Cost per hire and time to hire: benchmarks and how to cut them

Cost per hire is what an organisation spends on recruiting in a period, paid to outside suppliers and spent on its own people and systems, divided by the number of people it hired in that period. The main benchmarks report medians. In SHRM's 2025 survey of US employers, the median cost per hire was $1,200 for non-executive roles and $10,625 for executives. In the CIPD's 2026 UK report, it was £2,000 for most employees and £3,500 for senior managers and directors. For speed, SmartRecruiters' 2025 report gives a global median time to hire of 38 days, across 95 countries.

Cost per hire and time to hire benchmarks

The rows do not compare directly. SHRM and the CIPD asked HR professionals for their organisation's numbers, and organisations count costs differently. The CIPD says part of the variation it sees "may be attributable to the inclusion of different costs in estimates or differences in calculation methods". SmartRecruiters and Gem measured dates in their own customers' hiring software. SHRM's time to fill starts when the requisition opens, which is earlier than time to hire usually starts, so time to fill runs longer.

How to calculate cost per hire

Cost per hire = (external recruiting costs + internal recruiting costs) ÷ number of hires in the same period

External costs are what you pay to others. Internal costs are your own recruiters, interviewers and systems. SHRM's 2025 data brief lists what the total may include: "third-party agency fees, advertising agency fees, job fair costs, online job board fees, employee referral costs, travel costs of applicants and staff, relocation costs, recruiter pay and benefits, and talent acquisition system costs". The CIPD's 2026 report adds "in-house resourcing time", psychometric and selection tests, the costs of offers such as vetting, and onboarding.

A worked example, with made-up numbers. A company makes 20 hires in a year. It spends $30,000 with a recruitment agency for two of them, $6,000 on job boards and $9,000 on its applicant tracking system, and the share of salaries spent on recruiting (one recruiter for half the year, plus interviewers' time) comes to $45,000. That is $90,000 in total, so its cost per hire is $90,000 ÷ 20 = $4,500.

Three choices move the answer a long way:

1. Whether you count internal time. Interviewers' and hiring managers' hours are a real cost, and the CIPD counts them, but they are easy to leave out.
2. Whether you separate executive hires. SHRM reports the two groups apart: in 2025 the executive median was almost nine times the non-executive one. What agencies charge is set out in how much recruiters charge.
3. Which hires you divide by. Count internal moves as hires only if you also count what it cost to fill them, and use the same period for costs and hires.

Average cost per hire, or the median?

People search for the average cost per hire, but the averages run far above the medians. In SHRM's 2025 survey, the average non-executive cost per hire was $5,475 and the median $1,200; for executives, $35,879 against $10,625. SHRM's data brief uses the median because it avoids "the influence of extreme outliers that can have a greater impact on the average value", and because it keeps the 2025 figures comparable with the 2017 and 2022 surveys. In April 2022, SHRM gave the average from its earlier data as "nearly $4,700". If you compare your own figure with a benchmark, compare a median with a median, and executive hires with executive hires.

SHRM's three surveys show executive and non-executive hiring moving apart:

Source: SHRM, 2025 Recruiting Executives Benchmarking data brief (released October 2025). Time to fill is counted in calendar days, including weekends and holidays.

Executive time to fill fell by 15 days between 2022 and 2025 while executive cost per hire rose by 21%. SHRM reads this as a sign that organisations "may have invested more to expedite the process".

In the UK the medians went up. The CIPD's 2026 report puts other employees at £2,000, up from £1,500 in 2024, and senior managers and directors at £3,500, up from £2,000. The rise for senior hires came mostly from the private sector, where their median was £5,000. The CIPD asks for caution because the samples are small.

Time to hire vs time to fill

The two metrics end at the same moment, when a candidate accepts the offer. They start at different times. Indeed's employer guide, last updated 23 September 2026, defines them this way:

• Time to fill runs from the start of the hiring process to an accepted offer. Employers start the clock on the day the job is posted, the day a requisition is submitted, or the day it is approved.
• Time to hire runs from the day the person you hire enters your process, usually the day they apply, to their acceptance.

Indeed's example: a job posted on 1 January, an application from the eventual hire on 10 January, and an acceptance on 31 January give a time to fill of 30 days and a time to hire of 21 days. If time to fill is long but time to hire is short, Indeed says, the problem is more likely attracting and sourcing candidates; if both are long, the delays run through the whole process.

SHRM measures time to fill from the opening of the requisition to the accepted offer, and splits it into stages: approval of the position, posting the job, the start of screening, screening, interviews, the decision and offer, and the candidate's acceptance. Its 2025 press release says screening and interviewing alone average 8 to 9 days each.

Neither number ends on the new hire's first day. The notice period comes after the offer is accepted, and in Hong Kong it depends on the contract: see notice periods in Hong Kong.

Time to hire by country and industry

SmartRecruiters' 2025 report gives median days to hire for five countries and five industries, from its customers' applications between September 2023 and August 2024:

Source: SmartRecruiters, Recruiting Benchmarks 2025, country and industry scorecards. The report links Germany's longer hiring time to the involvement of the works council (Betriebsrat).

Gem's 2025 report, built on its customers' data from 2021 to 2024, shows hiring getting slower. The average time to hire rose from 33 days in 2021 to 41 days in 2024, while the number of interviews per hire rose from 14 to 20. Engineering roles averaged 53 days to hire in 2024, and financial services was the slowest industry at 63 days.

Where the time and money go

In SmartRecruiters' global medians, applications are reviewed within 6 days and candidates reach an interview by day 14, but the hire comes on day 38. The later interview rounds, the decision and the offer fill the gap.

Large organisations are slower. In SHRM's 2025 data, organisations with 5,000 or more employees had a median time to fill of 61 days for non-executive roles and 60 for executives, against 44 and 45 overall. They took nearly twice as long to get a position approved, to post it once approved, and to conduct interviews. Their recruiters handled a median of 60 requisitions a year, against 20 across all organisations with dedicated recruiters.

Gem counts 20 interviews per hire in 2024, up from 14 in 2021. Its count includes every interview with every candidate for the role, not just the person hired.

On the money side, Gem found that job boards and social sites brought in 49.0% of applications in 2024 but only 24.6% of hires, while candidates already in a company's own database (its CRM or applicant tracking system) made up 44.0% of hires, up from 29.1% in 2021. In SmartRecruiters' data, 7% of hires came from referrals and 8% from internal candidates, which the report calls "lower-cost sources of hire". SHRM's median organisation filled 7% of non-executive positions internally in 2025.

How to cut cost per hire and time to hire

1. Measure both metrics, the same way every time. Only 31% of UK organisations tracked time to hire in the CIPD's 2026 survey, up from 21% in 2024. Use SHRM's stages to find the slowest step before you change anything.
2. Approve and post roles faster. Approval and posting are among the stages where SHRM found the largest organisations slowest. Agree headcount and the job description before the role opens, so the posting can go out the day it is approved.
3. Fix the number of interview rounds before the job is posted, and book the decision meeting alongside the final interviews. Gem's figures pair more interviews per hire with a longer time to hire.
4. Score every candidate against the same rubric. Comparable scores let the panel decide from the evidence it already has. Structured interviews are also the best single predictor of job performance in the research covered in skills-based hiring.
5. Look at people you already know first: past applicants, referrals and internal moves. They need no new advertising and no agency, and Gem's rediscovered candidates already make up 44.0% of its customers' hires.
6. Put advertising money where hires come from. Record the source of every hire, then compare it with where your advertising budget goes; in Gem's data the gap between the two was large.
7. Use agencies where they pay back, such as senior or hard-to-fill roles. Agency pricing is compared in how much recruiters charge, and the Hong Kong and Singapore rules in recruitment agency fees in Singapore and Hong Kong.
8. Check quality next to cost and speed. SHRM found that 20% of organisations measured quality of hire in 2025, down from 27% in 2022, and the CIPD found that three in ten measure the performance or retention of new hires in their first year. A hire who reneges, does not turn up or resigns within 12 weeks, the early losses the CIPD tracks, sends you back to the start of the process.

Hong Kong and Singapore notes

None of the benchmark sources above gives figures for Hong Kong or Singapore: SHRM's data is from the US, the CIPD's from the UK, and SmartRecruiters' country scorecards cover Australia, France, Germany, the UK and the US. Use their figures as reference points, not as local prices.

Singapore's Ministry of Manpower publishes how long vacancies stay open. In its Job Vacancies 2025 report, released on 20 March 2026, 17.1% of vacancies had been unfilled for at least six months, down from 39.0% in 2015. For PMET roles (professionals, managers, executives and technicians) the share edged up to 16.0% in 2025, from 14.4% in 2024. MOM names software, web, multimedia and games developers and designers, data scientists, and applications and systems programmers among the PMET roles that were harder to fill.

Two local rules affect when, or whether, a new hire can start. In Hong Kong, the notice period in the employee's current contract applies; see notice periods in Hong Kong. In Singapore, hiring a foreign professional on an Employment Pass means meeting its salary floor.

Where ROUND.1 fits

ROUND.1 is a hiring marketplace for Hong Kong and Singapore, built by h.work. Each candidate takes one AI first-round video interview in a web browser, lasting about 20 minutes by default (roles can be shorter), 30 at most. Each role is interviewed in one language, English or Mandarin Chinese. The interview is scored competency by competency, with each score backed by quotes from the transcript, and it is reused for the other roles the candidate chooses. Companies meet candidates who have already been interviewed and scored, and a person at the company decides whom to hire.

Candidates pay nothing. Employer pricing is on ROUND.1, explained, along with the full list of facts and limits. The benchmarks on this page come from the sources named with each figure; none of them measures ROUND.1.