The average time to hire in the US sits around 44 days. In the UK, 40. SHRM pegs time to fill at 42. Pick your benchmark, the number is ugly.
If your process takes 47 days, you are normal. You are also losing candidates. Top performers are off the market in roughly ten days, so “normal” means you miss them.
Where the 47 days actually leaks
Screening backlog is usually the biggest. CVs sit in an inbox for five to eight days because no one has time to read 200 of them. That is week one gone before anyone has spoken to a candidate.
Scheduling is the second leak. Back-and-forth emails between recruiter, hiring manager, and candidate routinely burn four to six days per interview stage. Multiply that by three stages and you have lost nearly three weeks to calendar tennis.
Feedback delays are the quiet killer. Interviewers take two to four days to submit scores. Debriefs get rescheduled. Decisions get deferred “until we have one more candidate to compare.” Add another five to seven days.
How to reduce time to hire to 20 to 25 days
Collapse screening to 48 hours. Use structured CV screening, either a disciplined rubric or an AI tool, and commit to a same-week shortlist. No exceptions.
Batch interviews. Offer candidates two or three slots inside a three-day window instead of rolling availability. Use a scheduling tool with calendar sync. This alone usually cuts four to five days per stage.
Require written feedback within 24 hours of every interview. No feedback, no next step. Make it a rule, not a preference.
Run the final interview and reference checks in parallel, not in sequence. You save three to four days and lose nothing in rigour.
Pre-agree the offer band before sourcing starts. When the decision moment comes, you should be sending the offer the same day, not opening a negotiation about levelling.
Stop treating speed as the enemy of quality
Slow hiring does not mean careful hiring. It usually means disorganised hiring. The teams with the shortest time to hire also tend to have the highest quality of hire, because structure beats deliberation every time.
Sieve cuts the screening stage from days to minutes and gives your team a shared view of every candidate, so the 47-day process stops being your default. Start at sievecv.com.