How long does it take to fill a role in the UK? Our data from 46 filled vacancies

What the numbers are

Most published time-to-fill figures are industry averages of other people's surveys. These are ours: 46 vacancies we were instructed on, worked, and closed as filled, across 18 sectors. The clock starts the day the vacancy was opened with us and stops the day it was closed as filled — it includes the client's own interview and offer stages, not just our part.

26 of the 46 roles — a little over half — closed inside 45 days. 13 closed inside 30. Where a sector has an even number of roles the median falls between two of them, which is why some rows carry a half day.

The mean is 52 days, ten days higher than the median. That gap is the honest part of the picture: a small number of genuinely difficult searches drag the average up, and any provider quoting you an average rather than a median is quietly using those hard roles to flatter nothing at all.

How it breaks down by sector

Read that table with the role counts next to it. A single-role sector is one story, not a benchmark, and we have left the counts in rather than presenting a one-role sector as a trend.

What actually drives the difference

Sector is a weak predictor. Two roles in the same sector in our own set took 14 days and 93 days. Three things separated them.

Whether the role exists in a recognisable form. A Management Accountant is a title thousands of people hold and search for. A Field Service Engineer who can maintain meat processing equipment across two counties is a description, not a title — nobody has it on their CV, so the search becomes a hunt through adjacent industries. That role took 115 days. The Payroll Lead took 14.

How fast the employer moves. Our slowest roles almost all share a pattern: candidates presented quickly, then a gap. Interview feedback that takes ten days effectively adds ten days to the fill, and the good candidates are gone by the second gap. This is the single biggest lever an employer controls, and it costs nothing.

Whether the money matches the brief. A salary a decade behind the market does not produce no applications; it produces applications from people who cannot do the job. That shows up in our funnel as a large sourced number and a small presented number, and it shows up in the calendar as weeks.

How to use a time-to-fill figure

A median tells you what a typical role does. It does not tell you what your role will do, and any recruiter who gives you a firm date before seeing the brief is guessing.

Three practical uses:

1. Plan backwards from the start date. If someone needs to be productive by January, and the median is 42 days plus a notice period of four to twelve weeks, the brief needs to be live by early October.
2. Set an internal service level for feedback. Two working days to give interview feedback is achievable, and it is worth more to your fill time than any change of supplier.
3. Ask any provider how they define the clock. If they start it at "first CV sent", their number and ours are not measuring the same thing.

Where the risk sits

On a percentage fee, a role that takes 169 days costs the agency 169 days of work and pays the same as one that takes 14 — which is why hard roles quietly get deprioritised in favour of easy ones. On a flat fee with a refund if the role is not filled, the long searches are still ours to absorb, but the incentive runs the other way: the only way the fee is earned is by finishing.

That is the honest argument for the model. It is not that fixed-fee recruitment is faster. It is that the cost of a slow search does not land on you.

Frequently asked questions