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title: How Long Does It Take to Hire Someone? url: https://jacobian.org/2021/mar/11/hours-to-hire/ hash_url: e7dd6d41e0

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:

  • 60 applicants
  • 15 got initial hiring manager screens
  • 10 full interviews (4 interviews per candidate)
  • 1 offer

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:

ActivityTime spentTotal hours
Writing JD4 hours4
Posting to job boards1 hour1
Resume review10 minutes / application10
Hiring manager screen45 minutes / screen11.25
Interview scheduling1 hour / applicant10
Interviews3 × 1 hour / applicant30
Interview - hiring manager1.5 hours / applicant15
Interview debriefs15 minutes / applicant2.5
Offer, negotiation, and paperwork4 hours4
Pre-onboarding work8 hours8
Total95.75

Of those hours:

  • 32.5 hours were other interviews' time, split among three people – so about 10 hours per non-hiring-manager interviewer.
  • The remainder, 63.25 hours, was my time – hiring manager time.

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!