How many hours does it take to hire someone, from approval of the open position to their first day? It takes about 100 person-hours, and that’s about a best-case scenario.
It’s well-established that making a good hire is expensive. Most of that cost is time investment: recruiting, screening, interviewing, and negotiating all take a large amount of time. When I’m actively hiring, my rule is to set aside 50% of my time to devote to hiring. But that’s just a rough heuristic; I wanted to know more specifically how long I (and my team) spent.
So, I tracked a recent hiring round to see. This is just one example, not scientific data or anything. It was a typical hiring round that went fairly smoothly, so these numbers probably represent something close to a best-case scenario.
We spent 100 hours over 4 weeks to get to an offer. The round by the numbers:
It’s a small applicant pool, but the per-applicant numbers are pretty solid and should scale to larger rounds.
Here’s how those 100 hours broke down:
| Activity | Time spent | Total hours |
|---|---|---|
| Writing JD | 4 hours | 4 |
| Posting to job boards | 1 hour | 1 |
| Resume review | 10 minutes / application | 10 |
| Hiring manager screen | 45 minutes / screen | 11.25 |
| Interview scheduling | 1 hour / applicant | 10 |
| Interviews | 3 × 1 hour / applicant | 30 |
| Interview - hiring manager | 1.5 hours / applicant | 15 |
| Interview debriefs | 15 minutes / applicant | 2.5 |
| Offer, negotiation, and paperwork | 4 hours | 4 |
| Pre-onboarding work | 8 hours | 8 |
| Total | 95.75 |
Of those hours:
Again, this is just one example, but I think it’s representative. I’ll be using this to better forecast how long future hires will take; I hope it’ll help you do the same!