Free Time to Hire Calculator: Measure & Optimize Your Recruitment Timeline
Calculate exactly how much time your current screening process is costing you and discover how much you could save with asynchronous candidate screening.
Calculate Your Current Time to Hire With Our Screening Time Calculator
Understanding Your Results: What Is The Ideal Time To Hire?
The ideal time to hire varies significantly by industry, role level, and location. The recent 2025 benchmark data shows that the US has a median time to hire of 35 days, which is 8% faster than the global average.
However, it usually takes around 23 days to complete the interview process for most jobs, suggesting that much of the extended timeline comes from non-interview activities.
Read our guide to understanding time-to-hire to learn more.
Where time gets lost
If your time-to-hire calculation shows significant time investment in screening calls, you're not alone. Most recruiters spend 15-30 minutes per candidate on initial phone screens. Even when it becomes clear within the first few minutes that the candidate isn't suitable, professional courtesy demands you complete the call.
Common time drains include:
- Interview scheduling inefficiency: Average 3-4 email exchanges per interview scheduled
- No-shows and rescheduling: 15-20% of scheduled calls require rework
- Courtesy completion: Continuing calls after early disqualification signals
- Context switching: Moving between candidates, taking notes, updating systems
- Administrative overhead: Call summaries, scorecard completion, next-step coordination
The impact is measurable. For example, Bott + Co. law firm replaced 45-minute phone screens with asynchronous interviews. Instead of the typical tasks that increase time-to-hire, they now spend just 10-15 minutes reviewing each candidate, saving over 1 hour per candidate throughout their entire recruitment process.
This efficiency gain becomes crucial when you consider that the applicant-to-interview ratio in 2024 was 3%. For every 100 applicants a job posting received, 3 of those applicants were invited to interview. With such low conversion rates, optimizing the screening process directly impacts your team's capacity to handle volume while maintaining quality.
How To Get an Accurate Time-to-Hire Calculation
Calculate screening efficiency, not time-to-hire duration. Most Time-to-hire calculators fail here.
Many average time-to-hire calculators simply measure the days between posting a job and extending an offer. While this metric is important for tracking overall recruitment process velocity, it obscures the real operational challenge: inefficient screening processes that consume recruiter bandwidth without providing proportional value.
The difference matters:
- Basic time-to-hire: Measures calendar days (often affected by external factors)
- Screening efficiency: Measures actual recruiter productivity and resource utilization
Your calculator results above focus on the latter—the controllable efficiency gains that directly impact your team's capacity and effectiveness.
Time to hire calculator vs ATS ROI calculator: Know which one to choose
ROI calculators show how much you could save using a specific recruitment automated screening tool, while time to hire calculators estimate how much time you're currently spending on recruitment activities.
Choose a time to hire calculator when you want to:
- Understand your current time investment in screening processes
- Identify which recruitment activities consume the most resources
- Calculate potential savings from process optimization
- Make data-driven decisions about where to invest in efficiency improvements
Choose an ATS ROI calculator when you want to:
- Compare the financial benefits of one ATS platform against another
- Justify a specific software purchase to leadership
- Understand the total cost of ownership for recruitment technology
Looking for ROI analysis? If you want to see the financial impact of switching to Willo specifically, we have a dedicated ROI calculator that shows potential savings from our asynchronous interview platform. [Calculate your Willo ROI here →]
Know what’s a good average time to hire
Industry benchmarks can be misleading because they don't account for recruitment process efficiency. A company with a 6-week average that requires minimal recruiter time investment is performing better than one with a 4-week average that consumes excessive screening hours.
Better metrics to track:
- Time per candidate in screening stages
- Recruiter hours per successful hire
- Candidate experience scores and completion rates
- Offer acceptance rates (indicating process quality)
Focus on optimizing recruiter productivity rather than just minimizing calendar days.
Know When To Switch from Time-to-hire Spreadsheet Calculators
Many recruitment teams consider building their own time-to-hire tracking system in Excel or Google Sheets. While spreadsheets offer familiarity and cost nothing upfront, they quickly become bottlenecks as your hiring volume grows.
Basic tracking: Spreadsheets excel at recording dates—application received, phone screen completed, offer extended.
Manual data entry overhead: Every application, interview, and status change requires manual input.
Custom formulas: You can create calculations for average time between stages, identify bottlenecks, and track recruiter productivity across different roles or departments.
No process improvement: Spreadsheets tell you how long the hiring process takes, but don't help you reduce that time.
One-time setup cost: No subscription fees or vendor negotiations required.
Scaling impossibility: Managing 50+ candidates monthly in spreadsheets becomes unmanageable.
Missing the real efficiency gains: You'll know your average time to hire, but still spend 30 minutes on phone calls that could take 10 minutes to review asynchronously.
Consider moving beyond manual tracking when:
- You're screening 20+ candidates monthly
- Multiple team members need candidate access simultaneously
- Time tracking becomes more important than time optimization
- Administrative tasks consume more than 10% of recruiter time
- You need standardized evaluation processes across hiring managers
How Leading Companies Reduce Time-to-Hire by 70% With Willo
Organizations switching from phone screens to Willo's asynchronous assessment consistently report 50-75% time savings in initial screening. Here's why:
Immediate efficiency gains:
- No scheduling required: Candidates complete interviews at their convenience
- Pre-employment testing: Choose from over 1000 pre-made assessment templates. Start interviewing in under 4 minutes.
- Front-load disqualification: Ask knockout questions in the first 2 minutes of calls
- Standardize evaluation: Use multiple question types—video responses for communication assessment, multiple choice for quick qualification checks, text responses for detailed technical questions.
- In-built background screening: Know a candidate's criminal background and right-to-work stats before investing screening time.
- Limit call duration: Set 15-minute maximums for initial screens
- Willo intelligence: Save up to 20 minutes with AI-powered candidate screening automation. Generate an in-depth candidate performance summary. Send personalized follow-up or rejection emails. Scan screening video transcripts, and more.
- Collaborative scorecard: Standardized scoring system reduces hiring bias and interviewer variability
- Enhanced collaboration: Multiple team members can review simultaneously. Hiring managers review the same content and share feedback without an ATS login.
The result?
Lunio replaced phone screens with asynchronous interviews, saving 30 minutes per candidate. For their volume hiring, this translated to over £50,000 in cost savings compared to recruitment agencies, with 42 total hours saved on screening alone.
EDF UK’s admin time dropped by 50% after implementing Willo’s asynchronous assessment. Recruiters previously spent 30-40 minutes per call plus note-taking time. Now they review and take notes in under 20 minutes per candidate while maintaining a thorough evaluation.
Packaly saved 60 hours of employee time per week—equivalent to the productivity of four full-time recruiters—while improving candidate experience quality. Now they handle the workload equivalent of four full-time recruiters with Willo– impossible with manual tracking alone.
Ready to Cut Time-to-hire Without Compromising The Human Side of Recruitment?
See exactly how much time and budget you could save with a personalized analysis of your recruitment process.
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Frequently Asked Questions
What is the time to hire formula?
The time to hire formula is: Total Screening Hours = (Number of Candidates × Average Screening & Interview Duration) + Administrative Time.
This formula measures recruitment process efficiency by accounting for the actual time investment in screening and admin activities.
How do you calculate time to hire?
Time to hire can be calculated in several ways, depending on what you want to measure:
Basic calculation: Count calendar days from job posting to offer acceptance. Add up the days for all hires, then divide by the number of hires for your average.
Operational calculation (more useful): Track actual time spent on recruitment activities:
- Initial screening time per candidate
- Interview scheduling and coordination time
- Interview time (both recruiter and hiring manager hours)
- Administrative time (notes, follow-ups, coordination)
- Decision-making and offer preparation time
Example: If you spend 30 minutes screening each of 50 candidates monthly, that's 25 hours of screening time investment—regardless of how many calendar days the overall process takes.
