a competitive talent market, and even your employer brand can slow recruitment to a snail’s pace.
That’s why savvy businesses make monitoring and improving Time to Fill a priority.
It’s not just about hiring faster – it’s about delivering projects on time, delighting clients, and driving better profits.
Here’s everything resource managers need to know to help accelerate Time to Fill.
Time to Fill is a key performance indicator used to measure the efficiency of the hiring process. It covers the time from job requisition to offer acceptance.
The clock starts ticking when someone fills in an internal form to ask for a new recruit and ends when the new hire begins working for your organization.
Time to Fill is important because recruitment needs to be a speedy and efficient process. Hiring delays translate directly into project delays.
Businesses measure Time to Fill to support faster recruitment, better resource planning, and reduced project risk by:
Time to Fill and Time to Hire are related concepts. They’re both concerned with the recruitment process, particularly the efficiency of the processes involved.
But the starting points and end points are slightly different. And they’re of primary interest to different stakeholders.
You calculate Time to Fill with a simple formula.
Time to Fill = Date the offer is accepted - Date the job requisition is submitted
Let’s look at a couple of examples:
The formula is simple, but the data is very valuable. By monitoring your Time to Fill rates you can:
This all helps you progressively improve your Time to Fill and benefit from higher productivity, lower hiring costs, and a happier workforce – as you’ll see next.
Time to Fill is important because it impacts workforce planning, productivity, and costs.
If your organization’s approach to Time to Fill is simply a shrug and ‘It takes as long as it takes’, you might be creating downstream problems.
Knowing how long it takes to fill a position helps your company plan better. If you know it will take 30 days to appoint someone, you can build accurate schedules that reflect this reality, instead of guesstimating when they might be available.
When positions stay open too long, it isn’t just the lost capacity that drains productivity. Being short-staffed also disrupts team dynamics, overloads existing team members, and hurts morale. This is toxic for team productivity, so filling roles quickly is imperative.
Job openings can cost you revenue if you can’t take on projects or complete them in a timely way. They can also increase expenses if you choose to fill the gaps using overtime or temporary workers. Either approach dents your profits.
An efficient hiring process makes a good impression and helps cement you as an employer of choice. A slow and unsatisfactory candidate experience, on the other hand, can have your preferred applicants running for the door.
This isn’t just a ‘now’ problem – a poor reputation can also undermine your ability to recruit in the future.
Deliverables and client satisfaction can be compromised by slow Time to Fill. When there’s an open vacancy on a team, it can impact schedules and quality, especially if the job opening creates a skill gap. But that’s not all.
Slow Time to Fill has serious consequences in project-based businesses. It can strain client relationships and negatively affect revenue by:
This is why reducing Time to Fill is a goal for many professional service firms. And why so many businesses use Runn to do it ➡️
Time to Fill rates vary for lots of reasons – like location, specialization, and market conditions.
If you’re a specialist engineering business in a remote location, external factors like talent supply and skills shortages will make it harder to fill roles – especially compared to a more generalist organization in a highly populated area.
But the good news is that not all Time to Fill factors are outside your control. Here are some of the main factors that could be holding you back – and what to do about them.
Streamlined processes support speedy Time to Fill, while sluggish ones slow hiring down. If approvals get stuck in multiple layers of management, if job postings aren’t approved quickly, or if the interview process is ineffective, filling empty positions takes longer than it should.
💡 Solution: Address this by pinpointing pinch points and eliminating bottlenecks. Use automation wherever possible, such as online forms to capture vacancy requirements and auto-populate recruitment software.
The best processes in the world can’t compensate for a poor employer brand. If people don’t want to work at your organization, you’ll struggle to attract applicants. But if you’re an employer of choice – with a stellar reputation and brilliant benefits – you’ll quickly attract a crop of qualified candidates.
💡 Solution: As a resource manager, you have a hand in shaping the organization’s reputation by helping build a people-positive work culture. One where workloads are fair, people are matched with interesting work, employee preferences are respected, and burnout isn’t part of the picture.
When current employees are happy, they’re more likely to recommend your workplace — and word-of-mouth marketing makes recruitment a whole lot easier.
It’s common sense that it’ll take longer to fill a vacancy for a software developer than a store assistant, or a data scientist than a delivery driver. Specialized roles require harder-to-develop skills, have higher barriers to entry, and attract fewer qualified candidates.
💡 Solution: Overcome this issue by creating a candidate pipeline – for example, by developing relationships with educational institutions that create graduates in your sector – to raise awareness of your organization and opportunities. Or implementing an employee referral program.
In a competitive labor market – where lots of companies are chasing a limited number of candidates – it can take longer to fill roles. Industry trends, demand for certain skills, and competitor activity all influence how quickly you can find the right person.
💡 Solution: Creating a candidate pipeline can help (see above). But also consider how attractive you are to candidates. Do you offer competitive pay? Valuable benefits? Good work-life balance? In a candidates’ market, your offer should rise to meet the challenge of securing top talent.
Hiring in remote or less populated areas can slow things down because there are fewer candidates to choose from. If you’re fishing in a smaller talent pool, it can take longer to catch the right person. On the other hand, remote roles can accelerate Time to Fill because you’ve got the whole world to choose from.
💡 Solution: Consider whether your organization is best served by on-site employees or could benefit from making some – or even all – roles suitable for remote workers.
Now you know some of the speedbumps slowing down your Time to Fill – and some overarching organizational strategies to get over them.
But – as a resource manager – what can you personally do to tackle them?
Time to Fill is measured from when you raise a requisition order for a new resource, so the efficiency of the early stages rests with you. Here are five ways to make the process as fast and efficient as possible.
Being proactive is key when it comes to resource planning. To help you identify hiring needs in good time:
For example, if developers are always overutilized and their capacity causes roadblocks, that’s a sign you need to recruit. Similarly, if you’re approaching a seasonal spike in demand, you know to start hiring.
Every resource is a cost to the business, so you need to prove they’ll pay for themselves. But how? Use scenario planning to model how different staffing levels affect productivity, project capacity, and profitability.
If you have a resource management system, you can use placeholders for demand planning, to show how an extra team member could help hit deadlines, deliver new services, or improve client outcomes.
Remember those streamlined processes we were talking about earlier? They start with you. Implement a standardized resource request workflow to reduce unnecessary delays.
Clarify who can raise a request, what information needs to be included – like skills required, role expectations, etc – and what the approval process is.
The more specific and detailed you can be about the skills, experience, and qualities you need in a new hire, the easier it is for your HR department to find the right person.
After thinking carefully about role design:
HR will then be able to write effective job descriptions that attract the right candidates first time.
Further reading: Having an up-to-date skills inventory helps you understand the full mix of talents and capabilities in your workforce. Here's how to make one ➡️
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Remember that sometimes the ideal hire is already working in your organization. Internal mobility can be a great way to fill resource gaps while giving employees opportunities to grow.
Take time to understand who might be ready for a new challenge or interested in upskilling. And have systems in place to advertise vacancies internally. Not only does this cut down on hiring time, it also boosts retention and morale. And it can be cheaper than hiring externally too. It’s a win-win.
Runn is a resource management platform that makes it easy to identify hiring needs and create streamlined resource request processes - vital factors in accelerating your Time to Fill.
Runn helps you:
